Ms. Rodriguez's Classroom

Activator-This is something I will actually have to harness a bit after I introduce and get my participants hooked. Activator can sometimes seem impatient, so I'll have to keep that in check, especially as a participant I think I did it! I'm always a bit impatient with waiting for people to wrap up conversations but I let myself go a little bit. Competitor-I don't think I see this one playing as much a part in this. It's one of the strengths I like the least about myself and I still don't know how this will fit in my seminar. I'm not sure if I got competitive or not....maybe I just compared the effectiveness of others' seminars to my own? Context-This is one of my greatest strengths for this April 6 day! I love learning history and building stories, then having something to look forward to to bring it all together really excites me. I loved helping learners try to think about ways they could implement my role based small group discussion into their own cl...

Being part of this book club group has forced me to read outside of school again. I forget how much I like it, and how good I am at reading! I'm a quick reader but still good at comprehension, so I'm whizzing through this book. I love how Michelle Obama reflects on her time growing up, drawing comparisons to the Chicago I know and the one she knows. She isn't as much of an obvious leader as some of the other book's author's are, but she has a quiet persistence and stubbornness about her that makes her a leader in my mind. She didn't let anyone tell her "no" when she wanted to go to the top schools, and she also didn't stay in a career that made her unhappy. This, to me, is what a leader does: shows how to live a life by example.

Evidence is definitely required for this comparison of different sections of the same class doing the same Harkness discussion. Who: my students with whom I was not doing my action research. What: monitoring discussion equity with the same app I used for my other class. When: the same day I monitored discussion for my experimental class These students were naturally much more equitable than my experimental class. They had an equity rating of roughly 80%, while my experimental class had one of 67%! I think this happened because they are naturally a more equitible class, and since I wanted to promote equity in my other, experimental class, these were the results I expected from this section (periods 5 and 7, my experimental class was period 8) since we are done with Harkness discussions for the quarter, I shared this information with all classes by first asking how they think they did. They were all pleasantly surprised with their equity levels, and period 8 was not at all. We will...

This past weekend I gave my "Hot Topics" presentation on accountable talks. One of the things we focus on in high school is using sentence stems to ask good questions. However, I missed a perfect opportunity to use the sentence stem soccer ball I made for class. I Had a simulation where Cuba, the United States, and the USSR were all trying to figure out how the Cuban Missile Crisis started and who was responsible. It started out with small group research and then went into a full fledged debate. I tried to monitor and moderate as always but it got intense and some of the boys, who are more comfortable with one another, began to talk over all the female students. One even ran out crying and had a panic attack with the school counselor. I felt so horrible about how this spiraled out of control, and thought, in retrospect, if I used the soccer ball with appropriate sentence stems as our "talking stick" it could have gone much smoother and more equitable. All of my res...

This weekend we learned about the importance of brain breaks. These usually aren't employed very often in high school because we assume our students' brains don't need them! We are so focused on pounding them with content we forget that they are 16 year olds in adult looking bodies. Today I did a simple one: After doing a short reading at their own pace, I told my students to put their heads down and close their eyes until the whole class was complete with the task. They all did it no questions asked! To bring them back into the lesson I gently started talking until all heads were up. We then had a low-key discussion regarding the reading. I think it's really important to give students at this level a break because they are secretly not as developed as we think they are.

What: We are studying the rise of communist societies in Russia and China in the early and middle of the 20th centuries. Students start out class by making a claim/thesis comparing and contrasting the implementation of communism in each place, then do some mini research to support their claim. Next, we played communism catch phrase! It is exactly what it sounds like. Students are split into three groups (with 4 people per group, I know, my classes are small). Each group gets the same list of 15 words related to the rise of communism in both places. They are: Guomindang Soviet Union Mao Zedong Zhenotdel Karl Marx Warsaw Pact Lenin Provisional government Chiang Kai-Shek Communism Stalin NATO Bolsheviks Kulak Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Each group had one student be the clue giver, and the rest of the class had to guess what the term was based on the clues. They could not rhyme or give initials. Each student had :30 seconds (projected as a timer on the whiteboard)...