Reflection

My biggest concern at the outset of the internship was whether or not my fellow 10th grade team members would actually try out new things in their classrooms during the middle of the school year. Trying out new things is not too much of a problem with the teachers I work with, but it can be difficult to try new things once you have already established the flow of your classroom and routines with instruction. Would my teachers be willing to implement new technologies along with a new instructional idea, using formative assessment data to influence instruction, over halfway through the year? As you will see, the willingness to try was there, the difficulty ended up being finding the time to do so.

I try not to be disappointed about not meeting all of the goals of my internship. I built the resources website and included team members feedback on best practices. I was able to hold several small PD sessions within our regularly scheduled PLC meetings and meet with some teachers one on one, but the reduced number of meetings from what I had budgeted prevented me from demonstrating all of the proposed platforms as well as moving on to the important discussion of planning reteaching activities based on formative assessment data. I am frustrated because we never reached a place of consistency with meeting times and implementation which made my proposed evaluation of the internship moot. We were never able to pinpoint content goals outlined in our SMART goals from the beginning of the year that we could measure using any of the platforms because we were still trying to get everyone used to creating and using any of the platforms.

What I realize now is that despite my own personal frustrations, my team members rather enjoyed the experience and felt like they got something out of it. I have to remember that a plan is just that, a plan, and not a requirement. My survey responses indicate that teachers would like to incorporate more of these specific platforms into their instruction and would be willing try other things, but that they require time and training to develop a plan to make it a part of how they operate. As the grade level team leader, I have the ability to make that happen after PARCC and other mandatory testing is completed mid-May. There are a few things that we need to make some decisions about as a grade level team, switching from EdPuzzle to PlayPosit and using a common Google Classroom even though our district is not a G-Suite for Education member, before we make too many plans for our summer. I also need to know if my Administration wants me or our grade level team members to provide Professional Development for the full academic and/or arts staff at the beginning of next year. I am open to that possibility but would rather know sooner as opposed to later. If there are enough teachers who want to pursue using GoFormative on a more regular basis in the coming school year, I will ask my Administration for a quote to purchase a Team license so that we can have access to the advanced question types. It might require that we find a grant to fund the license depending on our budget.