A Synthesis of Learning
I’ve never read Gretchen Rubin’s 2009 book The Happiness Project, but it contains a quotation that I’ve come to think about quite often. In it, Rubin writes, “The days are long, but the years are short.” Indeed, as I finish my master’s program through Michigan State University and reflect back on the two years since I began, I’m taken back by the dissonance between how much my life has changed and how little time it feels like has gone by.
When I first started discussing pursuing a master’s degree I was having coffee with my family, away from whom I’d never lived more than two hours. I was working at the high school I’d graduated from, a few years into my career, but still very much finding my footing and struggling from new teacher woes. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to continue teaching, finding it difficult to deal with the issues most of us go through at various points throughout our educational careers. I was tired of spending most of my waking time teaching, grading, and lesson planning. I was getting worn down by difficult students and confrontational parents. I was confused about if I’d made the right career choice as I watched my friends and family work shorter hours, make more money, and build their careers up through a tangible ladder of positional prestige. I knew that if I didn’t make some dramatic changes, both personally and professionally, I was surrendering myself to a life which I may never be upset with, but one in which I was also never likely to feel completely fulfilled.
Looking back on the macro level, the years since that initial conversation with my family seem almost non-existent. It could have been yesterday! Yet, at the same time, everything is different, because there have been a lot of long, challenging, thrilling, amazing days in those years that have fundamentally shaken up who I am as an educator, friend, family member, and human being. These changes came about due to a lot of different things. To get out of my rut, I followed in the footsteps of some cousins and pursued employment abroad, ending up spending three amazing years in Mandalay, Myanmar. I got in shape, losing about 35 pounds, which did wonders for my mental health. I met an amazing woman to share my experiences with, to whom I’m now engaged. I reconsidered my friendships and cut ties with people that were not bringing me happiness. Professionally, I decided that teaching is what I want to do with my life, I just needed to get better at it. Enter, this master’s program.
Throughout this portfolio, you’ll find many pages about my master’s program experience, such as my annotated transcripts, goals reflection, and professional artifacts, but here my aim is to look more internally at my growth and express how a few specific courses have changed that way that I approach and execute my professional work. First I’ll discuss how my assessment went from out-of-date to one of my strengths, then I'll tackle the importance of clarity and purpose, then I'll discuss the impact of learning to lead colleagues and manage conflict.
Better Feedback
CEP 813: Electronic Assessment for Teaching and Learning is not a course that I expected to get as much out of as I ultimately did. Yes, on paper, improving my assessments was one of my professional goals, but the mediums I use to deliver feedback was not something that I’d actively considered. An entire lifetime as a student had taught me by example that rubrics and notes written on essays were the best (only?) ways to deliver meaningful feedback to students. Maybe in-person individual conferences if I was particularly ahead on my grading and lesson planning. I wasn’t avoiding other options out of sloth or hubris, I was avoiding them because more creative and diverse feedback options just wasn’t anything that I’d ever seen or been taught.
I don’t think that feedback was ever a weakness of mine. Save the occasional exception, I always gave back written feedback via rubric and longhand notes in a timely manner. I was always fair, offering both praise and constructive suggestions for improvement. Students rarely asked me to clarify or be more elaborate. It worked, so I never really saw a reason to change. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, am I right? Well, I wasn’t right, and instructors James Kerr and William Bork helped my assessment in a number of ways that started changing my feedback almost immediately. The class worked so well for me because learning happened in two ways- while we worked on resources for improving our assessment quality and feedback strategies, we received feedback on our work that explored diverse mediums and philosophies so that we could experience the student side of what we were learning. Each week was different, including “traditional” notes-on-the-worksheet feedback, individual Skype-style recordings, annotated screen recordings, and more. The idea wasn’t to show that any single one of those strategies works best but instead to demonstrate that they all have value. Furthermore, not only do some people prefer different types of feedback overall, but, additionally, their preferences may change based on the particular assignment at hand.
I’ve decided to implement this idea of choice into my assessments, offering students a variety of feedback mediums that they can select from when appropriate. For larger, summative assignments in particular, but also for certain in-depth or lengthy formatives, students are able to choose from written annotations, a screen/voice recording, or personal conference after school to discuss their work. While I don’t have enough collected data to definitively say if this has had a marked improvement on performance, it’s certainly had noticeable improvement on student morale and engagement, and I absolutely feel as if I’m a better teacher for doing it. You can read a bit more about my assessment philosophies here, as well as some of the resources I’ve created to match those philosophies.
I Can See Clearly Now
The second class that I feel had a great impact on instigating change in my professional work is ED 800: Concepts of Educational Inquiry. My reason for this choice doesn’t have so much to do with the actual content of the course (though walking through the history of educational inquiry and practicing different forms of it was certainly valuable) as much as how it was delivered.
ED 800 was unique among my courses for two reasons. First, it was entirely self-paced. The entire course was available from day one, each unit unlocking whenever the previous was turned in, and the only deadline was the final one. Something I’ve continually struggled with throughout my career is the balancing act between too much and too little freedom with pacing and over-watch. Now, yes, there is certainly a sizable difference between a high school student that may not want to be in my mandatory English class and a professional paying top dollar to further their education by choice, but I think it was still important for me to see that it’s ok to let go. Clearly, openness on this scale doesn’t fit with the way high school education works, but I was able to see what specifically this class was able to do to ensure that the open format worked, and those guiding principles can be applied to different lessons on any scale.
So, why did that class work so well for me? Despite only hearing from the instructors once a unit and working through at my own pace, why did everything feel so solid, purposeful, and easy to follow? To me, the answer is simple: clarity and purpose. While I don’t have any specific or meaningful metrics to base this claim on, I feel comfortable saying that Concepts of Educational Inquiry covered the most information of all my classes by pure volume. Units were long, and each one had a very long main reading, articles, videos, and book chapters to read. Often, the assignments didn’t even necessitate reading it all, but I did. Why? Because the units were put together incredibly tightly. The organization was crisp, and I always knew exactly what I was reading and why. With clear instruction and transparent goals, I did the reading because I wanted to. I was shown the value, so I thought, “Yeah, I could skip this reading, but then I’m missing out!” This has inspired the way that I give directions and independent work. Students don’t often skip work because they don’t have time or are fundamentally unproductive people, they skip work or take shortcuts when they don’t understand what value that work has to them. If I can’t give a good reason for an assignment beyond “you’ll need it for the summative,” I’m forced to seriously consider why I’m asking them to do it in the first place.
Follow the Leader
The last class I’d like to speak about is CEP 816: Technology and Leadership. Throughout most of my teacher education in both graduate and undergraduate studies, the focus was placed on leadership in the classroom. It makes sense! After all, despite schools being filled with dozens of professionals, the day-to-day of teaching can be a fairly lonely experience. Given that I’m relatively early on in my career, I’ve also not yet been in many leadership positions among my peers. That being the case, this course, which focused on how to be a leader among co-workers, communities, and potential subordinates was incredibly valuable for developing an entirely different set of skills than I’m used to working with. This course wasn’t about how to use instructional technology, but instead how to take what one already knows and effectively build policy and professional development around it. Valuable activities included developing potential plans for professional development sessions, as well as drafting communication about technology policies for students, parents, and school personnel.
This course was also valuable as an initial foray into professional conflict management. At some point, everyone is likely to have disagreements with coworkers or superiors at some point in their career, and this class helped me grow immensely by walking me through best practices with conflict communication. While these activities were focused on technology, their principals certainly apply to any areas in which disagreements are likely to rear their heads.
At this point, I don’t see the pursuit of an administration position to be a likely move in my career, so it was great that this course handles planning, communication, and conflict resolution for professionals at all levels of leadership. Conflict in the workplace isn’t a problem, not knowing how to deal with conflict is. In my option, this should be mandatory learning for all teachers before acquiring a license. It wasn’t part of my undergraduate studies, though, so I’m thankful to have gotten it here.
Knowing What I Don't Know
Even though I’m only entering my eighth year as an educator, I already find myself sometimes forgetting what it’s like to be on the receiving end of formal instruction. This master’s program has helped me remember that, reminding me of the difference that effective feedback and clear instructions can take, but also instilling the importance of how frustrating it can be when fundamental elements of teaching aren’t done well. There’s another saying that I’ve come to think a lot about lately, though I’m not sure where it’s originally from. It goes, “The first step towards being an expert is knowing how much you don’t know.” My master’s program did not teach me everything I need to know to be a better teacher. What it did do was peel back the curtains and give me a handful of different glimpses in just how deep the rabbit hole of learning can go if one is willing to dedicate themselves to being a lifelong learner. So, while this is an end, it’s also a beginning, and it’s a good feeling to have my ship pointed towards the right waters.