As a first year teacher, everything is just a little more exciting. Everything has been a "first." Between my first fire drill, Science Day, Artist Day, and field day, everything has been insanely memorable. My first post planning experience surely did not disappoint. Our school brought in the wonderful Jen Jones from Hello Literacy came and redelivered her 50 Shades of the Common Core: Critical Thinking and Text Complexity. This PD surely spoiled me! I tell David all the time how much of a "teacher nerd" I am. I just love to learn! Jen was incredible and it was such an honor to get to learn from her.
Here are the big take aways I got from her redelivery!
1. Bloom's Taxonomy Posters - Jen Jones showed us one of her awesome TpT products that I plan to use within my classroom next year. Here is the link to the posters. She uses a cell phone signal to demonstrate the brain power students use to get to that level of thinking. One thing I loved about this was the stress she put on teachers holding students accountable for this. In college, they taught us Bloom's, but not how to translate it into accountability for the kids. I am so excited to explore this further this year.
2. ...because... - As Jen shared this, I wanted to scream, "How have I never thought of this?!" It is absolutely genius! I can't wait to implement this great and (SUPER EASY!) strategy next year. To find out more, check out this blog post of Jen's.
3. Expect students to speak in complete sentences. - Again, so simple but so genius. I love this expectation being set day 1 and I think it will solve a lot of problems, so to speak. I love the sense of accountability this creates. I think it is also going to really help our ESL and SPED population also.
4. TBE Graphs - My last take away was her TBE graphs. As a grad student, I did my capstone project on self graphing. Super effective and super important in building intrinsic motivation for students. Part of my summer is going to be devoted to developing a self-graphing tool to help students see their growth in mastering standards. However, I do plan to use Jen's TBE graph as part of my student's data folders. Again, with the accountability! I feel like text based evidence is imperative when it comes to deeper thinking. Having a graph increases desire to use text as evidence. Check out Jen's post about her TBE graph's here!
As you can tell, I am so pumped up for next year. I can't wait to have all kinds of deep thinking going about Science and Social Studies!
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