David's Activity 2 Reflective Blog

1. Who - I received feedback from the teacher in New York. 

2. When - They will be using the activity after spring break. 

3. The Need - The teachers interviewed expressed different needs such as primary content for upper elementary, processing emotions, and working together in groups. 

4. Blog: 

In this activity, I was continuing to try and develop students opportunities to grow in group work as well as complete primary concepts at older grade levels. This has been an interesting experience seeing where teachers are seeing their students, and the different needs. While we continuously spiral curriculum through our instructional delivery, sometimes it is difficult for us to introduce our primary concepts. This experience so far has made me realize the continued stress that is being felt by teachers, especially in this political climate and time in the academic calendar. 

The politics of the world are empowering parents to be more involved in their education which can be an amazing community connection. However, this want of connection is being fueled by contempt for the teaching profession. As opposed to starting with the love and care of a child in mind, parents are attacking teachers and making them want to leave the teaching profession all together. The academic calendar is dictating a lot of stress for teachers with concerts coming up, and standardized testing on the horizon. This puts a bump in teacher routine and makes it difficult to find and keep any groove that has been found in this difficult year. 

My experience so far has made me realize that teachers going to conferences and looking for resources are just trying to survive. If we can provide them with materials that just work in their classrooms, this alleviates some of the stress they are feeling. Now my challenge is to consider how we can implement these practices into the classroom and help teachers grow in their thinking of lesson inspiration and scaffolding, Teachers need love, support and recognition right now, not to revolutionize the world. 

Assumptions that I had made prior to this project were that teachers needed to keep their standards high for their students and work towards developing and continuing their programs with the standards they had prior to the pandemic. This has been a trend since the standards for teachers were lowered during the online learning in 2020, and then standards continued to be lowered as the transition to in person learning happened. I wonder if we have framed it in a way that is toxic to the educational environment. This turn in the educational climate needs to accomodate students where they are as opposed to putting them "on grade level." Imagine if we could get rid of grade levels, and just have students working towards goals that help them achieve the standards when they are ready for the? Now moving into activity 3, I am looking towards having another lesson that is almost a plug and play so that teachers do not need to stress too much about learning the content before delivering it. This will hopefully help them to not feel any additional stress from this project. I have also received some feedback from teachers wanting to have rhythmic notation introduced as well!