Teaching Approach
2) Strip way practices that seem to be holding students back from your goals.
Things to consider testing out the removal of:
Things that students identify as stressful
Things that students can fail at but still succeed on assessments that test only for your chosen goals
Things that take a lot of time in class that might be employed other ways
Things you find stressful or annoying (yes your mental health DOES impact the quality of your teaching)
The timeline on which I removed various teaching strategies and the impact it had on assessment scores.
3) As you strip away fill the freed time with practices that research suggests will support your chosen goals.
Practices shown to improve reading fluency:
Practices shown to support student mental health:
Practices I have found personally helpful for both goals
Early outreach to adults supporting children in minoritized communities
Outreach to adults supporting children as soon as I see a dip in exit tickets
The grade breakdown of test scores for the last six years
RESULTS 6 YEARS INTO THE PROCESS
No students left behind- no D's, no F's with majority of grades assessing for my academic goal of reading proficiency
While I am about a month behind my normal place in the curriculum, all of my students have actually demonstrated that they learned what I have covered and that is with COVID remote teaching for most of the previous year.
Students regularly saying things like "School is too stressful, but I like Latin" or "Latin is my safe place"
A more diverse group of students choosing Latin and staying in Latin
A teaching career that suddenly feels so much more sustainable
This is the breakdown for end-of-the-year grades for each year except for '13-14 where I did not have access to overall averages and had to use test averages. I did not include the years I was remote teaching because the data was so contorted. Years that are missing I did not have access to.
Interestingly, I often had to pad grades with "class participation" before COVID to avoid a lot of grades below A and B so the test average from 13-14 probably more accurately reflect reading assessment data than the final grades would have.
When all students are doing well it is worth checking in and making sure all students feel challenged. These are some of the responses that I got from my 8th graders when I asked them if my class was too easy.
It doesn't feel hard because we have so much fun.
No, but we always have to work. You don't give assignments we can waste time on.
Latin is one of the only class that hasn't made me cry.
This seems to suggest that my students feel like they have meaningful work without being overly stressed.