Research/Practice Context

Over the last year, my practice context has changed dramatically. I have started teaching full time at the local Montessori school where I was a substitute teacher for the last school year. I am currently teaching 6th grade ELA and have 2 separate periods for that class. I also teach 7th and 8th grade science. In our small charter school, I have one 8th grade class and our 7th grade class are again split into two different periods. For this school year, the elective that I am teaching is Mythology. I also teach an "intensive" course that changes each month. These classes are meant to be an extra support to students that focus on something that the students might be needing some extra help with. For the month of October, my intensive is handwriting.  We are currently looking for any grants that might help us set up a pottery studio for our students and if and when we are able to do that, I will be able to teach that class. I am also one of the 6th grade advisors and the advisory class meets for 30 minutes as a short 3rd period class each day. That means that I am currently teaching 5 (6 if you count advisory) different classes over 10 periods on an A/B schedule.

I have my own classroom that had been split into 8 different tables with 4 chairs at each table. Recently, I decided to begin teaching my ELA class in workstations instead of the lesson and giving students class time to work on what we were doing.  I will begin teaching a short 10-15 minute lesson, giving vocab for the 2 week rotation, and then having students work in 15-20 minute rotations where they will be working on the vocab at one table, the reading at another where they can practice citing sources, summarizing, etc, and then rotating to another table where they will be working on rootwords (a program we are piloting for the creator) or a project that we are currently doing. I have a table set aside towards the back of the room so that our sped team have a space to pull students aside that need extra in class support. I have a table set aside towards the back of the room on the other side of the room that will be our extension table where if students finish the work at the other 3 stations, they can move to the extension table where a few other options related to what we are doing will be there to complete. I am hoping that this set up will help my students understand more, stay on task better, and be more fun for them as they won't have to work on one thing for the entirety of the class period. Our school as a large percentage of IEP and 504 students and I am hoping that this set up will be more accommodating and beneficial for all of my students. 

Within my classroom, we have a class pet axolotl. We have a bookshelf filled with books that my students use for our silent reading time. We have shelves of art supplies that we use for advisory, one-pagers, poster making, and any other art projects that might come up in any of my classes. I think I have been able to sneak in at least one art project into every one of my classes within the first quarter. While I am not teaching an art class, I understand the value of utilizing art in a cross-curricular way and have been using that whenever the opportunity has arisen. 

I originally set up my classroom to make sure that students had space, they had access to the books that we would be reading, that they would have access to the art supplies that we would need, and that they would be able to see me clearly and I would be able to see them clearly in case they needed any help. After teaching the first quarter, I could see where the gaps were that I needed to fill. This was where the reorganization of my classroom came in and why I am going to be organizing my ELA class into workstations so that I can more effectively help my students. This reorganization was important to me because it seemed that we were struggling getting through the reading and therefore lost time to learn the other things we needed to also be covering. I am hoping by switching to the stations, we will have a more varied learning time and be able to cover more information in the same amount of time.