Collaboration Promotes Student Learning

Introduction

        Student teaching requires extensive collaboration.  In my case, I was assigned a new cooperating teaching in late July whom I had never met.  We had to collaborate through three extended summer meetings to agree on common ground for class rules, grading policy, curriculum, and procedures.  To make this process even more complicated, I worked as one of three "core-teachers in a ninth-grade cohort model that means all ninth graders have a single group of about 30 students with whom they share their language arts, science and social studies classes.  This creates a natural need to cooperate with these core teachers as well as my cooperating social studies teacher.  We worked extensively over the summer to create common norms for our three classes and weigh the trade-offs of each norm against our own needs, pet peeves and strengths.  We continued meeting throughout my student teaching both formally in ninth-grade team meetings and informally at lunch and during our common prep period.  I furthermore, had the advantage of collaboration with my fellow student teachers during Critical Friends Groups on two occasions during Fall quarter; and, I had the input from my university supervisor.  My four years of teaching experience prior to this masters program was very isolated in comparison.  Without hesitation, I prefer the collaboration of my student teaching.

        Despite years of teaching experience, student teaching in an urban high school humbled me.  The reading and writing abilities continued to surprise me throughout the quarter.  Ninth graders were assessed in these areas before entering high school and the cumulative average reading level for my students was at the sixth grade level.  Considering that many students were at grade level, this meant that significant numbers were well below sixth grade.  This challenge came back to me day after day and was the number one topic for my collaborative meetings with colleagues, peers, and supervisors.  When around 35% of my students did not turn in anything for their first major writing project, I realized that I was way over the heads of many of my students.

Collaboration with Cooperating Teacher

        After exhausting my new tool box from the masters program and extending my three day lesson plan into an 11 day unit due to the need for more scaffolding, I started looking for help from anyone and everyone.  My cooperating teacher had the suggestion of "pitching" the class to a different ability level on different days of the week so that everyone will be engaged at least some of the time.  In the end, I adapted this idea to the three writing projects that I used for the principle assessment during my student teaching.  Each essay was pitched to a different ability level.  The first was down the middle at grade level.  The second essay I adapted with ideas from my Critical Friends Group to make it pitched at a lower ability level.  The final essay was the least scaffolded and was pitched at the more advanced students.  In the final writing showcase portfolio, students could select which essay to showcase as their best.  This way, students could perform at whatever level they were most able.  Advanced students were less proud of essay two, so they naturally showcased the first or third.  Remedial learners were overwhelmed with essays one and three and showcased their work from essay two.  Overall, the writing portfolio was a success in allowing a wide range of ability levels to create a meaningful final product for the quarter (see sample student work.)

Collaboration with Ninth Grade Team

        One of the collaborative aspects of our ninth-grade cohort was vocabulary.  Since I had done little work with the explicit teaching and assessing of vocabulary in my masters program, I turned to the language arts teacher for some pointers. He had a great idea of making a list of words that the students must use to tell a story, or summarize a text.  This was logic to me since it required more than rote memorization and had real-life application.  The initial papers I graded were so full of basic spelling errors (their, there, they're, your, you're, etc) that I made these words the basis of our first vocabulary quiz. This is a much more creative and realistic way to assess vocabulary knowledge than the traditional multiple choice tests that I had envisioned.  I would expect to see fewer of these basic errors in student writing over time if I continued to emphasize these words in future vocabulary assessments.

        My cohort teachers in language arts and science helped teach me to slow down and break down concepts into progressively smaller pieces to help more students understand.  The challenge to this model is that the more intelligent students are left relatively unengaged much of the time unless they choose to see themselves in the teaching role and mentor their peers.  This model works great when it happens, but many ninth graders lack the maturity or skills to make this decision to mentor others.  I'd like to learn better ways to encourage this process and to keep more students engaged in learning at their level more of the time.

Collaboration with Critical Friends Group

        The Critical Friends Group (CFG) is a model for multi-perspective peer feedback. I brought my frustrations about the wide range of reading and writing ability within my classes to the CFG.  Though they recognized that this is a difficult situation, they came up with many ideas such as various ways of using summaries, color coding different parts of the text, and explicitly practicing identifying the thesis and supporting evidence for every text we read.  The message was clear. Keep breaking down the tasks into smaller and more specific parts.  When it came time to structure the second essay, I decided to begin with a structured academic controversy (see lesson plan).  This structure would favor students who were more vocal than visual.  Once students chose a side on the debate, they had to take a stand in front of the class and defend their position.  Finally, they entered their reasoning into a fill-in-the-blank essay format that required them only to argue with evidence (see assignment).  By structuring the essay in this way, those students who struggled with ideas like thesis, paragraph, topic sentence, and other basic skills could simply focus on argumentation like their peers.  One student complained it was too confining, but most were grateful to have the added help that the essay scaffolding provided.  Some strong essays came out of this format.

In-service Training and Department

        It was reassuring that the incredible challenge I faced with the spectrum of learning abilities was a shared frustration among my colleagues at Franklin High School and throughout the Seattle School District.  It was informative to take part in the Fall in-service training workshops on differentiated instruction.  It was helpful to see what other teachers are doing and what challenges they face.  Small-group cooperative learning models like creative-writing groups showed some promise to me if I could figure out how to deal with the sporadic attendance of my students.  My department head had some great lessons that he shared using Socratic Seminars to help student's access texts well beyond their reading level.

Research Proposal

        If I were to step back and research this challenge of differentiating instruction for a wide range of readers, I might systematically examining the change from essay one to essay three through an assessment tool like a growth portfolio. Furthermore, I could have created short writing samples where students had to support their claims with evidence at the beginning and the end of the quarter.  This would focus on a single learning objective rather than a broad collection of objectives.  By administering the same assessment two or more times, I would be able to show change over time in a more direct and meaningful way.  The changes in a complex task such as persuasive essay writing, and evaluating sources would need to be evaluated over a period of years rather than over a period of ten weeks.

Conclusion

        In conclusion, positive collaboration with my cooperating teacher, cohort teachers, university supervisor, and fellow student teachers led to important suggestions and adaptations to address the district-wide challenge of widely differentiated classrooms.  Pitching different projects to different ability levels proved to be the most effective method I adopted, though I would need to do more research to conclude that this made a significant impact on student learning for all groups.  One hint of our cohort's success was a disruptive student who told my colleague that she wanted to be part of the other cohorts.  It came out that there was a common student perception that our cohort were the "nerds."  Our students were the ones who were "doing school," in my colleague's words.  This would suggest that in a relative sense, our students were outperforming their peers in engaging academically in school.  I see this as a broad arrow pointing toward success, yet I could never claim credit for it alone.  With the instability in the home life of many of my students, it is difficult to make conclusions about what they are learning, period.  There are too many variables to account for.  Intuitively, I know that my students faced some big challenges and they grew in the process.