Amber said I did it wrong...Statement of Inquiry part 2

Statement of Inquiry

Where have you been?

Career wise, I was in the private tutoring world for 10 years. #expensive I had a crazy two years of job searching, substitute teaching, assistant teaching, student teaching, and finally part-time actual teaching. Then, I MADE IT! I was a teacher! I have been teaching for 3 years, all of them at Wakefield High School in Arlington, VA. At the end of my first year, I got tricked into teaching Journalism....then I found my calling. #JournalismisLIFE

What do you know already?

I know that I have no idea what I am doing. It is silly that they leave me alone in a classroom with 158 students. I hope they know what they are doing, but I don't think they know either. I think that is the big secret of teaching, no matter how many years you have been doing it, you really don't know what you are doing. Students change, philosophies change, policies change; all you can do is try to have fun during this wild ride.

THIS IS THE PART I DID WRONG!
Where are you going?
What is next for me is reflection. I have never reflected so much in my freaking life.

I am going to be a driving force on the "Every student. Every year." Committee. Driving Force. 
I am going to start to plant the seeds of a productive student run writing center for the 2016-2017 school year. Kids need help in 2015-2016, but they already have schedules, etc. So, I can't get the full picture rolling until the next school year. I am okay with that. I think that will actually help in the long run. I will be able to manage it. People will see me as the one to go to for writing center ideas and inquires (God, help me.) this year, so they can help the right students become part of the Writing Center movement. 

I think I am going to focus on making the school news site even more accurate, relevant, and timely.  
I am also going to plan my English 10 units NOW for the year. I am going to try to work in a lot of what I learned at NVWP. That way I can also focus on getting work back to students in a 48 hour window, with essays back in a 96 hour window. I gotta keep current with grading to keep feedback relevant and timely, or there is no hope of them reading it.

I didn't realize that being in the same room with 16 other teachers, all of which have been teaching longer than me, would help me get some basic teaching methods down. Don't give them a list of characteristics of a certain genre, give them a mentor text and have them figure it out. Have them help create the rubric. HOLY FRICKING CRAP! Have them grade it? What? I don't know...I guess it does make sense! Use a table of contents with my multi genre research papers. Write FOR MYSELF so that I remember what it is like to have to write on command. GIVE MORE STUDENT CHOICE! Make them more responsible. They work harder. They learn more. Wooh! #foodforthought

(What I previously wrote...#stillTRUE)
Nowhere. You are going to have to pry my cold, lifeless body out of my teacher chair, put me on a stretcher, and wheel me out of the classroom. It took me FOREVER to become an actual teacher...beyond that two years of crazy...I have been trying to be a teacher since I was a year out of college. I see myself running the school newspaper, running a writing center (THANKS, AMBER!), and running the TV Studio at Wakefield until I die. #lovinlife

What questions still linger?

How do I know that what I am doing is right? That it affects my students in a positive way? It teaches them what they need to survive life? How will I know? What can I do to become a better teacher for my students?

What can I do to help my school be a better school? What can I do to unite the English department so we can have more fun and feel like a unit not a competition?

Where do you want to be?

I want to be where I am. I want to stay there. I want to become more of a leader. I think because of my personality, some people think I am all flash and no bang. I am also grammatically incorrect at times, so that is not a good look for an English teacher. That can make people think I have a lower intelligence level than I actually do. #judgement I think becoming more of an unofficial leader (not a real administrator...I don't want THAT job.)

I guess...where I want to be in 5 years is Newspaper Adviser for The Chieftain for 2 classes and after school, running the Writing Center 4th and 5th period, and teaching one English class to keep current and in the department. I want to be where I am, but even better.

Peter's Statement of Inquiry

Intro:
If everything is an emergency, nothing is. Of all the pithy witticisms bestowed upon me by my previous head of school, this one continues to hold significance for me. Especially when I think about teaching, reading, and writing. A snapshot into my brain would reveal two hemispheres alight in near-constant 911 calls and emergency fires: grades, RTI, parent-teacher conferences, constructivist methods of behavior modification, the 20th century, No Child Left Behind/A Race to the Top, writing, reading, PISA scores, NAEP scores, Lawrence Baines, SRI, Lexile levels, privatized reform, Paul Thomas, authentic assessments, using technology, etc. There is certainly nothing extraordinary or exceptional about this. Teachers are constantly juggling multiple (and often competing) demands from various public/personal realms. What follows is a statement of where I am as of this day.

Where I've been:
Anyone who has been within earshot of me at pretty much any point during the last couple of weeks is at least somewhat familiar with where I've been as a teacher. Started out in a data-centric charter school teaching test strategies to a 100% free and reduced lunch population. I taught reading and writing in test-prep formats. I did it a few years and loved it for a few years. I'm not sure 'love' is really the right word. But for reasons best explored elsewhere, the school provided me the structure and discipline I needed at the time.

I changed positions to Arlington County and started on a new path of self-discovery and transformation. My teaching philosophy slid from hardcore behaviorism to constructivism. I did away with grades, alienating myself from my colleagues and some of my students in the process. I felt like I had lost myself. I needed something to grasp onto. Some sort of philosophical or methodological rock that wouldn't disappear at the first sign of a new idea.
I've spent the last 9 months reading education history and pedagogical theory attempting to ground myself in the facts. To elevate my mood by immersing myself in the history of the profession. If only I read enough John Dewey, or learned more about the history of education reform, maybe only then would I know who I was and how I should proceed. Except, frustratingly, it hasn't worked out that way. 

Instead, the more I read, the more I write, the less I seem to know.

Where I am now:
In many ways I feel like I've created a sort of pedagogical Frankenstein. An amalgamation of specific viewpoints and reactionary politics repellant to most teachers I engage with. I don't like grades. I don't like measurement. I don't like testing. I'm coming to realize that I don't possess the skills or understanding to understand, much less convey, the nuanced complexity behind everything. Instead, I seemed to have gravitated only towards the most reactionary of viewpoints. Part of me thinks this is normal. That I have to work my way through these understandings. That I can't rush my personal journey back to myself. So now I'm desperately trying to find my place as an educator. 

Where I want to go:
I want my teaching to mirror my ethics. I want my students to use writing as a tool for understanding themselves, literature, and the world around them. I want to engage my students' families and to help them understand that my class is not a class focused on measurement or numbers or letters. 

How I'll get there:
I'm still working on this part.

Amber's Statement of Inquiry: Everything in my Brain

Statement of Inquiry

Amber Jensen

21 July 2015

Where Have I Been?

So for nine years, I have been an English teacher at a public high school in Fairfax County, Virginia. Even though I’ve carried one title on my contract during that time, in reality, I have played a lot of different roles (no surprise to any teacher out there): I have been a teacher of 9th grade, 10th grade, IB English 1, and Advanced Composition. I have been a curriculum developer for Advanced Composition, a founder and director of a high school writing center, and a mentor-trainer for other teachers who have started high school writing centers. Now I am also a PhD student and a co-director of the NVWP Invitational Summer Institute.

I never imagined myself teaching high school for so long. I would have been gone long ago if it hadn’t been for the autonomy and leadership I was able to assume as I envisioned, designed, and implemented the writing center at my school. For me, it was all about an issue that gave me a chance to network with other teachers and find a voice that seemed to matter to my colleagues. It was about helping my students find that voice within themselves, too: as rewarding as it has been for me to publish an article and present at national conferences and be elected to the boards of some national organizations, it has all come together for me as my students have mirrored those same experiences in their professional development as students, writers, and tutors. Traveling to Chicago and Orlando with some of my writing center tutors to watch them present to audiences of both high school and postsecondary peer tutors is possibly the most rewarding thing I have experienced as a teacher. To have them start a blog and manage the regular publication of blog posts (read it here!), to run for and be elected to positions of leadership in peer tutoring organizations beyond their school, to have the space and autonomy to propose and implement ideas in our school: this is what teaching and professional growth is all about for me.

Where Am I Going?

As I transition out of full-time public school teaching and enter the full-time world of academia, I am headed on a path that I will have to navigate, once again, without a lot of direction or precedent. In the PhD program here at Mason, I am the only one who is still a high school teacher (in my experience, many of my K-12 teacher colleagues who start doctoral programs end up leaving the classroom altogether, which is totally understandable). In my role with NVWP and with my paired interests in Education and English, I am uniquely positioned to try to find a bridge between the two. I know what you’re thinking, and I agree: these are two worlds that should be interlaced, but unfortunately, often aren’t. My challenges include:

• finding a research interest that asks a specific enough question and ties the two fields together in a meaningful way and may provide a lens or a perspective that hasn’t already been explored in depth
• legitimizing my academic study in two different worlds that value different approaches to research, different ways of knowing, and different audiences
• sorting through all of the theories and research that already exists to find my own place
• making sense of, and hopefully making use of, my own experiences in a way that will inform and inspire the work I continue to do

Ultimately, I hope to tie together my interests in composition pedagogy and teacher voice and professional growth as a full-time, tenure-track professor in either an English or Education department that values preparing teachers as professionals. I am excited about continuing to work with my students - this time pre-service teachers - to find their own voices and the help them learn how to navigate their careers and feel empowered as change-makers.

What Do I Know?

Most of what I know is from my own experiences. I know that becoming part of a network that exists beyond my school has been sustaining and inspiring for my continued work and professional growth. I know that mandated collaboration feels like a really big pain - as does mandated professional development. I know that not all teachers are super motivated or confident to engage in the kind of work that really excites me. I know that there are bureaucratic challenges to teachers being change-makers and having a voice in decision making. I know that teaching is really, really hard work and the profession isn’t really set up to give teachers time to do the kind of reading, reflection, and research that is necessary for them to engage in this work; teaching is exhausting!

I have learned a lot from my PhD course in Public Sphere Theory, and I am excited about how some of that relates to teachers’ voices. I know that there are organizations out there that value and draw upon teacher voices, and that there are many, many great models of teachers who find value and are empowered in the work they do.

What Do I Still Need to Know?

I am curious about the ways in which certain professional organizations and career opportunities impact teachers’ professional growth. I want to know more about if and how programs like the Northern Virginia Invitational Summer Institute and its ongoing community enriches teachers’ conception of self, their involvement in wider discussions around teaching practices and policies, and their future involvement in leadership and decision making at their schools. I want to know if there is a link between teachers who feel empowered and their classroom pedagogies and professional practices - do their students benefit? In what ways? How and does a teacher who feels autonomy in his/her practice create a classroom environment that does that same for students? What are some of the barriers teachers feel when it comes to engaging with colleagues, administrators, and the wider public? What are some of the barriers students feel? Are there ways to change the cultures of the teaching profession and the classroom to bring about more buy-in, investment, leadership, and autonomy in both teachers and students?

WATH "rhymes with moth" EN Statement of Inquiry

Statement of Inquiry

Where have you been?

Career wise, I was in the private tutoring world for 10 years. #expensive I had a crazy two years of job searching, substitute teaching, assistant teaching, student teaching, and finally part-time actual teaching. Then, I MADE IT! I was a teacher! I have been teaching for 3 years, all of them at Wakefield High School in Arlington, VA. At the end of my first year, I got tricked into teaching Journalism....then I found my calling. #JournalismisLIFE

What do you know already?

I know that I have no idea what I am doing. It is silly that they leave me alone in a classroom with 158 students. I hope they know what they are doing, but I don't think they know either. I think that is the big secret of teaching, no matter how many years you have been doing it, you really don't know what you are doing. Students change, philosophies change, policies change; all you can do is try to have fun during this wild ride.

Where are you going?

Nowhere. You are going to have to pry my cold, lifeless body out of my teacher chair, put me on a stretcher, and wheel me out of the classroom. It took me FOREVER to become an actual teacher...beyond that two years of crazy...I have been trying to be a teacher since I was a year out of college. I see myself running the school newspaper, running a writing center (THANKS, AMBER!), and running the TV Studio at Wakefield until I die. #lovinlife

What questions still linger?

How do I know that what I am doing is right? That it affects my students in a positive way? It teaches them what they need to survive life? How will I know? What can I do to become a better teacher for my students?

What can I do to help my school be a better school? What can I do to unite the English department so we can have more fun and feel like a unit not a competition?

Where do you want to be?

I want to be where I am. I want to stay there. I want to become more of a leader. I think because of my personality, some people think I am all flash and no bang. I am also grammatically incorrect at times, so that is not a good look for an English teacher. That can make people think I have a lower intelligence level than I actually do. #judgement I think becoming more of an unofficial leader (not a real administrator...I don't want THAT job.)

I guess...where I want to be in 5 years is Newspaper Adviser for The Chieftain for 2 classes and after school, running the Writing Center 4th and 5th period, and teaching one English class to keep current and in the department. I want to be where I am, but even better.

Rivas Statement of Inquiry

Gabriela Rivas, M. Ed.

ESOL Teacher

Statement of Inquiry

Where have you been?

For the past 3 years, I have nurtured my craft as an ESOL teacher at a local Northern Virginia Public School. I have continually researched the latest information on strategies, methods, and approaches that would help me teach my student population to the best of my ability. Trying to expand my services to help more children, I have also provided reading instruction to non-ESOL students and dually identified students (ESOL and Learning Disability).

What do you know already?

I have observed that ESOL, dually identified, and non-ESOL students share the need for similar Tier 2 interventions and multi-modal instructional support in order to close the achievement gap between them and the general education population. My quest for greater knowledge inspired me to pursue an endorsement as a reading specialist through the University of Virginia. I do not plan to change departments. Rather, I hope to obtain greater expertise in order to be a stronger advocate for the individual needs of my students.

Where are you going?

I see myself teaching in the trenches for about two more years. Being a career switcher, I bring experiences of years as an ESOL advocate through the Arlington County ESOL/HILT Citizens Advisory Group, a parent of ESOL and dually identified students, social entrepreneurship skills for outreach work with the Latino community, and business management expertise.  

What questions still linger?

Therefore, at this point of my life, I see the need for me to serve a wider population. How can I reach more students, including those outside my classroom? How can I share the techniques I have used with such great success with other ESOL teachers? How can I share these with non-ESOL teachers? How can I help the teaching community be cognizant of the needs of our ESOL, dually-identified, and economically disadvantaged students?

Where do you want to be?

I think that my mission in life, now, is to be an advocate for those who have no voice. I have the need to reach a wider audience. I want for ESOL teachers to see that ESOL students CAN make two or four years worth of progress within one single school year, if provided with properly tailored instruction.

I see that I can do this with a blog presence where I share about my personal experiences as an ESOL student and ESOL teacher and the teaching strategies that have worked with my students.

In addition, with the training provided by the Northern Virginia Writing Project, I hope to present at TESOL conferences and even at international conferences on literacy.

In two years, I hope to be working as an adjunct professor in the summer or studying for my administration and supervision endorsement or doctorate, God willing and with good health. #cancer survivor

Statement of Inquiry (Draft)

Here is a draft of my Statement of Inquiry

Where have I been?

I taught kindergarten for 5 years, first grade for 8 years, and ELLs for 2 years.  During that time I have worked with 12 different co-teachers with varying strengths and weaknesses.   Getting the best out of students requires getting the best out of their teachers.  How can I best build my co-teacher’s capacity to actively engage students in writing across the curriculum?

Increasing student engagement has redoubled in importance now as students in poverty further dominate public school populations.

Where am I going?

Next year I will be co-teaching with a 3rd year teacher in 4th grade. I will have some of the same students that I had last year. I have been placed in 4th grade to serve as a coach to a young teacher. What techniques will work best to foster her capacity to engage her students? Will her youth make it easier for her to embrace coaching and technology? Will I be co-teaching in 1st or 2nd grade? If so, how will I need adjust my coaching techniques to support an older teacher?

What do I know?

Engaging teachers and students in writing increases academic success across the content areas.  When students find their voices as writers it augments their ability to communicate successfully both in school and in life.  When students participate in written discourse with others, their sense of self-efficacy is enhanced, so is their motivation and engagement in the writing process

.  

Negotiating the digital landscape can be tricky and stressful at times.  The logistics involved in many programs can be counter intuitive. These challenges increase when paired with the other demands placed on a classroom teacher's busy schedule.

There are also many issues surrounding internet etiquette and safety. 

What do I want know?

How can I use digital media to create opportunities to make meaningful contributions to conversations relating to issues that they care about?

What are benefits of engaging students in sharing their writing on the internet?

What are barriers to engaging students in sharing their writing on the internet?

What skills will students need to have proper internet etiquette so that they can avoid misinterpretation and confusion?

How can I protect students' identities and anonymity on the internet, especially at a young age?

How can I best coach/support my co-teachers as they implement new/different strategies in their classrooms?

Heather J.

What I Think About When I Think About a Statement of Inquiry

            At my first Summer Institute, we were told to come in the first day having written a first draft of a “position paper” – some thoughts on some position we had related to writing and/or the teaching of writing. At the time I didn’t know if I had a “position” on anything, but I could come up with a few things I wanted to learn to do better. One of them – and the one I chose to write about in my first position paper – focused on peer response groups. I used them in my classes, and I believed (in a theoretical way) in their value, but I’d never quite felt I was doing them very successfully, and so I decided I would devote at least some time during the Summer Institute to learning more about peer response groups and how I might make them work better in my own classes.

            I’m not sure why I came up with this particular idea; we were never told more than that single instruction to write “thoughts on some position.” And when I got together with my writing group that first Monday afternoon and we shared our position papers, the thing that stood out most to me was how differently each of us had interpreted the assignment. I had chosen a fairly specific aspect to focus on, while other teachers had taken a broader approach, presenting their values in regard to teaching writing, or talking about their own experiences and aspirations as writers themselves; one, a Physical Education teacher, phrased her position as a basic question: How can I use writing with my students?

            The title “position paper” has since been replaced by the title “statement of inquiry,” but one of the things that remains is the freedom each teacher has to shape this statement around whatever interests and matters most to that individual teacher. Perhaps it is some specific aspect or technique involved in teaching writing that you’d like to do more, or better. (In a later summer, my statement of inquiry focused on portfolios, which at the time I didn’t know enough about to feel comfortable introducing into my classes, but by the time the summer ended, I was so hooked I’ve never taught a writing class since that didn’t use some version of the portfolio system.) Perhaps it has to do with your sense of yourself as a writer or something you’d like to do that will help you as a writer. Or perhaps it’s a broader issue you want to consider and explore, maybe from a political point of view. At one point, thinking about the summer, I pondered making my “statement of inquiry” simply be: technology (though I realize this is neither a statement nor, I guess, an inquiry.) I feel that I am too far behind the times both in my ability to use technology for myself (I’d like to have a web page, for instance, and although I am on Facebook, I don’t know how to do anything on Facebook, not even how to find all my “new notifications”), and also in using technology in my classes. So even though “technology” isn’t particularly enlightening as the title of a statement of inquiry, I knew what I meant, and if I’d chosen to go in that direction, I would have been comfortable with the choice.

            What I have ended up choosing to explore for my statement of inquiry stirs some excitement in me, and for me at least, that’s important. Simply put, I feel as if I have caught the “political bug.” I am a creative writing teacher; I believe in the value of creative writing. (I probably believe in its value more than I believe in the value of Algebra or Chemistry, but then I do admit to being biased.) I believe students innately sense its value, and the vast majority of teachers understand it has great value too. And yet creative writing, like so many other arts, is constantly being reduced (or eliminated) by those who make the decisions about what teachers will teach and what students will learn.

            In one of our informal staff discussions over the last few weeks, Peter Anderson mentioned that in some ways, teaching creative writing can be seen as a subversive act. This thought shocked me at first, in part because I teach in a creative writing program – I would be considered subversive is I did not focus my classes around creative writing. But the more I thought about it, the truer it began to seem. Even in my program, one of the deans recently said that she believed supervising a creative writing thesis is much easier and less work than supervising a Government thesis, for instance, because a creative writing thesis has no content. I can’t begin to explain all the ways that statement is wrong.

            This summer, I’m going to search out all the errors in that notion. I’ve spent most of my life learning the “hows” of teaching writing; now I want to look into the “whys.” I know, at a level deeper than any conscious argument can tap, that creative writing is important. But I’ve never really thought about how I can make that case to others. This summer, I’m going to try.

                                                                                                                    Mark