The Beginning of my Journey

I am very excited to have started this Master's program. I graduated from the University of Wisconsin La Crosse in 2006 after completing a semester of the Wisconsin Intern Project at Milwaukee Messmer High School. I taught another semester at Milwaukee Messmer and then I was lucky enough to lead a trip of students from the Milwaukee area on a mission trip to Quito, Ecuador for two weeks with the Global Youth Mission Project. Taking students abroad was an experience I will never forget, the students weren't mine but they had all been taking Spanish for a few years. To see the classroom come alive before their eyes was amazing. The students were stimulated and I observed their speaking skills improving at a dramatic rate. Shortly after this trip, my husband and I moved to Memphis, Tennessee so he could attend graduate school at the Southern College of Optometry.

I have been working in the Memphis City Schools district for two years now. From my first day with the district I became involved in every leadership opportunity I could. I have done everything from writing curriculum, thematic units, to giving a two day workshop to teachers about using PBAs (Performance Based Assessments) in the classroom. This summer I started out a two year Action Research program with SILL (The Southern Initiative for Language Leadership). I spent a week in Atlanta working to develop an Action Research project and plan. I will return to Atlanta this summer to present the results of my research. My research topic is discovering if immersion based teaching yields a higher level of proficiency in students. This program over the summer reinforced for me that I wanted to start a Master's program to extend my knowledge and be a better educator that can relate to my students. I am a little nervous about working on my research for SILL in combination with my new Master's program.

I started out teaching at Kirby High School but I was given the opportunity to transfer and start a middle school for credit program at a middle school, Bellevue Middle School. I absolutely love the school I teach at and the students I serve. I teach 3 sections of Honors Spanish I for credit (8th grade), 2 sections of Conversational Spanish for 7th graders, and one section of Exploratory Spanish for 6th graders. I believe that immersion based teaching is the best way for students to achieve the highest level of fluency in the classroom. Immersion based teaching is when the teacher speaks and teaches almost exclusively in the target language, Spanish. The school I teach in is a Title I school and roughly 92% of our students qualify for free or reduced lunch. With this type of situation, it is very unlikely that many of my students will have the opportunity to travel abroad, in fact many of my students have never seen the Mississippi river and our school is about 5 miles away. Since my students don't have many travel opportunities I try to use technology to bring travel experiences to them with Google Earth amongst other things.

My students love anything with technology. Since I work in a very urban district it is sometimes hard to get any technology in my room. Luckily, my World Language supervisor was able to give me a computer and a LCD projector. I guess that is another thing I am interested in learning in this program. I would like to know how to bring technology into the classroom when your school can't necessarily afford to give it to you. I did write a grant this year (One Class at a Time) and I was given $500 to purchase Voice Recorders and other AV equipment so I can record my students progress speaking Spanish. The students absolutely LOVE using the voice recorders so I really looking forward to adding more technology and ideas to my class. They are learning to see the benefits of listening to themselves and watching themselves afterwards and critiquing their performance on a rubric. My goal is to eventually develop an electronic linguafolio for my students. I am hoping this Master's program will give me ideas for the best format to do this in. I would like the linguafolio to contain audio samples of the students' progress speaking Spanish, video samples, writing samples, and reading comprehension artifacts.

I felt really excited about our first class. I find that in a lot of Professional Development that teachers are required to do for our district, the ideas presented to me are things that I either learned in undergrad or they are things that I am already doing in my classroom. I am thrilled to learn about something that I love, technology, and to learn about NEW and current things in technology. I am also excited to be working with so many other great teachers who as dedicated as I am to teaching and learning. I was very excited after our first class because I saw a direct connection to how I could use what we learned to my classroom. My students aren't all assigned to our school by location, many of them choose to transfer in to our school, meaning they all live very far apart. I can use Google docs to allow my students to collaborate on written Spanish projects from home. I also thought that I could use Google chat to have a weekly conversational Spanish chat session.

Finally, I can see Google docs being very useful amongst my district colleagues and I. As I mentioned earlier, about 8 of my colleagues and I have developed and presented a 2 day workshop to other teachers on Realistic Expectations, Motivation, Performance Based Assessments, and Rubrics. We all work around the city and it is difficult for us to get together and I found myself relating the frustration of the neighbor in the Google docs video. We send around attachments and I find myself with several different versions of things and it is difficult to keep it all organized. It think that using Google docs would be a much more efficient system for us.

I think that my biggest concern for our Master's program will be during this Spring Semester. This spring I am finishing the first year of my pilot honors for credit program for eighth graders and I feel a lot of pressure to make sure they are adequately prepared for the STAMP assessment they will take as well as our pilot district assessment. I have also started conditioning for softball, our season starts in February and goes through April. Finally, I am also in the last semester of my Action Research for SILL. After this spring semester my schedule will calm down a little more. I know that if I stay organized I will be just fine and the rewards will pay off. I cannot wait to implement more technology into my classroom.

I look forward to my fellow colleagues' thoughts, critiques, or contributions you can make to my posting! I know that we all teach a variety of subjects but I really think we can learn a lot from one another in this program as well. Until next time... I hope you all are surviving the Wisconsin cold. Memphis caught part of your arctic blast but we are headed back to the 50s and 60s next week.