Laura was one of the few teachers in this study who went back to her home school to teach.  There are some districts, both in Michigan, and around the United States, who prefer to hire their graduates. They feel like they have a better understanding of who this person is and, naturally feel like their graduates came from a good educational background.  Laura was able to cite three or four names of teachers on staff who were graduates of the district. Not all grads wish to return to their homes, for a multitude of reasons: they did not have a good experience growing up there, they were different people after college than they were in the K-12 years or they just wanted to try something new and while they were young, with few attachments, now was the time for adventure.  Of course, for the people returning home, “home” had most likely changed in the years since they attended school there and for some of them, any lingering memories by townspeople or school staff were misty.

Laura was another one of the GVSU grads who was teaching in her minor, ELA. She was teaching in the high school when I first visited her classroom, but her assignment and location would shift several times between 2008 and 2015.  Her teaching day was arranged into six periods.  The school had about 800 students in four grades. Her district was on the east side of the state and was hit hard by the recession.  There were funding problems due to decreased enrollment as Michigan lost hundreds of thousands of jobs and the people who filled those jobs. On top of the that the state was reducing funding for schools, based on the state’s reliance on the state sales tax.  Even with the financial difficulties facing the district there was an upcoming, necessary bond issue based on the fact that all the district’s buildings’ roofs were leaking. If the economy did not do well, the schools suffered. Due to funding cuts, even though Laura was up for tenure this year, her job might be cut due to her lack of seniority. On top of that the teachers in her district were working without a contract from the previous year. They did receive a 1% pay raise in their previous year, but it was obvious that the raise did not make up for the change in the cost of living.  She did get a small pay raise when she finished her Master’s program and moved over in the salary schedule. Laura also coached athletics her first two years of teaching, which helped in supplement her teaching salary, but due to the demands of her teaching position and all the preparation changes she was forced to give up coaching.  She hoped to return to coaching in the future. That hope was tempered somewhat by the fact that she was planning on having children and due to the uncertainty of a job layoff and the fact that she was “pink slipped” once, only to be hired back three weeks later, she was uncertain about returning to the coaching arena. During my K-12 teaching career, twice I went over a year without a new contract. The stress in both of those occasions made me think about changing my careers, but I also had the memory of my father being laid off multiple times in his job as a factory supervisor, so working without a new contract did not seem as bad as not working at all.

One of the first things that Laura mentioned to me this day was the strong staff support she enjoyed. She had great curriculum help, as well as assistance with individual lesson plans, from the staff and her department in the high school, as well as from the ISD. Along with the staff support came support from her family, both nuclear and extended.  Her largest class was 32 students, all the way down to 10 students in a journalism class.  Her average class size was in the 20s.  Laura was in her fourth year of teaching and by that time she had nine different class preparations, a record for the people in this study. Due her change in class assignments she considered herself a “rookie” once again this year.  The previous semester she averaged about 20 hours a week of outside of the school day work in grading and preparation. Added to that she came to school about a half hour before the school day and spent anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half after school every day.  Her duties in the journalism class meant staying after school for four hours printing the school paper the day before publication.

Laura’s first class of the day started with a journaling question, followed by a grammar correction exercise.  This assignment took the form of correcting spelling and punctuation from examples she gave her students. As with all the teachers in this study, Laura had an agenda on the board so the students knew exactly what to expect as they entered the classroom.  The writing assignment asked her students about their childhood dreams and whether or not that dream had changed as they grew older. She also asked her students to react to the original “Last Lecture”, given by a dying professor from Carnegie-Mellon University^[1].  Laura made a connection from the video to the story, “Tuesdays with Morrie” which her students had previously read.

Laura said she had good kids and they went right to work on their assignments. One of the things that Laura had them do was to predict common grammatical errors that people make.  The students made good guesses concerning punctuation and quotations and then got right to work making the corrections to the errors they found.  Cueing students’ minds for an assignment was a great way in getting them prepared and ready for an assignment.  Throughout the group work section on correcting the errors Laura circulated around the classroom, checking for engagement and progress and she made the effort to bend or kneel down, making eye level contact with her students, a trait that many of my former students shared.

Even before my standard question concerning what constituted success in the classroom, Laura volunteered that flexibility and organization were keys for success in teaching. She also said that due to the lack of teaching jobs at this time in 2008, future teachers should be prepared to teach in their minor.  Along those lines, Laura admitted that she was not necessarily highly qualified to teach a journalism class.  This new class preparation this year was her biggest challenge.  Several of the teachers in her building taught ELA but no one taught journalism so she was basically on her own.

Similar to some other teachers’ circumstances, Laura only had a classroom set of textbooks so the students could not take a text home.  She was also limited at the amount of technology at her disposal, but she could run multiple paper copies of assignments. Some schools did not have that option in 2008 or even today.  Another funding problem was the lack of money for buying new resources for the school library.  Laura’s individual classroom budget at this time was thirty dollars a year and her whole department budget was only seven hundred dollars.

Laura’s classroom featured posters on the wall, which included stock “Essential Questions:” reading strategies, the 6 Trait Writing Model, a United States history timeline, a World War II “We Can Do It” poster, as well as the photograph of construction workers eating on the girders of Rockefeller Center. Laura had some bookshelves: a teacher computer and printer, a wall-mounted Channel 1 TV, a TV on a cart with a DVD/VHS player on loan from the library, and an overhead projector.

Laura talked about the advantages of looping because she had had several of her students when she was teaching in the middle school. There was a definite benefit in knowing some of the students’ background and learning abilities before the school year even started, especially if a teacher looked forward to seeing positive growth in her/his students.

Throughout the day Laura gave clear instructions for the assignments she made for her students. She consistently asked her students if they understood her directions and when a student was unsure of her directions, she took the time to spend some one-on-one time with that student, explaining the assignment in a way that that person understood.

Laura thought she had good writing skills before she went to college, but she said that one of her college professors, Fran Kelleher, gave good constructive comments on Laura’s use of the passive voice.  Laura appreciated that help and said that feedback made her a better writer.  It was my experience with the History Department, especially in reading examples of corrected papers by my colleagues (sans student names), that every professor did a good job of offering constructive feedback to their students. Along those lines, every two weeks Laura provided time for her students to do re-writes of their corrected writings so that they could incorporate her constructive comments and improve their writing.

Laura displayed her skill for organization through the use of clipboards, three-ring binders with syllabi for each class, backed up digitally on her computer, saved to a thumb drive and then again backed up on her home computer, plus hard copies in her filing cabinets. The syllabi served as “contracts” for student work and had to be signed by the parents so there was no question what Laura was teaching in her classes and that everyone knew her requirements for work. The syllabi included exit outcomes, goals, classroom guidelines, grading criteria, behavior expectations and possible outcomes if bad behavior happened. Laura said that there was good parental involvement in the district, with 80 to 90% of the parents attending parent-teacher conferences.

There was no doubt in my mind that she could find where she kept everything and, based on my conversations with her, that she continually updated and improved those lessons and resources. At that point, I asked her how colleges might prepare future teachers for the minutiae of every day teaching.  Her response was that experience on the job was a better way for new teachers for learning the job.  Since the details for the job change from district to district and from school to school, no broad preparation would be sufficient for what teachers would face once they accepted their first position.

During one of Laura’s afternoon classes there was a behavior issue involving two female students. Laura quickly moved to correct the behavior problem and one of the freshman girls jumped out of her seat and left the room, quickly followed by Laura.  The student seated next to me, turned and grimaced, as if to say, “That girl is in trouble” and the class grew very quiet, sensing that Laura’s rules had been violated and knowing that they had better be working when she returned to the classroom.  At the end of the period Laura had the two girls come to her desk, after the other students had left the room. She role-played their behavior and helped them see why she, as the teacher, reacted the way that she did, in an attempt to modify their future behavior. Since I was only there for the day, I did not know if this chat had any longer-term impact, but both girls were quiet when Laura was explaining her expectations for the future.

Interview, 2008

Defining Success, 2008

Laura’s first definition for success was how well a teacher’s students were performing. She went on to say that if teachers are doing the best job that they can, continue to learn and grow, take classes, attend professional and improve their skills, then they are successful, as those factors apply to student performance. Laura thought her college education did a very good job preparing for success. She noted her professors were willing to answer questions, provide time for personal meetings, help out with constructive criticism and the re-writing of papers. Her teacher-assisting and student teaching experiences also enhanced her success.  Those semesters gave her a good picture of what her future classroom would look like, as well as did observing other teachers’ classrooms, a requirement of the university beyond the teachers and classrooms in which the future teachers were placed.

When asked about her content preparation she thought that her home school district provided a strong foundation for her future in teaching.  Although she taught three of four years in her minor, ELA, she was only four classes short of a double major, and with the help of her colleagues, teaching in her minor was not a major struggle.  She did say that her Social Studies major was a bit broad because of the spread of courses in each area of discipline.  Her area of emphasis was in History, but she implied her Social Studies degree made her marketable. Teaching Geography was a bit of a challenge because the textbook at her school was over 10 years old.  Her Government class was just the basics, even though she was teaching juniors and seniors.  Surprising, despite only having 6 credit hours in Economics, she found herself extremely well-prepared to teach that course because one of her Economics professor’s syllabus matched perfectly with her high school syllabus and standards.  Laura was able to use her college notes and other resources in direct use in the classroom.

Methods and Strategies, 2008

One area of content or skill weakness was in the area of special education, especially with the amount of mainstreaming.  She was a bit unfamiliar with the jargon associated with special needs students and thought that future teachers should have a deeper background with special education. Her last comment had to do with the dreaded teacher certification test.  For Laura, that test was no problem so she felt, based on those test results, she was prepared for her career.  She admitted that it would have been nice to have more than the required 6 credit hours each in Geography, Economics, and Political Science, but with some self-study and help from teachers and the ISD, she thought she did well.

Laura thought her best preparation for her career was student-teaching.  She was on her own. She had to do her own planning, grade her students’ work, all while realizing that the students did not feel that she was their real teacher. Since she made it through that experience successfully, she felt having her own classroom was less of a challenge.

I asked Laura if she had received a decent background in the idea of teaching to multiple intelligences and she said that she received more background on those strategies and methods in her graduate work than she did with her undergrad work. Even with that lack of knowledge at the beginning of her career she felt that she always varied the instructional methods she used and varied her assessment methods. She tried to use three to five different activities in all her classes every day. Her students commented that her classes seemed to go by fast due to this varied instruction and that there was good flow between the different kinds of instruction.

Contrary to many students’ teacher-assisting and student-teaching experiences at GVSU, Laura had both of her placements in high schools.  I asked her if that put her at a disadvantage now that she had been bounced back and forth between her district’s high school and middle school. She replied that coaching middle school sports helped her understand those students, how they learned and how best to maintain discipline.

Technology was another aspect of methods and strategies in teaching and one that Laura employed through project-based learning. She did not think of her as a lecturer. She wanted her students to be active learners, constructing their own knowledge and skills. I observed her varying her strategies and methods throughout the day and part of that variance involved multiple uses of technology, most of it student-centered versus just using as a lecturing tool.

Pearls of Wisdom, 2008

Laura’s first pearl was for future teachers to gain as much experience as possible. One way was substitute teaching.  While substituting was not the same as having one’s own classroom, it helps teachers learn how to manage a classroom. She also suggested coaching or advising as a way of developing positive relationships with students.  Those types of contacts were different than a classroom environment and would help teachers get to know their students in a different way.

Laura promoted the idea of learning from the coordinating teachers during student teaching, especially when it came to organization. She found that using binders and clipboards for organizing classroom materials and work helped her, as did different desk layouts, classroom decorations, and wall posters.

Even though Laura was placed in two high schools for her teacher-assisting and student-teaching semesters, I asked her how those two experiences helped her with her career. Without the middle school experience that many of her classmates had, she still felt that seeing the difference in how two schools operated helped her reflect and apply that information to her career.

Flexibility was her next pearl.  She taught nine different courses in four years! Even though there were multiple retirements during her time in her district, and those retirements helped make her job more secure, budget cuts and other changes, made her realize the importance of flexibility and adaptation. She reinforced the idea that while choosing a minor may be a choice based on marketability, a person should really want to teach that minor because it might become reality, like it was for her. She thought English was a good complement to history and Social Studies so her choices of a major and a minor made sense to her and worked out in her career.  Flexibility also came into play when planning lessons.  Things change on a daily basis and teachers need to be prepared for those changes. Classes or days do not always go as one plans, and without thinking through alternative plans when things don’t go as planned, there’s a problem.

Laura also cited organization, especially when it came to taking care of paperwork, not just in grading papers, but also on how well a teacher deals with the paperwork that comes from the administration.  If a teacher is constantly late returning paperwork, either to students or the administration, life will be that much more difficult.  For an untenured teacher, it might end a career.

2015

Laura was now teaching in the middle school.  She had three class preparations, 7th grade Social Studies and 7th and 8th grade ELA.  As class started, I noticed she had a weekly agenda on her white board and the daily agenda projected on her Smartboard via the use of a short-throw computer-linked projector. The classroom had several posters referring to themes in Greek mythology and motivational ideas, as well as an E/LA Word Wall.  She also had a fairly small microphone hanging around her neck which connected to a classroom speaker system. This technology benefitted the hearing-impaired students, as well as allowing her to be heard over a rather loud air handling system.  Laura had a serious upgrade in technology in the last seven years! However, a problem with the upgrade was that the Smartboards were supposed to arrive at the beginning of the school year and instead they were not installed until January. This meant that instead of having some time during the summer for planning and practice on this new equipment, the teachers were learning on the fly, a situation not uncommon when dealing with educational change.

The objective for the day was: “Demonstrate the knowledge of Byzantine and Muslim civilizations on a summative assessment.” Her class period was 50 minutes long and based on her daily agenda the students were to turn in absent work, review for the test, take the test and then prepare for a current events summary that was due in an upcoming class.  This class had 15 students, with several missing this day.  Laura’s classes averaged in the low 20s or less.

Laura had another child due in the next few months, adding to the two children she already had. She was also in the process of building a new house that would considerably shorten her commuting time.  Three preps, teaching a full schedule with middle schoolers all day long, and going through all the machinations of building a new home, all while carrying her next child: Wonder Woman!

The class started with the pledge to the Flag. I am constantly amazed when I hear critics of public education say that schools do not do the Pledge every day.  Apparently, those people do not observe schools in operation or just like to spread misinformation. I have the same feelings about people who criticize the lack of school prayer.  Students are not prevented from praying in school.  I have witnessed them praying before they eat lunch and I know some of them “prayed” as they prepared to take the tests they took in my classes. Even if those last prayers were not religious in nature, there is no law against students praying.  Teachers cannot lead prayer in a public school. I do remember reciting school prayer when I was in grade school and I know I just assumed that was part of the daily schedule, but I learned my catechism and how to pray from my mom and from attending church, not school. What type of prayer would truly be acceptable to all the various denominations of Christianity, not to speak of the other religions that are guaranteed their freedom to worship by the Bill of Rights?

Laura had her students brainstorm their review session in small groups. Each group had a small whiteboard, something teachers pick up at the local dollar store or other discount retail establishment.  The boards are inexpensive and make collaboration in small groups an easy process. After the groups reached consensus on a review question, a student in the group held up the board so everyone might compare their answer with the other groups.  It was quick and easy and Laura had an informal way to check for understanding, with the possibility of remediation before the actual test.  The students were engaged in the process and having fun at the same time. Throughout the review Laura provided multiple references to prior knowledge in order to refresh her students’ memories, as well as employing mnemonics to cue their stored knowledge.

After the review, the class quickly reorganized for the test, displaying Laura’s well-established routine and great classroom management.  This test was open-note and Laura handed out two versions so students couldn’t simply look over someone’s shoulder and view their notes to help with answers. One student sat at his desk, looking a little despondent or mad.  He forgot a pencil to fill in the Scantron sheet and also forget his notes.  Laura saw him sitting slump-shouldered at his desk and offered him some advice on how he might overcome his problems. Then she handed him a pencil.  He righted himself and even handed in the test before the rest of the class with an air of confidence, versus the depressed look on his face when he was first handed the test.  Laura was obviously concerned with his state of mind and checked on him a few times to make sure he was recovering from his initial problem.

Most of the students finished the test in a timely manner and then continued with the daily agenda posted on the board.  Laura explained to me later that school policy stated that assessments were worth 80% of a student’s grade and homework and daily grades were worth the other 20%.  In the process of visiting all these teachers there did not seem to be any state-wide standard for computing grades, nor anything that struck me as standard when I talked to the teachers in states other than Michigan.

Laura was upfront about the new teacher evaluation system.  Her district was still losing students and she knew that there would be teacher lay-offs in the near future due to the loss of almost 100 students. Due to the change in tenure-protection for teachers, seniority might not be a factor in who was released but rather who was deemed “minimally effective” based on the evaluation system. It became quite clear to me in talking with all the teachers, that while many of them had excellent relationships with their administrators, and all of the teachers who remained in the classroom at this point had attained tenure, the process of teacher evaluation was viewed by most all of the teachers as subjective in nature. Who the administrator was and how that administrator used the evaluation instrument varied within a building and probably within a school district. I witnessed administrators in various parts of Michigan state that the new tenure law was an opportunity to “get rid of dead wood,” while teachers interpreted that as a way for a district to lower their costs by eliminating experienced teachers who were highly paid.  I have no unbiased research that would show how many times that actually happened, just rumor and some loose talk by principals, was enough to lower morale in the teaching staff.

Added to that concern for teachers was a feeling that parental guidance and involvement had decreased. When I was a K-12 student, if I had been involved in a behavioral problem at school, I knew that, not only was I in trouble in school, but when the message made it home that I had erred in my ways, there would be a second form of punishment. While those circumstances might still exist in some form, especially in “high performing” school districts, with high parent involvement, the mood persists in teachers that they are not getting the backing at home that they used to years ago.

Laura’s next class was 8th Grade English/Language Arts. Her students were working on a punctuation correction worksheet. Laura used a document projector linked to the Smartboard for this activity.  Students were asked to come up to the board, and using different colored “smart pens,” they made corrections to the punctuation.  Laura used a “popcorn” method for choosing students to participate so once a student made a correction, he or she had the opportunity to choose the next person to come forward.  The students remained focused and engaged throughout the activity and, at one point, several of them mentioned the old School House Rock video, “Conjunction Junction.”  Many of the students received 100% on their worksheets. Laura reinforced the importance of good punctuation by telling them that they would need this skill when they moved up to the high school next year. As a former high school teacher, she had a built-in credibility with her students.

The next activity for the class was a poetry lesson. Laura’s transitions between activities in the lesson were quick and the class was fast-paced. The free-verse poem “Grandma’s Cupboard” was analyzed by the students, using the T4 cooperative learning model.  Laura had mentioned to me earlier in the day that she was having her students do more thinking about their learning as a metacognitive activity.  She gave the class three to four minutes to read through the short poem and then had them do “Pair and Share.”  During this student-centered activity Laura was constantly on the move around her classroom, checking for student engagement, asking questions and monitoring student progress. In the process she had the students make connections relevant to their own lives. She asked what family heirlooms they had at home, even if they did not have “Grandma’s Cupboard.”  The students’ answers included jewelry and clothing.  Laura mentioned the term “personification” in regards to the furniture and memories in the poem and how those things became “alive.” She shared a personal memory of her grandfather’s workshop and the smell of wood shavings and a wood fire, as well as cooking and baking smells from her grandparents’ kitchen. Another term Laura introduced was onomatopoeia and the sound that the word “whoosh” made.  The analysis, made in concert with her students, was that even though Grandma had died, her memory lived on.

The next poem which was analyzed was “Rubber Ducks.” With the backdrop of the previous analysis fresh in their minds, the class quickly engaged in the process.  The students came up with multiple examples that fit the template the class was using in analyzing the poem.  As the period wound down, Laura expertly reviewed the analysis of both poems. She referred back to her own memories she shared with her students and then had them share their examples, which included furniture, jewelry, stuffed animals, clothing, houses and vacation homes.

All of the work for this lesson was created without the use of a textbook.  In fact, there was no textbook for the entire course.  Laura, and, I assume, some of her colleagues, created packets for their students.  Laura shared that she had to appeal to the local community foundation for the funds in purchasing paperbacks for her students.

Throughout the school day there were no bells to mark the ending or beginning of classes. This lack of signal was due to the fact that some of the student body was engaged in taking state standardized tests.  Laura shared with me a concern about how teacher evaluations would be impacted by lack of student attendance or engagement in these tests. The test scores were not a part of students’ grades, unlike the New York State Regents Exams which were part of my high school experience. Teachers felt that students did not have a high motivation for performing well on these tests, especially since an earlier program for awarding partial college tuition based on good test scores was removed by the state.

Social Studies was the next class.  Laura had four Social Studies classes and three ELA classes.  Laura organized her students into groups of four or five and then handed out the small whiteboards for a review activity. After reviewing some key terms and ideas the boards were quickly handed back to her and she asked if there were any questions. Then Laura used the students’ prior knowledge by referring to a previous chapter’s information involving the Romans. Another mnemonic tool was incorporated into the day with the use of the “3Cs”, Constantine, Christians and Converted.  Laura used the classroom projector for displaying a map which helped in explaining why Constantinople developed along trade routes between Asia and Europe. She then entered into a discussion on the Five Pillars of Islam.

After the review the class launched into the test.  There were 22 multiple choice questions and two forms of the test. The students engaged in answering the questions and most of the class was finished in 15 to 20 minutes.  When they completed the test they followed Laura’s instructions and got out reading materials.

Laura mentioned a piece of software, which allowed her to tie assessment questions directly to the state benchmarks. She said that it took her quite a bit of time in creating questions which connected to the benchmarks, but that the software did generate much data. Unfortunately, along with all of her other duties and responsibilities, she did not have much time to analyze the data.

The 5th period class was much like the previous class. The test review prompts were in a different order than used in the 4th period class, but it was the same information. The student groups responded quickly to the questions posed and the groups worked well together in forming a consensus on their answers.

This was Laura’s 11th year teaching. She said that her preparation at GVSU no longer matched what she was doing in her classroom in multiple ways.  I mentioned to her that the program she experienced while in college had changed as well.  Laura reinforced one of her “pearls of wisdom” from our 2008 meeting by saying that teachers needed to be flexible and have the ability to adapt to changes in education. One of the changes for Laura was the use of multiple pieces of software using for lesson planning, parental contact and student information. She told me that the browser on her computer was filled with tabs in which she had to enter data on a daily basis. Laura estimated this data entry took an hour a day. If a student’s grade dropped from an A to a C teachers must contact the parents in this district. It was obvious that this data entry took up valuable time that might have otherwise been used in planning, grading and organization.

6th period was 7th Grade English/Language Arts.  The lesson for the day was for the students to create a cover for an autobiography that they had been working on, check for missing entries and complete the final entry.  The autobiographies were sent to the high school for publication and then returned to the students. They had a published work! Today was a student’s birthday and Laura handed out Rice Krispy treats to the class and me. While the students worked on completing their books, Laura played music in the background. She explained that while the students this year were a little chatty, overall they were polite and kind to each other. A few years before she had a group who were not so nice, unfriendly and mean to each other and since she taught both Social Studies and English, she was disappointed to have the “opportunity” in having the same students several times a day.

Laura’s last period class was once again 7th Grade E/LA, with the same assignment on finishing up their autobiographies. Throughout this class, as with the entire school day, Laura was in constant motion, moving around the classroom, answering questions and checking for student progress. It is interesting to note that some traditional principals I encountered over the years thought teachers only ‘worked’ when they were lecturing. For some reason, probably their own educational background, they thought group work was somehow not mindful and not exhausting. Few current teachers think that way.

Interview, 2015

Defining Success, 2015

For Laura success meant student success. “If they are achieving what they are supposed to be achieving and doing well in school then I think I did my job properly too” (Laura, v.t, 2015, p.1). She thought her college experience in a good job preparing her for success in the classroom. The content was strong, she had great professors, good experiences in her teacher-assisting and student teaching placements and good observations from her content and Education professors. She did note that no one could have predicted the changes that occurred in classrooms since she graduated.  She admitted she had been a little naïve when she first started. She was not prepared for being laid off nor for the multiple location and grade changes she encountered in her first 11 years.  She was now working on her third state-wide curriculum change since she started her career. On top of that she had taught 18 or 19 different subject areas and all of those areas had naturally changed with the three curriculum reforms. In Laura’s words, “not boring by any means” (Laura, v.t., 2015, p.2).

Challenges, 2015

Easily, Laura’s biggest challenge has been all the changes in her teaching position. Easing that challenge is the fact that Laura had the support of great colleagues, good administrators, and helpful conferences at the local ISD. She had no idea how larger districts, with less interaction between or within departments, could create the atmosphere of support that she enjoyed in her smaller district. Laura thought a huge challenge for teachers would be a feeling of being alone, with no support and advice from others. Another factor that contributed to her successfully meeting the challenge of teaching was the community atmosphere in her district, fostered by the fact that many of the teachers were graduates of the school district. Knowing the culture, the environment and having personal ties to the staff was comforting and created a team spirit.

Dealing with Stress, 2015

Laura already answered part of this question in the Challenge section above. Working with people you knew, in a community where you had grown up, was a stress relief. She also knew that, even with all the changes in her teaching assignment, she always had a “go to” person who would help her with the transition to a new curriculum or a new grade level. “I wasn’t alone” (Laura, v.t., 2015, p.3). Keeping organized was another key for lowering her stress level.  The ability to keep up-to-date on paperwork and meeting deadlines was very important. She cited an experience in one of her teacher-assistant or student teaching placements where the teacher needed some help with organization and sorting out and reorganizing that teacher’s materials helped Laura realize the importance of organization when she had her own classroom.

Laura thought it was important to leave school at school and not to bring her problems and stresses home to her husband and children. Some of her time staying after school was talking through her stressful days with her colleagues. She thought it important to get things off your chest and not to hold things in.

Motivation, 2015

Laura wanted to be the best teacher could be because she owed it to the community in which she was raised. A positive or negative for living in a small town was everyone knows everyone’s business.  I have had colleagues who choose not to live in the communities in which they teach because they feel like they need private lives away from their school and district. They do not want to work and live in a fishbowl. Most of my career I lived in the community in which I taught.  I had great parent-teacher conferences at backyard barbeques and forced teacher conferences in lines at the check-out counter at the local grocery store. In Laura’s words,

I want to be known as a good teacher, a challenging one because I’m from a small town. People from a small town talk a lot. I want to be at least…if you’re going to talk about me, talk about me in a positive way; that I’m dedicated, that I’m trying to do my best that I can for their students… I want to do a good job for the people I live with and work for so the community supports me (Laura, v.t.,2015, p.5).

Methods and Strategies, 2015

Laura had a whole list; more than any of the other teachers, although I suspect that the other teachers simply did not remember all the changes that they had experienced by 2015. Her first comment was about the changes in assessment. She remarked that earlier assessments did not match up to the way she taught. She learned new reading strategies, new methods of note-taking, how to lead her students into making more inferences and connections to information and ideas. She said she and her colleagues were mindful of changes before they were actually instituted so the learning curve would start earlier and not be as steep. Laura thought it was important for all the teachers in her school and district to be onboard when changes came so that they had a unified approach that was well-thought out and applied in a consistent manner.  Her examples were methods such as “Reading Apprenticeship”^[2] and T4^[3].

Teaching Evaluations, 2015

When Laura first starting teaching, she was required to submit lesson plans for three to four weeks and have a few observations. She remembered only one formal observation per year while she was still on probation and then tenured teachers had a “bit of a break.”  With the state-wide change in tenure laws, all that changed to a walk-through system:  there are no set observation times or days, the administrator just drops in, usually for 10 or 15 minutes. Laura said that keeps everyone “on the ball, ready to go” (Laura, v.t., 2015, p.7). Along with the drop-in observations there are checklists.  One of the goals was to prove student awareness no tasks, comprehension of the material currently being presented and keeping students accountable. Another item on the evaluation checklist was making sure teachers had objectives for their lessons. The checklists were used for both formal and informal evaluations. Laura thought the checklist was generated by the ISD, which meant that all the schools in the county had input on what they considered important for teacher evaluation.

I asked Laura if beyond the rubric citing “minimally effective, effective, and highly effective”, there was any written feedback. She said there was, and that especially on the formal evaluation and that feedback might run to three or four pages. There was a change in the written comment section. Earlier in Laura’s career there were comments for the different categories on the evaluation, but the process was streamlined most recently and the comments were removed.

Did the process as it now existed help make her a better teacher? Her answer was, “a little bit.”  It definitely increased her paperwork; more checklists, more paperwork for the county, more for the state government. She reiterated the thought that the new law and the evaluation process might make it easier to fire teachers with seniority and with cuts in funding, remove expensive, experienced teachers. She had qualms about the definition of the word “effective.”

Laura explained that two administrators observed her teaching and she thought they used two different checklists.  At the beginning of the school year teachers met with their administrators to discuss goals for the year and how they thought they did last year. There are end-of-the-year meetings as well. Laura had her goals statement due the week I was visiting. She had to have a personal goal and a student growth goal and those goals had to be tied to achievements and a professional path (further education, professional development) for the future.  Laura’s goal was “improved parent communication” which included items such as keeping her school website maintained and sending reminders to parents through text and email messages. It was her responsibility to generate her own checklist for those items.

Mentoring, 2015

Laura was assigned a mentor when she started her career. She used to get four days off a year for mentor work. The mentor could use those days for observing a teacher in their classroom, or work in the library together and for meeting and recording their work in a mentor log. The meetings gave teachers an opportunity to discuss content, their overall field and questions concerning teaching.  Laura’s mentor her first year in the high school was one of her former teachers when she was a student there. They had a close relationship and he had a personal interest in her career so there was the trust that comes when you know someone is looking out for you. He aided her with behind the scenes information that helped her manage her career.  When Laura changed buildings or content areas, she was assigned a new mentor. This person had over 35 years of teaching experience, and although the relationship was not as personal, it was still beneficial. That person knew some of the content and knew the building culture, plus she taught in a classroom very close to Laura’s so there was no problem contacting her.

Laura was a little surprised that she had a mentor assigned to her after making her fourth switch in buildings in the district (high school, middle school, high school, middle school). Her mentor actually had less teaching experience, but taught the same subject, English. Laura described this experience as one of collaboration versus mentoring. They shared ideas and experiences that benefitted both of them.  I asked her if she thought the opportunity and time for collaboration was more important than professional development, a thought shared by many of my former students, and she responded positively.

Although Laura said she benefitted greatly from professional development at the local ISD, she said a great outcome from those meetings was to bring back one or two things that might be useful. She thought the best form of personal development was working with people who did the same thing she did where they could share lesson plan ideas, advice and content knowledge. I attended more than a few in-house professional development meetings during my 46 years in the classroom, plus a few summer seminars and institutes, as well as all my graduate hours. I agree with Laura that I received the most benefit for my teaching and my students’ learning by having time with other teachers who taught what I did and with the grade level experience I had.  Laura related one of her best experiences to me:

I was part of PASST, Performance Assessment something…it’s a real big one, but my colleague and I, we were invited to write different questions for a possible future test for the state.  That was really insightful and interesting too because we went to training before that too, kind of getting us ready for performance tasks questions and responses.  How to re-write some of these questions that tie into benchmarks.  Better outcome expectations.  So, there was a group of about 8 of us from around the whole county schools.  We met at the ISD four times this last year.  We were assigned one content and we thought that would be easy.  It was really challenging.  I had a high school one and that high school one covered about 400 years of history.  And you were thinking, the way that it was worded it seemed like it would be a whole unit evaluation in terms of how to assess that one content expectation.  So that was interesting to me.  We figured out how to best write it.  Was it a multiple-choice question or an extended response?  Would it be a performance task where it takes several paragraphs of writing?  It was interesting, but I think the best part, too, was talking to teachers from other areas.  “What’s going on in your building?  How are you adjusting to the new content?”  Different things.  Just sharing teaching experiences too.  “What life was like?  What are you doing?”  Like one person was taking college classes still.  And everyone talks about traveling and getting your travel paid through grants. So that was interesting to see what life was like over there too.  Beyond our borders (of our school district) (Laura, v.t., 2015, p.11).

Continuing Education, 2015

Laura thought the best continuing education she received was in the form of different teaching strategies she learned over the years. She had already noticed that education reform came in circular changes. She mentioned good professional development opportunities she received from her Intermediate School District, especially for ELA, reading and writing.  She received her Master’s degree in the early part of her career and she said the ongoing professional development has been more helpful to her teaching in the long run versus her graduate hours. She did say that she planned to revisit her boxes of Master’s materials during the move to her new home in the hopes of finding strategies that might help in her classroom, especially information concerning learning styles.  She also said that she remembered some good advice from a graduate course on how to recognize and prevent teacher burnout. Laura remarked that Social Studies education professional development was not as plentiful, in part, due to the impact (and political wrangling—my comment) over the state Social Studies standards. To counter that lack of Social Studies PD, Laura said that she was able to apply the knowledge and skills gained from her ELA PD to her History classes, for example, strategies for reading informational text.

Pearls of Wisdom, 2015

“Make sure you know what you’re getting into because it’s not for everybody” (Laura, v.t., 2015, p.2015). Laura said that college students should focus on their pre-student teaching observation hours. They should talk to the teachers and, using the available information, decide if a teaching career is really what they want to do. Is a teaching career worth all the time and money?  Over time, she also learned that many of the challenges in terms of goal setting and meeting standards are shared by people in other professional endeavors. People in the medical field and the business world also must set and meet objectives that determine changes in salary and advancement.  Prospective teachers need to know that changes will happen in their field. Flexibility and adaptability are a key for success.  She cited her own multiple changes in the grade levels and content areas she taught.  At the start of her career she thought she was always going to be a high school history teacher and after her multiple building switches and 18 or 19 course preparations that certainly was not what happened. That said, she knew she was a better teacher now because she was flexible, adaptable and willing to learn as the conditions of her career changed. She felt good when she told her middle school students what to expect when they went onto high school because she was a high school teacher at one time.  Laura saw both the positives and negatives offered by technology. Her classroom was up-to-date with equipment and software and she mentioned all the software applications which were beneficial for teaching. During the day, she also mentioned the time it took her to keep up with data input and communication through some of those applications. Her last pearl was for future teachers to be cognizant of the changes in the family structure of their school districts, not just in large urban areas, but rural ones, as well.  Students seemed to have more problems in their lives than they did when she attended school.  Family units were weaker and students needed more support from the schools than she remembered from her grade school and high school years.  There were more programs for dealing with behavior management situations, finding and helping “at risk” students and supporting special needs students now than there were in the past.

Through all those changes, both in where she taught, what she taught and how she taught, a constant with Laura was her smile. Her face exhibited the same hopeful, positive attitude when she was a college student, when I spent the day with her in 2008 and on this day in 2015.  I hope the same is true now.