growNman
growNman
I am growNman 108
Join us for a deep dive into the strategies for cultivating student growth and resilience in the classroom. Listen as our guest shares personal stories of shifting from aspiring administrator to passionate educator, using life lessons to motivate and inspire students to believe in themselves. Explore the critical role of communication in empowering students to take charge of their educational journey, and learn about the tools that can measure and showcase progress, like the NWEA. This episode is a call to educators to harness their influence, nurture strong relationships, and propel students toward academic excellence and personal development.
what up, though, and welcome back to I'm growing man shaman, john d in the building. Um, I wanted to get out here and reveal some some news. This past week is nwea, and I believe I've gotten at least 90% of the scores back and I've shown extreme success and growth. But I already knew that was going to happen, and I do want to say, when I talk about this, it's not because I'm a great teacher. I've mentioned this before.
Speaker 1:This is like my fourth or fifth year actually teaching math. Like this is like my fourth or fifth year actually teaching math, and the previous years I was in a mindset of not being in, wanting to be in the classroom, so I wasn't even trying to get, you know, good at it, because I wanted to become an administrator so bad in my past. So now it's me just seeing what I can use with my life lessons on how I could translate that into getting students to work for themselves. So this episode is to talk about ways teachers, in any subject area, get the best out of the kids, and I know a lot of people say use real world experiences, you can, but it's got to be relatable to them. So a lot of people can just really use this Shout out to 24, kobe Bryant, class of 96, the Mamba mentality. Kobe really just talked about how to improve and it had to be intentional. And if he did that in a game of basketball, I know you can do that in math and that's what I did. I proved that the more minutes anybody really the more minutes you put into anything you're going to get better in. And I try to tell him like I don't really care about answers, because if you don't know how to get to the answer, you kind of just wasted your time. You can guess the right answer and it'd be pointless for the next time you have to do something like that. So I get them into the mindset of understanding the process. It's okay to make mistakes, because if you knew how to do it you wouldn't make the mistake. So what can we do to prevent that from happening again?
Speaker 1:So my whole goal was to show that if they practice that, the scores would increase dramatically and to show growth. For the most part it's like three to four points per trimester, I guess, from fall to winter, winter to spring, and I've averaged, I think. I believe I'm averaging at least eight to ten points per classroom. So again. I just want to-emphasize anybody can do this, but in order to do it you do have to get the students to buy in, and my process this year really helped me understand how to become successful in the classroom at this point. And this is pretty much what made me successful and I think that it would work for any teacher.
Speaker 1:But you have to be in the mindset that you're working with kids. Kids are going to be kids and you can't expect kids to do what you would do at your age because they're kids and I, you know you might have been blessed enough to not have to go through the things that they had to go through, but they're still kids. And I think me working on my communication has allowed me to get students to buy into my tone of urgency, because I do talk with. I talk with urgency when things are not going according to the boundaries I've created for my classroom to be successful, and I do want to talk about the boundaries of the classroom to make them successful, I believe assigned seats are necessary. I'm not for sure what's better if you should do it in the beginning and then let them kind of find themselves around, or let them pick where they want to sit around or let them pick where they want to sit, but you'll just always have a seating chart. If it gets out of control, you can just do it. But you give them the mindset of responsibility Like, say, look, I'm going to let you guys sit where you want to sit, but if you don't allow me to teach the class because I gave you the responsibility and I know your kids, but some of you guys are more mature than others and maybe some of that will rub off and you guys can keep yourself accountable in the classroom but if you can't, we'll have to do assigned seats. And for the most part, the way that I do it, I let them sit anywhere and then I'll give them assigned seats. But I'm not for sure. If I do the assigned seats first is better and then kind of let them separate. But the reason why I'm saying this is because it gives them that, like I said, accountability of being able to make that decision. And you know a lot of my kids and they. You know you have to move them a few times, but you won't have to penalize the other kids.
Speaker 1:Number two no students are allowed to open your door, nobody, no matter who's on the other side of that door and this will reduce the number of students that always want to open up the door, like when you get the culture of nobody's allowed to open up the door nobody in the classroom cares about who's at the door Like the distractions reduced. But if somebody's running to the door, you never know Like a kid may run out, a kid may run in. It just kind of reduced that distraction and it's worked wonderfully for me this last couple of years, for me this last couple of years, and I believe that that's really important to create the culture in your room. Now this next part is probably going to throw people off, but I've always allowed students the ability to talk and the only time you can't talk is when somebody has the floor and that's either me or another student or a guest that comes into the classroom. But it allows them again the accountability of coming to class, enjoying that they get to talk to their friends without any interruption, as long as no anything inappropriate being talked about, anything that I would. I mean they're going to talk about whatever, but as long as I can't hear it, I can't control that. So that gives them that reason to come to my classroom and that's it's worked in majority of my classrooms.
Speaker 1:I did a survey. This helped also. The students loved the fact that they get freedom. But they say that I'm too nice and I allow other students to ruin it for the class because it gets too loud and they can't concentrate and I had to work on that. But I think when I got that feedback after I don't know, it was like the first quarter I've been still totally trying to work it.
Speaker 1:But during that time I had these other procedures that have to go on as far as getting schoolwork done, and they already know that they can get free time if they complete. What's necessary was necessary, because I figure as long as they put in enough minutes per day on completing problems, they'll get more confident in the material that I introduce them to, because most of them have so many gaps that it's going to take a really good teacher to be able to recognize the gaps. I'm not that teacher. I had to figure out what I could do with the strengths that I have and try to get as much as possible out of them.
Speaker 1:And this year my school is participating in a pilot program and it's helped me tremendously because I believe honestly that any program can do it but it really depends on the teacher and what they're willing to do to get the most out of the students. And since we were piloting it piloting it I was going to try to do my best to see what I could get out of them and the program has been. It's helped me tremendously because they take a test at the beginning and it kind of like knows where their gaps are and it starts there and as they move on it fills in those gaps and it allows me to teach in a different way. Like I can teach new material knowing that some of my students may not get it at all and I'm not really worried about that part, because there are students that will get it and some students that may get it but there are students that will not get it. But as long as I teach the material, those who will get it will get it. But they will get at least 15 to 20 minutes on this program. That's very important to me because this will catch the students I can't reach. Like I can move these other students on, but I can't reach these students. But that program is catching them up to make them more confident, to retain the information that I'm teaching and to see how much growth I've gotten from them in this first few months. I'm really looking forward to the spring scores because I haven't even taught majority of the material.
Speaker 1:So to me I feel like as long I told them, I was like, hey, if I get you to show growth, if majority of the students show growth, y'all got to believe me and they agree. And I had the results to back it up. So now I'm going to put the full court press on him. I'm like look, you already know what we're trying to do. And I feel like this Any teacher can use this for their classroom. You have to just tell them it's a process. To complete the process, you have to do this, this and this.
Speaker 1:If you don't put any work in it, you can't expect any growth. You can't expect to be proud of a performance because you didn't put your effort into it. And a lot of them I know it's really tough to focus, but that's the part that they're going to have to bring in, because you can only do so much right. And I have students where I'm like look, do you want me to stop pushing you? And I'm like, no, I don't want you to stop so to see these results now, to me it's going to be a fun run for the rest of the year, because they can't say that I didn't know what I was talking about, because I told them from the very beginning if I show you that you guys can do it, you got to make it happen and that changed the entire thing.
Speaker 1:A lot of times we look at from the beginning of the year and you're looking at this test at the end of the year or maybe the end of the semester or whatnot, like if you can get some benchmarks where students can see growth, and I do believe the NWA is a good marker of showing growth because it covers more information than what they're supposed to know and these programs out there, it will teach new material. The only hiccup that I see now I have students that are doing really good in these programs. I'm not even teaching them the new material, but they're learning it, but they're not really learning it and they're learning it for the most part and then they forget it because in my head I thought some of these scores were going to be remarkable in the amount of lessons that they completed, but I realized that the teacher is very important in introducing new material, especially to these students, because they get to ask questions and doing it online without having the teacher to be able to help you or get enough practice in it kind of hinders the performance on the test because it doesn't correlate. Like no matter how many lessons you do in you know in a, in that part of math, if you don't have enough practice in it to understand why this happens, it's really difficult for them to retain it to show that they have mastery in an area without the teacher. So I know that was probably too much and unnecessary, but I just want you guys to know is I'm excited about this upcoming semester or the second part of the year, but focus on even now like you can.
Speaker 1:You can create a new start and you got to watch your tone. A lot of times. We take a tone to these kids and they know what a mean tone is and remember they're kids. You go back and forth with a kid because they hurt your feelings. They're kids, so we're. I know it's hard to act mature in that area because we didn't work on it, but we should always be working on that because, again, they're kids.
Speaker 1:You develop that relationship. I know everybody always say you got to develop the relationship. You don't have to. It can help. But if you can show them a process, you can do it without developing a relationship. The relationship will get the kid to work harder for you and I'm not saying that's not important, but I know people keep pushing this idea. But you don't have to develop a relationship with these kids for them to get the best out. To get the best out of you have to help them understand that there's a process to get up like a performance, and if they don't understand that, it's just they can't think that far. So it's like you got to chop it up and say OK, in order for us to get here, we have to do these things.
Speaker 1:And over the course of time you're going to accumulate minutes and the more minutes you get in it and when I say minutes I'm talking about intentional minutes like they're working to get better, not just sitting on there and you know I was on there for two hours but you did three problems come on like literally, where they know like if they don't work, they can't get better, and that just all came from, uh, kobe bryant, for real, for real, like and I do that in my own life, so I'm not teaching them nothing that I'm not doing. I like I work on math every single day. I have apps where I could just make sure that even on days like this like we got a snow day and well, I'm actually working on math anyway but on a Saturday maybe, like if I'm not lesson planning or anything like that I'm still going to get some math done. And to me, the more math I do, the easier the language I can help deliver it where whoever's listening to me can understand. And math is another language and if you don't take time to learn the language, it could become frustrating.
Speaker 1:And now that we have all of this technology, we can really catch these kids up. We just have to have the teachers that have the language to convince the kids that they're important enough to receive the message so that they can work harder for themselves. And that's the honest to God truth, and I think that's what I've been working on, like y'all most of y'all been those those of you who've been paying attention, like I really care about communication. I don't want you to take anything the wrong way and I'm only trying to help you so that your tomorrow can be what you want it to be, not because of the distractions in your environment that prevents you from getting the information that we're trying to give. And that's another thing. What I'm trying to give.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to help these students know that every teacher they go to is trying to do the same thing that I'm doing. They may just say it differently but regardless of what language it comes out, that's what their intent is. And if you don't go in there to go get it, you're hurting yourself. And if we can convince students to take their own education into their own hands and learn as much as they can, the world changes, but they have to believe that they're that important. So let's do it, and I just wanted to share that with y'all, because those MWEA scores it solidified what I'm doing is correct Just convincing the students that they have to put that work in to create a result that they haven't seen yet. But y'all, make today better than yesterday. Don't worry about anything you can't control. G-a-t-a Get after that action or that action will get after after you. Be great on purpose.