My PledgeCents campaign is fully funded! I’m so surprised that it was funded this quickly, and I’m so grateful to everyone who donated. I’m so glad that I’ll be able to get pencils and crayons and paper and other school supplies for my students this fall.
Yesterday, we set up our classrooms for summer school. Our school used to have an open concept floor plan, and they’ve since built walls to divide the school. However, those walls don’t go all the way to the ceiling, which means that it’s sort of loud, and we can’t turn the lights on or off in our classroom – they’re either on or off for the whole school.
We’ve been learning a great deal about Culture of Achievement this week, which is the behavior management plan we have to create. We’ve made ours, but I’m concerned that we won’t be able to implement it effectively. I also have a hard time understanding the depth of what TFA means when they refer to a Culture of Achievement – it’s connected to Culturally Relevant Teaching, but it’s also about setting high expectations and creating a classroom where students feel like they can try new things, even if they don’t work out the first time. It feels like Culture of Achievement is all-encompassing and fairly murky, and it’s confusing for me. It’s hard to hypothesize about making a Culture of Achievement in my classroom, without ever having met my students.
We’ve also learned how to input our data into the Institute spreadsheet, which we have to do for math and literacy. Every day, there is an objective, and we have to grade each student’s progress toward mastery of the objective. They also explained why data matters, and encouraged us to come up with a “why” for us doing data, and explained that data can be an expression of love – we love our students, and we want to use any means we can to give them the best education.
TFA tracks the data we gather on a national level, presumably to create better training for teachers – if they test out a new classroom management program, or a new style of lesson planning, or new diversity training, they’ll track the effects that has on student test results in summer school and know if they need to implement those changes on a larger scale. I appreciate this dedication to improvement – I think it would be easy for TFA to say that they’re good enough – that they’ve made an impact by just getting enough teachers certified and into classrooms. However, they’re continually working to improve their program to make it as effective as possible.
One of the hardest things for me to handle with Institute is not really knowing how well I’m doing. I feel like I’m doing fine, I’m getting all of my work done on time and understanding the content that they’re teaching us. However, there isn’t a grade at any point – no one has ever told me how close I am to meeting the goals, or where I fall on the spectrum of bad to good, or if I’m participating in a way that’s useful. Some of it, I can read – we get comments from our Corps Member Advisors on our lesson plans, and on our Culture of Achievement plans. There’s a lot of emphasis on love and appreciation in TFA – I feel like the organizational culture values me as an individual, but it doesn’t quite mesh with all of my prior education, which highly values what I can do and what I have done.