PLC Meeting at Arts

On November 27, 2007 I attended a Professional Learning Communities Meeting at Arts High School. The meeting lasted for about an hour. The facilitator of the meeting new I was a students from MSU and allowed me to sit in with the teachers and be a full and active participant. There were ten teachers present and one was designated as the facilitator.
As the teachers arrived they had to sign in. The meeting took place in a small room, about 15' x 15', around a long oval shaped table. Once everyone was present a meeting agenda was passed out. On the meeting Agenda was the meeting objective and guiding questions.

Meeting objective: To continue to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to develop open-ended questions that will develop higher level critical thinking.

Guiding Question(s): How do we develop open-ended questions so that they: 1) help students acquire critical thinking skills gained from higher order questions; 2)prepare students to successfully answer open-ended questions on standardized tests; and 3)inform instruction?


The facilitator opened the meeting by going through the agenda and explaining what he would go over in the meeting. The agenda item was to review objective and guiding questions. The spent about five minutes doing this. The facilitator read them aloud. The teachers made a few comments. The teachers then when on to task two, Bloom's Taxonomy. A chart including Bloom's Taxonomy was handed out. At this point a little bit of debate broke out over weather or not it was important to give students questions that only cover the first level of Bloom's Taxonomy, knowledge, or if they should try to give questions that cover all the levels. One teacher said, "We need to give them questions that only cover the first level because they need to have something to work up to. You need to be able to answer questions on the first level to be able to move up to any other level." Another teacher said, "Questions that only cover the first level don't show that they understand concepts. They are just spitting facts back," .

After some debate they moved on to the next agenda item, guided reading. A packet of reading was passed out. The packet included several articles. The facilitator went around the table assigning different pages to each teacher. On teacher said, "My pages are the end on an article". The facilitator decided to just have everyone skim all of the articles. The artciles were discussed and then they moved on to what it meas for a question to be open and what makes a question open. They were given questions and had to decide if they were open or not. They then created their own open-ended questions and shared them with each other. The meeting then came to a close and teachers said their goodbyes and went on with their days.

I really enjoyed this experience. I think the PLC meetings are great. It keeps older teachers up to date and gives teachers a chance to learn from one another. I hope the school I end up teacher for does something like this.

Thanksgiving Football Game

Today I went to a football game at Brick Memorial high school. This is a huge game in the town of Brick. The Brick Memorial Mustangs were playing the Old Brick Dragons. This game is played between the two high schools of Brick every year on thanksgiving. It is a huge tradition. When I arrived at the game the stadium was packed. It was not only high school students, but people of all ages. A lot of people I met were Alumni of either school. There were also a lot of families present. I was sitting on the Brick Memorial side. All of the students I talked to said they thought they were going to lose. After a long and stressful game Brick Memorial ended up surprising everyone and won 17, 7.

NCLB

I have been hearing about NCLB since it started. My mother is a teacher and she has been complaining about it for years now. I don't understand how it could stay in place if so many years if teachers are against it. I think NCLB puts the focus of education in the wrong places. Standardized tests have been given way too much importance. I think maybe it may push some schools to want to fall bellow standards to get help. It just upsets me that schools have to be so political. It makes people forget why were really all there, why there is a school. I think things have to improve with the next presidential administration. They can't possibly get much worse.

The History Teacher

Through my research for my inquiry project I have come across a very interesting journal. I am a future history teacher and I find this journal extremely useful. I think it would be beneficial for any current of future history teacher. Almost all of the articles I used in my Inquiry project paper came from The History Teacher. I found their articles so interesting I couldn't stop reading. I even paid for a years subscription.

You can find this journal at:
http://www.thehistoryteacher.org/


You can find old issues at:
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ht/40.2/


I advise anyone who is planning on being a history teacher to at least take a look.