Teach Wonder
Teach Wonder
The Assumptions We Make: Why Self-Reflection and Observation Require Different Things
In this episode, we discuss updates to our Educator Institute, a professional learning community focused on equitable teaching practices in STEM. We talk about the challenges we faced when testing our self-reflection tool as one for observation and how we shifted things. If you work with future teachers, or are trying to better your own practice, this episode is a one that talks about the intentional ways we have to self-reflection and pitfalls to avoid when observing others.
Intro Music by: David Biedenbender
Music by Viacheslav Starostin
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Okay, now we're recording. So welcome to teach wonder. Yes.Welcome to Teach Wonder, a podcast hosted byAshley O'Neil and Julie Cunningham. Julie Okay,
Ashley O'Neil:so let's start with context, doing some just definitions. Because if you haven't been listening to us all season, we're going to be using some terms and phrases that we want to make sure are clear to you. So do you want to start by just giving a quick overview of the educator Institute?
Julie Cunningham:Sure. So the educator Institute we developed as a professional learning community, and that has been very important to us, that we are a community and that we're not somebody's not out in front or at the top of the pile, like giving other people information, right? Everybody has either classroom expertise or student expertise or core teaching practice expertise that they have the ability to share with the community. And so the the goal for the community is for all of us to better understand equitable teaching practices, specifically in stem so that we can better support our pre service teachers as they go through the program at CMU and start to do classroom observations And then pre student teaching and student teaching. And so that's the whole premise of the professional learning community. And so the things that we do together always have some sort of an outcome or goal associated with supporting pre student teachers as they go through the program. And of course, we focus on STEM mostly because that's what we do at the Center for Excellence in STEM education,
Ashley O'Neil:if it's and the population, the education scholars that we're working with primarily are the students who are in our space volunteering with kids. They have kind of a cohort that they they're with us for portion of their time. We don't get a ton of true freshmen. They tend to join us. They're like, a semester or two in to their degree, but they are in their space, and because they're the pre service teachers that we work with most directly, they're kind of the focus of these conversations, and so a big part of what we are doing, too, is having good conversational crossover with our classroom teachers about what skills translate like what are they learning in an informal education space, in a field trip? Because we know that's not the same as being in a math class, but what are the skills that they are doing here that will serve them in the classroom in the future, which I think does two things for us, right? I think that it helps us refine how we focus conversations with students in field trips, and what we're looking for from them here and the opportunities that we give them. And it helps it make it more explicit for the students. We've always just kind of said, like, you get practice talking to kids, and that's really great. That's really great, but to really drill down and say, Oh no, you also get practice like negotiating boundaries with students when it's cleanup time or whatever. Like, the more explicit we can be with our pre service teachers here, who for us are our STEM education scholars, the better it serves them in the classroom to say, hey, that cleanup routine that I did in the makerspace will also serve me when it comes to like, math centers, etc,
Julie Cunningham:right? And I think the other value added is that because we're an informal education space in that we're not assessing students, or we're not holding students accountable for curriculum in the ways that regular classroom teachers are. It allows the pre service teachers, the stem Ed scholars, to see these things happen in multiple spaces, and to recognize that there can be some overlap outside the classroom with other learning opportunities, and that those are not just disparate events, right? That we can practice these things in multiple arenas. And perhaps, as you said, things that I learned as an informal educator carry over into the classroom, and there's no reason that there can't be some back and forth. I think that is definitely some added value. The only other thing I'll add about the stem Ed scholars is sometimes, at times, in the program, it has lent itself more towards being secondary students, because they see themselves as science and math teachers. Current. We have a nice variety of students who are studying to be both secondary math or science teachers and, or, I guess not, and or elementary teachers, and that they all see themselves as being STEM Educators, which is not always where this program has landed, and so in I don't know that we have any students who are studying to be special education teachers right now, but also, at times, we have had those students in the program as well. So just because we say STEM education scholars, I don't want someone to think we're talking about a specific type of classroom teacher or a specific grade level.
Ashley O'Neil:And interestingly enough, in our educator Institute, we have that same gamut. We have preschool all the way through secondary, which is fantastic. It's not a tremendously large group of people. And so we have, I think we hit all of those areas. We hit elementary we hit middle school, we hit high school, and all the way down to preschool. So that's a nice, diverse group of people. Also to say we see things in common in our teaching. Yeah, you teach AP calculus and I teach preschool, but these things are universal in the language of education. And I'm learning from your practice, you're learning from mine, and so these students could learn from that too. I think that's really interesting. I agree.
Julie Cunningham:And just this is probably a tangent already very early in this podcast, but one of the ways in which we saw that play out from the summers Professional Learning Community is we did community agreement, or a community I guess it doesn't really become agreement initially, but a community agreement for our professional learning community, and that resonated, and so we've come back to it every single time we were together as a learning community. And that resonated so much with the teachers preschool through high school that I would say almost all of them did that this fall in their classroom with their students, and allowed their students to have ownership over that and to do it in the students language. And it was, it's very easy to imagine that with high school students, I feel like, because that's my background, but it was really fun to see it play out with even the preschool students right in their language, they were very capable of putting together a community agreement and adhering to that agreement in their classroom and then refining it as they saw things that didn't work. So it's been fun to see some of those things across the different grade levels.
Ashley O'Neil:Yes, and like, again, I just so we had our group meet in the summer, and for some of them, that was the first time they'd met each other. And then we have been in every classroom, not maybe all of us staff at CMU, but one classroom we haven't been to yet, yeah, okay, almost everybody, and then they all came back together for the second meeting. And it was interesting to see how much shared language, like they spoke so easily amongst each other, and they were so reflective right away. It was cool to see that some of the relationship work that we put in in the summer had come to fruition, and they had this shared context. All of them talked about their community agreements, and so it gave them a lot to talk about as well, which was nice. I
Julie Cunningham:agree it was a very comfortable fall meeting when it felt very community based, when we all came back together. I agree that was really nice. Yeah.
Ashley O'Neil:Okay, so where do you want to head next?
Julie Cunningham:So one of the outcomes from the summer that I think we have talked about previously on the podcast was that as a community, we developed a reflection tool, knowing that scholars get credit for their volunteer time working with children in the makerspace by reflecting on the event that they attended. And they mostly set, sometimes with our support, their own goals for what they want to get out of the events. And then they reflect on whether or not that event supported their goal or didn't support their goal, and what their evidence is for that, and mostly they do that informally on it is. It doesn't really matter what the tool is, but currently we're using Padlet, right? So they can put that in as a audio document or a video document, or they can type it up. So there's lots of different options. Nonetheless, that's how scholars get credit for the event they attended is through the reflection. And so it was a natural in for us, for the professional learning community of educators this summer, to say, here's what we think the scholars could and should be reflecting on, and or anyone who's observing. I'm sorry, participating in an event with children, right? And let's sort of flesh this out and see if the this tool is valid for reflecting on for anyone reflecting on their experience working with children. And so we did that, moving from the summer into fall, we asked the scholars in here, the scholars that work with us in our space, to take two of their six events and use the reflection tool so that it didn't feel so cumbersome to change everything on them immediately. And we, the professional learning community educators agreed to also try that in their classroom. We agreed to try it with any events that we were the instructor of. And we also agreed to go back into each one of their classrooms and use the tool. And so that's kind of, I think, the bridge from summer into fall, yep.
Ashley O'Neil:And so we did that right. Thus the scholars did it in a Google form so that we could see their responses kind of laid out. And then Julie and I went into some classrooms. Julie went into some classrooms, Corey went into some classrooms. So there was a bit of a crossover. And we hit, I think, everyone but one. And very quickly, we realized that as an observation tool, as a reflection tool, we were getting really great responses from the scholars, but as an observation tool, it was a bit problematic. Do you want to share a little bit about sure
Julie Cunningham:one of the questions, or several of the questions really ask about the interaction between the person doing the instruction and the students, and for a person observing from the outside, for a third party, I found myself having to just make way too many leaps, way too many assumptions, or way too many judgments, if you want to call them, that, about what was going on and not having the context of the classroom or the teachers, why the teacher was making the decisions they were making, or even like, was this a typical student response or an atypical student response? Right? There was just way too much unknown knowledge in the reflection tool for an observer to use it and it again, it just felt like, if I was to use that, I was just making, again, way too many assumptions or judgments about what was going on. And so that didn't feel like a valid tool as an observation tool, and we had originally intended it to be both the reflection tool and the observation tool. It does seem to be getting really valid results. By valid, I mean, like the patterns seem legitimate for the information we're getting from the scholars, they seem to be giving us good responses, thoughtful responses. And the answers they're giving seem to fit well with the questions we're asking and the type of responses we would expect,
Ashley O'Neil:yeah, and to give you just like a maybe, to put it into like, to give it some gravity, for example, we I can use an example from here in the maker space, where I can think about a situation when I was teaching. And you may have noticed me looking at a child who was making a pretty significant mess, and then choosing to not step in. And if you were a casual observer, right? It would be really easy to tell yourself a story and place a lot of judgment on my decision, the child's decision that looked non compliant, that looks like they're kind of purposely destroying something, etc, etc, etc, right? Then you layer in the relationship I have with that child, and you recognize that there's a reason why I'm making those decisions, but there's no way you could notice that. And since we have worked so hard on the educator side and on the student side, I think if there was a single word that we try to use as like a guiding principle, it would be curiosity. Right? We want our classroom teachers to get curious about students. We want our students to get curious about projects and their own ability. We want our undergrad students, if they leave here with nothing else, right, we want to leave them with this kind of innate curiosity for why and to ask questions about things without placing judgment first and an observation tool that forces you to make some assumptions is kind of ripe with judgment, right?
Julie Cunningham:And we often talk about too how nuanced teaching is. I'm sure we've said this before in the podcast, but how many of those like non decisions, or what appear to be non decisions are really very conscious decisions by the instructor to not engage in that particular conversation? In our behavior, or whatever it is at the time, right? But it's often a very conscious decision, and even though to the onlooker, it appears like they're making no decision at all. And so we would never want to reinforce for pre student teachers right to be making judgments about what they didn't see happen, or assumptions about what they didn't see happen. So we fairly quickly. I mean, I was in two classrooms on one day, and I very quickly realized and told those two teachers whose classrooms I was in, like, this tool isn't working for this purpose, right? And we talked about why, very informally with the teachers that day. So then we let the teachers know that we were going to kind of back off on coming into classrooms until we'd sort of decided what to do with the tool, because it really wasn't fair to them. The premise of, I mean, and it's a, it's a gift to go in someone's classroom, right? Like they don't. That's a, I'm a stranger, it's extra for them. It's going to disrupt their class in some way, shape or form, right? It's going to pull their students attention away from even if I'm a mouse in the corner, I'm still something new in the classroom. So we sort of put pause on going into classrooms, and we asked teachers still to use the tool. The educators in the professional learning community use the tool to think about it as a reflection tool. So there's that. And then you and Corey and I met, and we said, okay, let's pull out the observation pieces from this tool, right and and let's separate them from the reflection, and let's think about this as two tools, which we did, and that wasn't terribly difficult to do, to pull those pieces apart, but also what we realized was we still had a tool that could be used to judge the teaching that one would see, and we definitely do not ever Want to be doing that ourselves to another teacher, nor do we want to set again pre service teachers up.
Ashley O'Neil:Well, it ultimately isn't useful, right? Like, let's say there even is an example in which maybe you think a teacher should be stepping in, or whatever, that ultimately is not a productive line of thinking. You know, I can think of an example in here where we watched a teacher, where, from my perspective, and this is totally mine, right? Maybe I would have been like, Hey, I wonder why they're not choosing to react right to that situation, because to me, it seemed like something you should definitely step in on, right? It is a more productive line of questioning to help our pre service teachers go, why? Why might they not be and to focus again on what the student's doing. Like, what is that student doing? How might I respond? Why might they be responding this way? What would happen if I did this? What would happen if I didn't? And to start getting curious and thinking about the student as the focal point, rather than like, it's real easy to armchair expert something from the side, right? So to keep the conversation productive in their own head, then starts to train them to be thinking of those questions when they're teacher in their own classroom, which is ultimately the point of this whole tool, right? Is to build for them a vocabulary and a toolbox of questioning strategies that help them be the best version of them themselves in the classroom, right?
Julie Cunningham:So you're absolutely right. That is how we that's the direction we went in. We said, well, instead of focusing on the teacher, how could we focus on a student or students in the classroom and their engagement? So asking the observer to find either student engagement or lack of student engagement to record how they're defining that so. And I guess, just to take a step back, we also recognize that oftentimes you wouldn't have time to talk to the educator before or after using the tool. So ideally, if you get done with the tool and you have a whole bunch of questions, you could go back to the educator and get your questions answered, but that isn't always what happens, right? So focusing on student and student engagement, and then what do we how are we defining that? What do we say we're we're calling student engagement or lack of student engagement, so that everybody's clear, and then using evidence to say this student these are the indicators of student engagement. And then here's what I expected about student engagement and how it aligned with what I expected. So always going back to this yourself and what your expectations are with the student engagement. So in other words, leaving the teacher out of it all the way through so there would never be a judgment made or an assessment made about the teacher or their teaching well.
Ashley O'Neil:And that's kind of a gift like I remember. Even back, and I'm going to put a container on this, but I remember back to some of my own really beneficial undergrad work, and it was this time where we thought about the things that came before a noticeable event, right? So the things that came before a student's grade, or the things that came before a student's behavior, and walking back in time to look at the steps that led them. There is a really helpful way to think about how to move forward, right? Rather than just being reactive to, oh my goodness, this child's doing this thing, I'm going to do an emotional reaction to get really analytical and say, Okay, what are the steps that led me here? Because that's going to help do the best, like, make a more intentional choice for what, how to respond, or how to do, do something next, right? So it's instead of being reactive, you're being, like, reflective and then responsive. And I think that again, yeah, it would be lovely if they could have a person, the person to talk to, to say, hey. Like, why did this happen? Why not? But the very exercise of developing those questions is a really, it's an important piece of becoming a reflective practitioner, and so even if those questions have to go unanswered, I like the idea that hopefully this is getting them to ask more questions.
Julie Cunningham:And we did test it with scholars at our last PD event, with them, professional development event with them, with video. So we pulled up some teacher video, and we used the tool that way, and it seemed to work. They didn't seem
Ashley O'Neil:they had a lot to they had a lot of good conversation, and I would say almost all of it right, was focused on, why do you think that happened? What I observed, what might be a possible reason, what might happen next if? And I think that is that's where we wanted it to go. So the fact that the tool resulted in that conversation is a good sign that we're getting close to something.
Julie Cunningham:And so the Professional Learning Community, educators in service educators are working on using the reflection tool this semester yet in their classroom. So going back to the original tool we started with and providing some very tangible examples and outcomes for pre service teachers to have to look at as reflection of from a classroom teacher, right? And next, we'll share the observation tool, which is the one we were just talking about where we focus on student engagement, student classroom, student engagement. And then we'll ask them to pilot this tool as they observe engagement or non engagement in their classrooms, and get some feedback from them so that moving forward in spring, we'll look with them at the patterns of STEM Ed scholar responses and see if they want to tweak either tool, and then take their responses and see if we need to tweak either tool and have some conversations surrounding that. But we I think it is exciting that we have pre service teachers who are pre student teaching using the tool. Pre service teachers in the maker space, so informal education using the tool ourselves, using the tool, both for ourselves, for our own self reflection and for observation. And then the K 12 teachers who are in the professional learning community using the tool. I think that, in and of itself, is a pretty exciting dynamic
Ashley O'Neil:we have. Also we're getting, like, a lot of different settings, a lot of different grade levels, and then a huge, a huge variance in level of experience, right? We've got our pre service teachers who are kind of just getting their feet wet in the classroom for the first time, maybe teaching a lesson once a week, just kind of starting there. And then we've got teachers who have quite a few years of experience all across the grade levels, and the fact that, like, we then have the same question that we're asking, right? Like, what happened with the student? You know, how does your response fit into these types of categories? What happened next is really going to create some like through lines, and we're hopeful to see some patterns to say, hey, when this was kind of the plan of the outcome, this tended to be how students responded when teachers thought about this. The other thing that we are doing or that we're asking in this tool is for teachers to consider their own bias, and that has not changed, to say, like, Did I come into this interaction with an expectation, or did I make an assumption based on cues or history or context, or, like, visuals, whatever, right? And that's always a. Helpful thing, and we've had some really interesting responses. We have some teachers who have had students for multiple years, right? Or have family members, right from like, like, I had their sibling, or I, you know, had their parent, whatever. And so biases can come in lots of forms. But just to say, like, you know, this child came with, like, a whole bunch of warnings or contexts from the previous years, and to be able to admit that like, you know, I've had the same conversation with this student every day this week, and so when this happened again on a Friday, I'd already written in my head how this was going to go, when actually, this small thing changed and it went differently. So to be able to acknowledge that they bring a whole history into the story. Is never, is never a bad way to start a reflection, right?
Julie Cunningham:Yeah, yeah. So just to recap, really, we've stuck with the equitable practices theme, right? And the curiosity theme. And I think those two things have served us well in terms of thinking about building respectful relationships, thinking about having eliciting student thinking and valuing student thoughts and prior learning. So we've had thinking about group dynamics and group work. So I think thinking about building a community in a classroom, all of those things, and how they can look and feel equitable, how they will are equitable to the students in the classroom, and then how we can value again, students, curiosity, those through lines have helped support, I think the tools and the building of the tools and the conversations, really, we've had as a professional learning community have also been very respectful, but also, well, very thoughtful, very respectful, but also, I think, very enlightening, right? That, I mean, not everybody teaches in the same type of a setting. Not everybody teaches in the same even type of community, right? So I think the variety has been
Ashley O'Neil:and it's delightful to get beyond the the validation phase, and then, like, the, this is a really big thing phase. So we can do a lot of, like, patting each other on the back, and you're doing a great job. All true, all real, all important. And then we can get into, like, the this is a really big thing. I find some of these things overwhelming. There are aspects of education that are outside of my control, and it can be really easy to kind of focus on those and talk about those, and all again, all valid, all important, all real. And it's really cool to see this group have that camaraderie where they can make jokes like we had a fair we had a moment where we all talked about lamented six, seven in our own way, and how it reached pre K all through high school. And also we're having really honest, productive conversations about the things that they can control and the way that they're developing professionally. And I think when you have a community that can both relate to each other and appreciate each other and appreciate the hard work that they're doing, and then also have honest conversations for the sake of improvement, I think that's a bit like a magical sweet spot that we found. This has been another episode of teach wonder, and we're really glad you're here. If you like this episode and are new to us, you can find more episodes and never miss another one by following our show. Teach wonder. Wherever you get your podcasts, you