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A Little Bit of Clarity

Week two has been an interesting one, that is for sure! We started off the week working with animals (live and stuffed) and ended with two days of virtual learning due to COVID cases. While each day was filled with ups and downs, challenges and successes, I think that I am started to get a hang of the online school grading and assignment platforms and learning most students names and personalities. This week was all about clarity (from Rosenshine and Furst Effective Teaching), and for this blog I will discuss times in the past week where I found myself lacking in this area.


The first "oh crap" moment was small, but really got me thinking about how I communicate with students, whether that is verbally or visually. For our lab, I split students into two groups by handing out two different colored sticky notes. They were blue and pink and each color was labeled 1-8. When I went to dismiss my students, I told them that the blue group should go to the shop and the pink stay in the classroom and my students looked so confused for some reason. It was because I wrote 1-8 with a pink marker on the blue sticky notes and wrote 1-8 with a blue marker on the pink sticky notes and when I said "blue group" they didn't know if that meant blue marker or blue sticky notes. While this was not a big deal and was an easy fix, it was not something I even considered as being confusing until I was met with 15 confused faces on lab day. 

The next thing that I found myself reflecting on was with my digital notebooks that students work on. I have students that are either all online (PVOL) or all in person learners. This means I have to do extra work recording myself and putting extra things together for my PVOL learners, so I have a digital notebook for PVOL ONLY and a digital notebook for in person learners ONLY. When I went to grade the digital notebooks, I found that half of my in person learners had been working in the PVOL ONLY digital notebook. Again, this was not a big deal but does requires extra work for me grading wise. For the next module I want to work on my clarity, both verbally and visually making sure students are aware of the differences and where to find the correct version. 

On a more positive note, my animal restraints lab was really fun and challenging while I was trying to manage kids in the shop working on the lab, students in the classroom working on the lab, and students at a station with me, where they demonstrated animal restraints on live animals. Yes you heard that right! We had three special guests appear in our Vet Science class for extra practice on restraints, Buck the Rabbit, and dogs, Molly and Bailey.  

We sadly had to end the week virtually, but both Thursday and Friday went as well as it could while working on Google Meet. It was both challenging and fun to see how many students would interact with you online! I used my cohort member, Katie Boyer's tip on how to see who is following along while screens are off, by having them type their favorite food or animal in the chat when they complete a task. It seemed that as the lesson went on that more and more students participated, whether that was by unmuting and speaking or by using the chat box. It was an interesting way to end week two of student teaching. 

Has anyone else found themselves not being clear with directions with students? What were some things you self-reflected on or have thought about doing differently? 

Comments

  1. Megan RoyerJanuary 31, 2021 at 10:13 AM

    Michaela, your week sounds like so much fun!

    I would have loved to be a student in your class learning about restraining animals through your hands on activities with your special guests. I too have faced a couple hiccups with directions and there are two things I have done to help fix those hiccups when they occured. First, I fess up to my students that I made a mistake. This has helped a lot because now my students are more understanding and willing to speak up if they do not understand something I have instructed them to do. Second, I use Gracie as my guinea pig ALOT. Since she is a high school student as well as enrolled in Ag classes I will run instructions that I am unsure about by her. If she looks confused I try it another way until she is able to follow along. It takes 2 seconds and I've found it to be very helpful. I'm sure Charlie would be a great help for you with you wanted to try it with your own little sister! You are doing great things! :)

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  2. John EwingJanuary 31, 2021 at 2:37 PM

    Great reflection and connection to a very important characteristic of teaching! I probably told you this story about lack of clarity on instructions already, but in true "Ewing Fashion", I will post it here😬. One day I was giving directions to the students on an activity that they would complete with a partner. I told them I would pair then up and after explaining the activity, I said something like, "OK, we are going to keep this easy. I want everyone to work with the person in your left."

    Not realizing what I did/said, I said go ahead. Then I realized I had students that started to work and others that were trying to figure out who their partner was supposed to be! Yes, it doesn't work well at all when you give poor directions even if you thought they were great!

    Dr. Ewing

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  3. Dr. CurryJanuary 31, 2021 at 3:38 PM

    I got to the point I always coupled any activity directions verbally with a slide (visual). This cut my "what are we supposed to be doing's" in half!

    Great reflection, Michalea

    ReplyDelete
  4. Nicole GuiseFebruary 1, 2021 at 5:24 AM

    Hi Michaela - sounds like you had a great second week! I really liked reading your blog post about clarity, something I am continuing to work on myself. This is especially frustrating for me on Zoom because I will demonstrate where to find class materials in Schoology by sharing my screen, then ask the students if there are any questions before sending them to their breakout rooms (no one usually unmutes) and then as I visit each breakout room I get "I don't know where to find what we're working on". AHHHH!!!! One thing I have tried, is asking students for a Zoom reaction when they found the document and individually assigning them to a break out room once I know they are there. Then, I can help the group in the main Zoom room find the document before sending them to a breakout room.

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