Summer Recap

This summer, I had an amazing and intense summer institute training through Teach For America. It was essentially boot camp to prepare us to dive headfirst into a classroom full of actual humans who needed to catch up to grade level content and re-earn credits lost from absences or failures. The catch: while we were learning the essentials of how to teach competently and effectively, we also each had a class full of students for whom we were responsible.

The students are behind grade level peers, partly because the district has limited resources to provide students with the tools they need to be successful. For example, students in Lawrence are not provided with textbooks for classes, because it is too expensive for the district. Compared to all of the textbooks that I had to lug around in high school, that is definitely not equitable. So these students need passionate and dedicated educators to give them the attention, energy, and resources they need in order to reach their potential. Because they can! Students want to learn. They are smart, and they are capable. But they need support, from all angles.

In order to be the best teacher and support I could be, I learned how to reach English learners, how to develop engaging activities to sustain attention and reactive strategies for when attention is lost, how to implement logical consequences, how to construct effective lessons, and how to manage lots of student data.

Here’s a sample schedule for a Friday:

5:30AM wakeup
6:00 AM breakfast
6:40 buses leave UMASS lowell
7:10 buses arrive

Any time we weren’t in class, we had professional development, an activity called group of six (one person teaches while the rest are students, some of whom are having “off days).

I was a second block teacher. That meant that my students were coming to me after 2 hours of sitting and trying to learn Math in their second language, and were expected to stay focused in another hot, sticky room for two more hours trying to learn English. The students in my classroom this summer are all newcomers to the United States — that means they immigrated to the United States within the past two years. They had varied levels of English speaking, writing, listening, and reading ability. Most were level 2–3 on the WIDA (World Class Design and Instruction) scale. For more information on what level 2–3 English learners can do, see here.

And here is a picture of my wonderful, brilliant, motivated, and energetic students!!

Our unit for the summer was… IMMIGRATION. Therefore, every lesson over the summer was related to immigration. The ultimate goal was to write up their own immigration story, including challenges they face as an immigrant, reasons for immigrating (push factors that led them out of their country and pull factors that led them to the United States), the sequence of their immigration, and their feelings as an immigrant in the united states. In order to do that, I was provided with a “scope and sequence” for how to break down the necessary components to get the students to the ultimate goal.

My role was to take each of the Content Objectives outlined in this calendar, and formulate a lesson plan. At the end of the lesson, students are assessed on the content objective through an exit ticket. The lesson plan goes like this:

Do Now
Launch & Explore (aka Frame lesson)
Guided Practice
Independent Practice
Exit Ticket

Here’s an exemplar do now:

Here is an example of a blank exit ticket:

and here is an example of a completed exit ticket:

I sometimes felt like I wasn’t doing the students justice, because I created the exit tickets and did not always recognize when my prompts used language that was too complicated, did not always get to the key points of the unit, and struggled to best meet students where they were at.

However, at the end of the summer students presented their immigration stories in front of the class, and they were phenomenal. Unfortunately, I was not able to video their presentations. At the end of the summer, students wrote letters to their future teachers, using this template:

One student chose to write in Spanish, and acknowledged her difficulty learning math. She described, ‘I try to learn the equations but sometimes I forget them and that’s a little frustrating for me… I can be a bit disrespectful sometimes but it’s caused by the stress of that day’.

At the end of the summer, one student from each class wrote a letter to their teacher. Here’s what Alejandro wrote me:

I am thrilled to be returning to Lawrence High School in a few weeks. Although I am not working with the same Newcomer students, I am excited to meet new faces, create new relationships, and continue to work towards educational equity!