2a. Collaboration

          After my first year, I quickly learned that doing everything on my own was not going to allow me to survive a school year.  Working alone leads to a lot of unnecessary stress and difficulty.  This year, I started early on collaborating with my biology co-worker and my consultant to ensure that I would stay on pace and provide the correct amount of rigor in my lessons.  Before the school year even began, I met with the consultant and Ms. Griffin to go over the standards and create a pacing guide that was well thought out and easy to follow.  I continue to meet with both Ms. Green (consultant) and Ms. Griffin regularly to make sure that we are on pace with each other and the guide.  We also work on resources, power points, and worksheets that we believe will best benefit our students.
          This collaboration has helped me so incredibly much.  I feel that the effort that we split between us allows for the students to have a more consistent experience in our classroom, and more sanity for us as educators.  It allows us to have the feeling that we are not alone in the battle between lecturing, providing independent practice, making assessments, and managing the classroom.
I have also found that working with some of the parents on a regular basis has helped to improve student participation and performance, thus improving student learning ability.  Some of my students who did not do well in the first semester are off to a good start, all in thanks to a strong parental involvement to get work done and turned in on time.  I have had an improvement in student turn in rate at the beginning of this new semester.  I attribute this to constant reminders and a larger amount of parent contact throughout the week.  I hope that this collaboration with parents will continue to benefit student learning in my classroom.
          In all, collaboration is a crucial part of being a teacher.  Without collaboration, teachers would have a must more difficult task on their hands.  The collaboration allows for the work to be divided and better understood.  It also allows for better preperation and a consistent learning environment for the students.  This consistent environment allows the students to know what to expect, and thus allows for better student learning.  I hope to continue to find new ways to collaborate in increase the organization and rigor in the classroom to allow my students the best education possible.

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2b. Practice

          Change seems to be the main topic of my life at the current time.  I am at a new school with new policies and procedures.  I have a new administration, a new support system, a new classroom, and a new set of students.  My life has changed so much in the past three months that I can barely keep up.  However, for the most part, it is changing in a positive manner.
This year, I have changed several things in my approach to content and to students in the classroom.  One major change I have made is consistency.  I have worked towards being fair and equal across the board.  I did a better job of defining procedures and actually carrying them out in every-day situations.  My consistency has led to my students being more self-sufficient in their learning.  They know where to get worksheets for the day, where to turn in homework, and where to look to figure out the day's agenda.  My follow-through on my procedures have made many of my students become "classroom police."  The other day, one of my students entered the room and, from the door way, I heard "Now go ahead and get back up and get your worksheets, you know that's what we do when we enter Mrs. Wheeler's class."  Honestly, that is what success feels like.

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          I have also been working on being more organized than I was last year.  I still have nightmares about the stacks of papers I let build up during my first year.  This year I have developed a system using all of the extra folders I had laying around.  Instead of me grading a month late  and reporting all of my papers to Area 51 (also known as the trash can), I now have two sets of folders and student folders.  The first set of folders has papers I need to grade in them, separated by class.  I force myself to take these papers home every day so that I have to look at them every time I pull out my laptop to watch Netflix, which quickly leads to me grading them.  They then go into the folders of work that needs to be handed back to students.  Once a week, I choose a student to hand out the individual folders, which are numbered according to alphabetical order.  I hand back all graded work, and then the students put their work in their folders, re-order them, and return them to the appropriate place in the classroom.  I am especially proud of this procedure because it takes pressure off of me in multiple ways while keeping the students informed of their performance in the class.
          The other change that is having a positive impact is that I get to work early every day.  Last year, I arrived to school at the last possible minute.  This habit generally led to me being pretty frazzled at the beginning of first period, and sometimes throughout the day.  I am now able to get things ready for the day and take a minute to look over my plans and make sure my room is organized accordingly.  However, I must admit, the only reason this is actually happening is because I am all but dragged out of my house by Russell no later than 6:45am.
Change is abundant and working in my favor this year.  I am very excited to see where this year leads and I am hopeful to keep up with the consistency and organization I have developed within my classroom.  It is not going to always be easy to make the decision to embrace change, but I am hopeful that I can because it makes my life easier in the long run.

         Apart from my classroom procedures and set up, I also decided to use a change of environment to introduce student learning in a different setting.  I took a large group of my students to the Dahomey Wildlife Refuge, just south of Cleveland, MS.  In the classroom, we had just finished our unit on Ecology, so I decided to take the students to an ecosystem and let them experience an up-close view of a functioning ecosystem.  At the Wildlife Refuge, one of the rangers had set up several traps a couple days before our trip.  The students were able to pull them out of the water.  Almost all of the traps has fish and uniques insects.  One of the traps contained two snakes, one harmless and one venomous.  The students had a great time and really enjoyed learning in a new way.

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2c. Assessment

          Last year, I became very disorganized and it made it difficult on me and my students.  There were weeks when I forgot to announce the test.  There were weeks when it was on the board, but no one looked at said board.  There were weeks that I announced over and over (and over) that a test was coming up, and the students were still surprised.​  This year, I decided to create a system that was much ore consistent and predictable: a test every Friday.

          I started testing every Friday beginning with the first week of school, and I have never regretted it.  It gives me a constant input of data, it sets a consistent schedule, and it gives me time to grade papers and get prepared for the upcoming week on Fridays. The tests are not always long.  They all focus on what was learned that week, and will occasionally include review questions.

          Along with the weekly tests, I began using Zipgrade.  Zipgrade is an excellent tool.  It grades multiple choice bubble sheets in 3 seconds or less.  I also worked with the program and found out how to track individualized data based on test scores.  I am able to tag questions with certain standards, and then the program runs statistics on the students based on how they do with all the tests they are given.  There are even graphs that show where the students fall among their classmates on the different standards.

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