Week Six

 I don't know what to really say about data-driven decision-making. I haven't seen much of the nitty gritty, so it's been a little difficult. Hopefully, I can provide insight, but it was a fairly chill week since my purple day mentor is doing a refresher unit and providing class time for students to make up their missing or incomplete work before midterms. My white day mentor also gave the students a chill week of reading a short story in class and then taking a quiz over the story and discussing it. It's pretty long for a "short" story, so it was definitely a warranted "chill" week. 

Monday, I led class while my white day mentor was out. It was strange to be the adult in the room. Sure, there was a sub, but he went to take attendance down and then got lost and then lost his coffee mug and went everywhere (even his car) trying to find it. So for a good half of the class, I was alone as the adult of the room. 

However, I knew I was going to be leading class. This is where that data comes in. My mentor told me the week prior that he thought students would respond better to the short story we were reading if it were read aloud. I asked about groups and he told me which students were stronger or weaker readers so I'd know who to pair. When Monday came around, I made sure to pair up those students. Also, throughout the class, I noticed students slacking off, so I moved them to groups that were more on task. Overall, it went pretty well and most students were able to finish and take some salient notes. I think it would've been more of a train wreck on Monday without first knowing who needed to be together. 

I led a purple day class on Thursday. I also used some data to prepare for this one as well. I noticed on Tuesday that students were not responding to images and passages as well as video clips, so I focused my lesson around a series of video clips that I frontloaded and then used to start discussion. I was surprised how many responses I got from the students given how silent they seemed to be in lessons prior. 

Also for this lesson, I noticed a lot of the students preferred doing work on paper, so I made sure to print a worksheet. All but one student in attendance completed the worksheet. So that was exciting too. 

Finally, earlier in the week, I heard a few kids talking about how cool photoshop is, so I wanted to give them a chance to let out that creative, editing side. I made an activity where students chose an image, answered questions about its tone and mood, then edited the image, and finally answered questions about how the tone and mood changed because of the edits. They really liked the chance to edit and definitely created some really interesting images. I had to push them pretty hard to do the questions, but as I stated earlier about the worksheet, all but one student completed them. 

Overall, I think the "data" that drives teaching decisions is a lot more than just staring at numbers. It's knowing how the kids are as people, what they respond to as learners, and maybe even just their interests. I don't know if I would've thought about having students edit an image if I hadn't heard those others talking about photoshop. Maybe I would've, but I think we're (we being English majors) taught pretty heavily that we need to focus on language, but English as a content area is a world study. It's one of the most common languages, so many cultures exist within the subject. Art, too, is part of that language, so giving students the tools to express their feelings in basically a different dialect is vital.