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Michael Cooney - 3rd Grade Teacher, Mays Chapel Elementary
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Mr. Cooney has been teaching for six years. He started his teaching career at Lansdowne Elementary School in Southwestern Baltimore County. He attended Stevenson University for his Bachelor's degree in Elementary Education, and is currently finishing up a master's program at Johns Hopkins University, focusing on Technology Leadership in Education. Mr. Cooney's hobbies include writing and photography. He is also interested in drama and looks forward to starting a drama club at MCES! He is the proud father of Gideon, born in 2013.
Many of Michael's reflections will be cross-posted on his blog. Find out more about Michael at http://mrcooneysclass.wordpress.com. |
January 2015
5 Things I Say This Year
You know how people promise when they are kids that they will NEVER say certain things when THEY became parents? And then, years later, they start saying them, as if their parents are somehow taking over their speech? It’s probably like that for teachers, too. You think you’ll never repeat certain things you heard other teachers say, and then you find those words just coming out of your mouth:
1) “Work on something productive.”
This one is funny to me. It’s so simple and vague, but it’s part of my daily vocabulary. These words are usually spoken during our morning routine.
I used to create morning work. Again: I used to CREATE. MORNING. WORK. I used to have to copy worksheets just so my students would “have something to do.” Now, the morning routine on the board says something like… “Copy homework. Take out homework. Work on something productive.” The students use a weekly checklist to make sure they complete the tasks they have to complete. On it are suggestions for additional projects they could be working on. Those 15 minutes in the morning are the perfect time for students to blog, research, or create. It’s a simple direction that places the responsibility on them to get things done. For me…it’s nice not having to make morning work.
2) “What do you notice?”
Seriously, this is the question that guides every discussion, especially in math. Again, this is a simple, vague question, but the kids respond well to it for that very reason. They see things I don’t see, and as a result, they lead the learning.
3) “I don’t know, what do you think?”
My nephew loves to ask me questions. When we moved in to our new house, he asked me “Why do you have so many vents?” (He saw two.) I asked him why he thought we had so many vents. It turned out he knew why a house would have so many vents. He just had to be reminded to think for himself. Third graders are the same way. This is how I’d like to respond to 90% of the questions that students ask me.
4) “Sit where you’d like.”
The coolest thing happened when we moved our desks to the side last month in order make room for a skit we were performing. We stacked a few of them and haven’t unstacked them yet. I asked them if there were any kids who didn’t want a desk, and about half of them didn’t need one. They work on the floor, the couch, the bean bags, the (extremely strong and durable) shelves. There are extra tables in case we need a hard surface or flat work space, but in general, the kids are all over the place. There’s this open space now in the room that we use for demonstrations, skits, and activities that require movement. Otherwise, there are kids scattered around the room, and they are getting things done.
5) “…”
In general, I talk significantly less than I used to, and less than my teachers did. Don’t get my wrong, I loved hearing my third grade teacher read stories aloud, and I love talking to third graders. But the sound of the third graders talking to themselves about their learning sounds even better.
5 Things I Say This Year
You know how people promise when they are kids that they will NEVER say certain things when THEY became parents? And then, years later, they start saying them, as if their parents are somehow taking over their speech? It’s probably like that for teachers, too. You think you’ll never repeat certain things you heard other teachers say, and then you find those words just coming out of your mouth:
- What did I JUST say?
- I’ll wait.
- I don’t know, CAN you go to the bathroom?
1) “Work on something productive.”
This one is funny to me. It’s so simple and vague, but it’s part of my daily vocabulary. These words are usually spoken during our morning routine.
I used to create morning work. Again: I used to CREATE. MORNING. WORK. I used to have to copy worksheets just so my students would “have something to do.” Now, the morning routine on the board says something like… “Copy homework. Take out homework. Work on something productive.” The students use a weekly checklist to make sure they complete the tasks they have to complete. On it are suggestions for additional projects they could be working on. Those 15 minutes in the morning are the perfect time for students to blog, research, or create. It’s a simple direction that places the responsibility on them to get things done. For me…it’s nice not having to make morning work.
2) “What do you notice?”
Seriously, this is the question that guides every discussion, especially in math. Again, this is a simple, vague question, but the kids respond well to it for that very reason. They see things I don’t see, and as a result, they lead the learning.
3) “I don’t know, what do you think?”
My nephew loves to ask me questions. When we moved in to our new house, he asked me “Why do you have so many vents?” (He saw two.) I asked him why he thought we had so many vents. It turned out he knew why a house would have so many vents. He just had to be reminded to think for himself. Third graders are the same way. This is how I’d like to respond to 90% of the questions that students ask me.
4) “Sit where you’d like.”
The coolest thing happened when we moved our desks to the side last month in order make room for a skit we were performing. We stacked a few of them and haven’t unstacked them yet. I asked them if there were any kids who didn’t want a desk, and about half of them didn’t need one. They work on the floor, the couch, the bean bags, the (extremely strong and durable) shelves. There are extra tables in case we need a hard surface or flat work space, but in general, the kids are all over the place. There’s this open space now in the room that we use for demonstrations, skits, and activities that require movement. Otherwise, there are kids scattered around the room, and they are getting things done.
5) “…”
In general, I talk significantly less than I used to, and less than my teachers did. Don’t get my wrong, I loved hearing my third grade teacher read stories aloud, and I love talking to third graders. But the sound of the third graders talking to themselves about their learning sounds even better.
November 2014
Give them the room!
Truths I know as a person who writes:
So, quick update on what I’m working on: giving the classroom to my students. For real.
Yeah, we all know the furniture here is student centered… and the students can sit wherever they want to sit when they do their work…and they can access their devices whenever they need to. Those things were not difficult for me, mostly because they all fit with my teaching style and personality.
Recent faculty meetings have caused me to delve a little deeper into the “student centered” classroom. I have been mostly focused on what is hanging on my walls. We did a “ghost walk tour” of the classrooms before the students came in to see the evidence of student centered learning.
The following saying kept popping into my head: The students should be the hardest working ones in the room, not the teacher. You should know this when you walk into a classroom, even if no one is there. My room needed a little work. Who is creating my anchor charts? Whose information is posted on the wall? Who chooses how they are learning? As much as I’d like to say “the students,” it’s not always true. But as I walked through our different classrooms, I saw tons of teachers who really got it:
(Apologies for the bad quality photos…)
Give them the room!
Truths I know as a person who writes:
- If I aim for shorter posts, I will begin new posts more often. I won’t need to set aside huge chunks of time for writing if I aim small and don’t wait for the big ideas.
- If I write more posts, I will write more posts. In other words, the more I write, the more I want to write.
So, quick update on what I’m working on: giving the classroom to my students. For real.
Yeah, we all know the furniture here is student centered… and the students can sit wherever they want to sit when they do their work…and they can access their devices whenever they need to. Those things were not difficult for me, mostly because they all fit with my teaching style and personality.
Recent faculty meetings have caused me to delve a little deeper into the “student centered” classroom. I have been mostly focused on what is hanging on my walls. We did a “ghost walk tour” of the classrooms before the students came in to see the evidence of student centered learning.
The following saying kept popping into my head: The students should be the hardest working ones in the room, not the teacher. You should know this when you walk into a classroom, even if no one is there. My room needed a little work. Who is creating my anchor charts? Whose information is posted on the wall? Who chooses how they are learning? As much as I’d like to say “the students,” it’s not always true. But as I walked through our different classrooms, I saw tons of teachers who really got it:
(Apologies for the bad quality photos…)
My goal over the next few weeks is to give the students more opportunities to display their learning in the room. One way I have done this in math is by having the students create resources to explain to each other how to do a certain skill. If it’s a great example, I enlarge it with the poster maker to display it as an anchor chart for future reference. Students love coming back the next day to see whose work got “super sized.”
It’s a work in progress. My room won’t be finished until June!
October 2014
Here I am, almost two months into the school year, and my classroom is almost unrecognizable compared to my classroom last year. I don’t just mean the location and the furniture. My room has transformed this year thanks to a number of influences. In this post, I am going to name the first five that come to mind.
5. BCPSOne
I had used Engrade before, so my parents already had access to the grades. When I heard that BCPSOne was going to be powered by Engrade, I thought, “Great! Not too big of a change for me. I’ll just enter my grades into BCPSOne now.” As if it were just a gradebook.
Instead, I have learned, BCPSOne is a portal for my students to practice independence. Yes, it makes things easier for me, with online quizzes that automatically grade, and a gradebook app that can average a student’s grades instantly… but the power that this website has for students is incredible. Each day I post the students’ resources to their calendar (anything from their Wonders anthology text to instructions for their independent work) and they are all kept in one place. They get started as soon as they enter the room in the morning. They can upload and turn in assignments as they finish them, just like college kids might do on Blackboard. Easy.
4. Daily Five
I was never a routine kind of guy/teacher. This year, I have been trying out a modified version of the Daily 5 for reading so that students have simple centers to work on while I am with small groups. It has been one of the biggest challenges this year, setting up the routines and making sure my lessons are paced well to allow enough time for their rotations. Still, it has been one of the forces that has made my reading class more student-driven and collaborative. Students can choose between reading to themselves, reading to others, working on their writing, word work, and everyone’s favorite, digital learning. This last station gives students a set time each day to research online, listen to reading online, participate in online discussions, and more. Combined with BCPSOne, the Daily 5 has made it so that my class can even run pretty well independently if I needed a substitute.
3. Discovery Education
It’s only been a week since I had a model lesson taught by Mrs. Hirsch from Discovery Education. She showed my students how to use Board Builder to create mini websites that demonstrate and explain what they have learned, and my students’ researching skills have really taken off with Discovery’s resource database. Instead of creating the usual Chesapeake Bay problems/solutions poster, for example, my students are currently researching on Discovery to deepen their understanding of one of these problems in order to create a board about it. I haven’t begun teaching Social Studies yet, but I imagine that I am going to use the databases to change the way I do that, too.
2. My Third Grade Team
Working with new teachers who came from 5 different schools has had its advantages. Primarily, we all have our own ways of doing things that have worked for us in the past. The more we share ideas, the better our teaching becomes, because we have the wisdom we have gained from our past schools. Not only that, we are all learning this digital “stuff” at the same time. I can’t even tell you how many times we have gathered together to share a certain tech tool or resource that worked well for one of us. We still do many things in our own way. But when we do plan together and discuss our lessons together, our ideas combine until we are left with a “greatest hits” type compilation of good instructional ideas. I am constantly challenged and inspired by their ideas, passion, and creativity.
1. My Students
Every day is different. Every day, they come to school with different ideas, different attitudes, different questions, even different interests. I am learning to do things differently every day this year. The kids aren’t the same from one day to the next. The world isn’t the same from one day to the next. My teaching, then, should not be the same as it was last year or even yesterday. I hope, then, that the more independent my students become, the more tools I show them to use, the more they can learn the way they want to (or need to) learn. That way, they can drive the learning themselves and I can help them along the way. It will take a while, but we’ll get there.
This list of forces is not all-inclusive. It’s constantly changing, like everything.
Here I am, almost two months into the school year, and my classroom is almost unrecognizable compared to my classroom last year. I don’t just mean the location and the furniture. My room has transformed this year thanks to a number of influences. In this post, I am going to name the first five that come to mind.
5. BCPSOne
I had used Engrade before, so my parents already had access to the grades. When I heard that BCPSOne was going to be powered by Engrade, I thought, “Great! Not too big of a change for me. I’ll just enter my grades into BCPSOne now.” As if it were just a gradebook.
Instead, I have learned, BCPSOne is a portal for my students to practice independence. Yes, it makes things easier for me, with online quizzes that automatically grade, and a gradebook app that can average a student’s grades instantly… but the power that this website has for students is incredible. Each day I post the students’ resources to their calendar (anything from their Wonders anthology text to instructions for their independent work) and they are all kept in one place. They get started as soon as they enter the room in the morning. They can upload and turn in assignments as they finish them, just like college kids might do on Blackboard. Easy.
4. Daily Five
I was never a routine kind of guy/teacher. This year, I have been trying out a modified version of the Daily 5 for reading so that students have simple centers to work on while I am with small groups. It has been one of the biggest challenges this year, setting up the routines and making sure my lessons are paced well to allow enough time for their rotations. Still, it has been one of the forces that has made my reading class more student-driven and collaborative. Students can choose between reading to themselves, reading to others, working on their writing, word work, and everyone’s favorite, digital learning. This last station gives students a set time each day to research online, listen to reading online, participate in online discussions, and more. Combined with BCPSOne, the Daily 5 has made it so that my class can even run pretty well independently if I needed a substitute.
3. Discovery Education
It’s only been a week since I had a model lesson taught by Mrs. Hirsch from Discovery Education. She showed my students how to use Board Builder to create mini websites that demonstrate and explain what they have learned, and my students’ researching skills have really taken off with Discovery’s resource database. Instead of creating the usual Chesapeake Bay problems/solutions poster, for example, my students are currently researching on Discovery to deepen their understanding of one of these problems in order to create a board about it. I haven’t begun teaching Social Studies yet, but I imagine that I am going to use the databases to change the way I do that, too.
2. My Third Grade Team
Working with new teachers who came from 5 different schools has had its advantages. Primarily, we all have our own ways of doing things that have worked for us in the past. The more we share ideas, the better our teaching becomes, because we have the wisdom we have gained from our past schools. Not only that, we are all learning this digital “stuff” at the same time. I can’t even tell you how many times we have gathered together to share a certain tech tool or resource that worked well for one of us. We still do many things in our own way. But when we do plan together and discuss our lessons together, our ideas combine until we are left with a “greatest hits” type compilation of good instructional ideas. I am constantly challenged and inspired by their ideas, passion, and creativity.
1. My Students
Every day is different. Every day, they come to school with different ideas, different attitudes, different questions, even different interests. I am learning to do things differently every day this year. The kids aren’t the same from one day to the next. The world isn’t the same from one day to the next. My teaching, then, should not be the same as it was last year or even yesterday. I hope, then, that the more independent my students become, the more tools I show them to use, the more they can learn the way they want to (or need to) learn. That way, they can drive the learning themselves and I can help them along the way. It will take a while, but we’ll get there.
This list of forces is not all-inclusive. It’s constantly changing, like everything.
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