First Day Jitters

Man oh man. I would be lying if I said that I wasn't anxious this morning. I think I was more nervous for my first day of my Practicum than I have been throughout my entire time as an education student. After an hour in my new classroom, I was comfortable and realized that I'm about to have a great semester.

Today was an interesting day. Because it's only the third day that students have been back on campus, everything is still a little hectic. Figuring out the schedule, handing out the student's technology, and everybody simply needing to get back into a rhythm again were a few things that seemed to leave things a little disjointed. But despite this, everybody was happy, inviting, and made it a successful morning.

The greatest learning point for me today was when my class grouped up with the English class and began discussions surrounding Personalized Learning Plans (PLPs) and Proficiency-Based Grading Requirements (PBGRs). This was the eighth grade group, so they had already begun a little bit of work on this last year. Today, their teachers informed them about how schooling would look for them for the next five years and the types of proficiencies that they will be expected to meet before they graduate from high school. Middle school students will focus on one component: self-direction.

Students broke off into groups where they would unpack various learning targets that they will actually be working on and demonstrating proficiency in throughout the year and in their high school careers. They would redefine the learning target in their own language, brainstorm three ways that they worked toward that learning target last year, and ways that they will tackle it again this year. In other words, they were providing evidence that they were proficient and met that learning target, or how they expect to meet the learning target this year.



While students did this, I walked around and listened to their conversations. It was fun to see how quickly some teams managed to unpack their sentence and come up with examples of how they met that target. It was also nice to see that they understood that they could be proficient and use the target outside of content areas because they are transferrable skills.

All in all, listening to the students and hearing their thoughts and watching them work through this is going to be a great way for me to learn about PLPs and PBGRs. I know I will get to see all of the good AND all of the bad, and that is refreshing to learn about it and how to troubleshoot before I have to figure it out for myself.

It's going to be a fun and informative semester, I can feel it already.