Student Teaching Work Journal Excerpts -- Collaboration with Lindsay Hudson

Monday, Aug. 20

The afternoon was spent working on a collaboration project I will be doing with one of the 8th grade teachers, Lindsay Hudson. This is the first year she’s teaching a social studies section at this grade level, so she was anxious to work with someone planning this project, which was a great opportunity for me! The students will be researching a person, event, or topic relevant to post-Reconstruction America in the 1870s to 1890s and creating a “trading card” with the most important information on the topic. Today we spent brainstorming the possible research topics for the students and then I started finding relevant websites for students to explore their topics. I will be building a wiki with these resources, in addition to creating a note-taking worksheet, a rubric for Lindsay to use when grading, and a couple of trading card examples from a topic they will have just finished studying. The class will be coming into the library computer lab to work on this during the first week in October, and I believe Lindsay and I will be co-teaching the lesson. Kathy somewhat guided this initial meeting with Lindsay and I, but I foresee the two of us tackling it more without her moving forward. I’m thrilled to have this project to work on right from the start! I think it will help me become more comfortable working with teachers, sharing expertise, and becoming confident in my knowledge and experience I’ve gained at GSLIS and through practicum.

Thursday, Sept. 27

I stopped by Lindsay’s room during her planning period today to make sure we are on target for next week’s social studies project in the lab. She is going to introduce the project on Monday, but we will team teach it the rest of the week. On Wednesday, I will be instructing on how to use the trading card application to develop their product. As I said on a previous day, Lindsay is totally open to collaboration and team teaching, so I don’t think we will have any problems and I am not worried about stepping on her toes or her stepping on mine. Unlike when I am working with Patti’s class (and feel that I need to run things by her, so she can announce them to the class), Lindsay is much more willing to have me jump in whenever I want to contribute, which makes the team-teaching process much easier. I think she is the type of person I would try to approach in a new school environment when I start my own job to begin collaboration activities.

Tuesday, Oct. 2

For 7th hour I was in the lab with Lindsay’s social studies class as they worked on their research for the post-reconstruction project. As she informed me yesterday, this class is made up of students who are really advanced and students are on the low-end of the academic spectrum, which makes it difficult to come up with projects that will engage everyone (definitely a time for differentiation!).

I could notice what she meant by this today as the students worked on their projects. Some students were really involved, taking a lot of notes and taking care to think about what each research question was asking. Others struggled to get anything written. I hope that the project is flexible enough to accommodate these lower and higher students while still getting successful outcomes. Tomorrow we will be working on turning research into product, so time will soon tell.

Wednesday, Oct. 4

This afternoon I instructed Lindsay’s social studies class in how to put their research into a final product using the Trading Card Creator tool developed by Read, Write, Think. I was concerned going into this lesson because the last two days in the lab have been a little chaotic. The students were incredibly chatty and not always on task, and I dreaded Ruth observing my lesson in this context. Before the students came into the lab, however, Lindsay assigned them seats for today’s session, which helped enormously. The students were the quietest they’ve ever been and maintained focus throughout the period. A handful of them finished working on their trading cards today, which will give them time to practice their presentations tomorrow during class. I am pretty confident that all the students will finish tomorrow with high-quality products. I hope I’m able to watch some of the presentations next week.

Tuesday, Oct. 9During 7th hour I wandered down to Lindsay’s classroom to see how the trading card presentations were going. Like I think is true for any project, the results ranged from impressive to the bare minimum. Some students provided a lot of interesting information in a short amount of space and time while others gave short, not-very-informative answers to the questions available. Overall, though, I think the project accomplished what it set out to do: give students broad exposure to a variety of important events and people during this time period without having them all study everything. I think it’s interesting that this shared sense of teaching and learning was reflected both in those of us doing the design and instruction (Lindsay and I) and those doing the learning (the students). I’m so glad I was able to collaborate with her during this student teaching placement. It gave me a great example of how we can share responsibilities and combine our own areas of expertise to develop and execute a successful student project.