Mary Redden
Domain 1 Reflection
Planning and Preparation
Year 2
This is my second year teaching several sections of Living Environment, and my content knowledge and teaching practices have increased tenfold from last year. Being more confident with the material, I'm better able to pair my instructional tools and strengths as a special educator with my knowledge of regents Biology, which in turn helps facilitate a more well-rounded instructional approach for our students.
This year, my goal has been to actively teach study/life skills (e.g., organization, advocacy, independent practice, utilization of resources, perseverance, and competition against personal best) which in turn enhances their Biology skills. The majority of the students in these classes are all intellectually capable of understanding, retaining, and applying the curriculum presented to them. I've noticed that the student problems mainly lie with their ability to attend in large groups, motivation, and ability to independently organize. Deficiencies in these areas hinder their ability to concur material across all subjects. So targeting these areas of weakness helps in all areas of school and life.
I began the year with an "organization day" built in to the beginning and end of each week trying to conjure good habits right from the start. During these days, 10-15 minutes of the class period was/is spent collecting and organizing materials necessary to study for each week's quiz, showing the students where to find resources on my Eboard, and recognizing and requesting help with concepts that they struggle with. As months went on, I began to fade out that "model prompt" of showing them exactly how to organize step-by-step, and showing them exactly and used teacher-made-checklists as a guide. In another few months, I plan on fading out the checklists, and the goal is to study and practice the above stated skills at an independent level.
In addition to typical extra help hours, I make myself available 9th and now 1st period for students who have thought ahead and requested time with my outside of class. I have a schedule and students have learned to document or "make a note" of where and what they're struggling with. Using this information, they can then sign up to come see me for more 1:1 instruction on the subject. This reinforces self-advocacy skills and teaches them to more responsible for their own education. Focusing on increasing these skills has paid off as the average midterm grades for all three ICT classes has increased between 10-14% since last year's results.
As this is the end of my second year teaching ICT Regents Biology, I feel much more confident with the material than I did at the end of last year. I was much better able to troubleshoot problematic topics this year than last. I knew where the students would struggle, and I came up with a plan to preemptively support those areas. Because of this, I feel my students are better prepared and will perform well on the Biology Regents this year. My goal is for all students to pass and for perhaps no one to receive a grade lower than 70. With the curve of the Living Environment Regents being as it is, I feel this is a great opportunity for IEP students to score high enough that they can potentially use points from the Living Environment Regents and apply them to other state tests where necessary.
This year I focused on utilizing labs from NYS that we haven't used before in addition to labs used by colleagues within the department to better instruct topics that I feel the students struggle with most. For instance, on the regents students often have difficulty with translating DNA to RNA, and using the Codon chart to chose the appropriate amino acid for each base sequence of the RNA when creating proteins. This year, I added an amendment to an existing protein synthesis lab that we did last year and it proved very successful for the students. I added a whole class practice component (which only took a few minutes) in translations that the students did together as a class before they went back to their lab groups and completed the labs on their own. I got this addition from another professionals lab from a neighboring district. This little bit of practice they got translating DNA to RNA by modeling it together helped with their execution of the lab individually as not one student got any translation component wrong when I corrected the labs. I went back and looked up the grades from last year's class regarding this particular lab, and the grades this year were much higher.