The End (for now)

Over the last 6 and a half years I have been on a teaching journey. Little did I know back when I was in college pursuing my dream of becoming a teacher that I would start my career in such an interesting way, teaching students online. In my first year, I tackled translating the visual arts into the online setting with help of those who had been doing it for years before me (my AMAZING co-workers). Like my students, I found this type of education to be exciting, fulfilling, and innovative.

Every day was an adventure and I felt a part of a community of educators doing something special, something amazing and different. I was helping students reach new heights, find themselves, and along the way, I found myself as an educator. My love for my job was all-encompassing, my love for my students and my colleagues and everything we were working towards was off the charts. I was not only able to be a teacher to my students but also found ways to teach other teachers, leading professional development, pioneering new technology in my classroom, writing my Master's Thesis project, creating my own Art TV show, and sharing my love of art with thousands. Teaching online has given me more opportunities in 6 and a half years than many teachers get in a lifetime.

It was with great sorrow when I lost my position several weeks ago when my school closed. I am mourning that loss. The loss of something special. The loss of a community. The loss of my students. More than anything, the loss of my opportunity to teach. A job loss can affect anyone negatively of course. Financially it is a blow; finding health insurance, searching for a new job, rebuilding networks and connections are all difficult. For a teacher, it might also feel like losing a dream, losing a calling, or even losing a sense of self. Who am I if not, "Art Teacher"? It is hard to feel complete when one's mission in life is put on hold. However, I have always taught my students to never give up and that life has a way of working out even when it seems hopeless. Each day we must start anew, hold on to hope, and push towards a better tomorrow. I don't know where my next journey will lead, the online classroom, brick and mortar, or higher education, but I know for certain that education is where I belong. Thank you for joining me on this journey, and know if you are struggling with a loss, you're not alone.

Creating Community and Engagement with Video

Much has happened since my last post. I have a year of Graphic Design under my belt, a new show for my school's Live Stream channel, and lots of new tricks up my sleeve. It has been a wild ride and I continue to love teaching online!

Last year, my school introduced EPAC (ECOT Public Access Channel), a place where students can attend field trips live from home as well as view educational content. Color Me Happy was then born, an art show that is accessible for all ages. In our district, we do not have a stand-alone art course that students take in elementary grades so I wanted to give students a place to get some art making instruction. Check out one of my episodes below!



In addition to Color Me Happy, we continue to explore areas of interest involving Art around the state of Ohio. As always I find video to be a great way to engage students and build community.



I have big goals for this 2017-2018 school year including a use of new technology tools like our 3D printers, vinyl cutter, and laser cutter. I can't wait to give my Graphic Design students a taste of professional design equipment later this year. Stay tuned for more updates!

Tablets as an Option for Art Making

I am getting very excited about next semester starting next week and I am preparing my semester 2 classroom with new technology on my mind! Big surprise right? I have been working with my team this semester to create tablet options for all of my Art 1 projects. Previously, all projects were required to be done on paper through traditional techniques. However, I have found that students really enjoy the option of creating a different way and it also benefits students who do not have art supplies or are having problems with their scanner. Also, having a digital option prepares them for all kinds of careers and it helps meet UDL guidelines. So, I have finally done it!
Each lesson in Art 1 offers two options for the assigned projects: a traditional option and a tablet option. All of my students have Android tablets to work on and all the apps I use in my class are free. Some of my projects offer a similar option for the tablet option as the traditional. For example, students may paint traditionally for their Impressionist Landscape, or they may use a painting app such as Sketch Guru.

Traditional watercolor

Using Sketch Guru

Other assignments have a different way for students to show their understanding of a given concept. For example, for my proportion lesson involving foreground, middle, and background students are able to draw the interior space of a room with pencil, or they can create a digital collage using PicCollage. Both assignments accomplish the creation of a piece that shows depth and understanding of proportions but some students might prefer one over the other. 

Traditional drawing

Using PicCollage to manipulate images

Some of these apps add additional materials for students to use that they would not have access to at home easily such as the texture tablet option. Students are learning about visual and tactile texture and then asked to either create a drawing showing 4 textures or create a sculpture showing 4 textures in TrueSculpt. 

Traditional drawing

Using TrueSculpt

I thoroughly believe in teaching traditional art skills and would never want to move towards 100% digital in my classroom but I think options are important. I am excited for students to have the opportunity to experience more diverse materials in their art making and get a taste of digital art if they choose. Stay tuned! 

Shameless plug: I'll be giving a presentation at NAEA this year on Saturday at 2pm all about using free Android apps in your art classroom!

Addressing Weaknesses and Clarifying Concepts

This school year I am working on addressing common mistakes students have made during previous years at the beginning of a lesson so they can be more successful this year. I am doing this through a short weekly video announcement.

Each video presents 3 tips for the current project. I am getting a good amount of student views on these videos. Aside from increasing the quality of student artwork, these videos also serve as a weekly greeting from me that my students see when they enter the classroom. 

Keeping Parents and Students Informed

My summer school course has wrapped up and was a very positive experience. I conducted a parent and student survey at the conclusion of the course about the efficacy of the course to help them achieve their goals and how their experience was. I received many positive results and one thing both my parents and students mentioned being helpful was my consistent communication.

Each week I sent out an email to students and parents about the subject of study for the week unit, assignments, and due dates. I have discussed emails like this in previous entries (Communicating with Students Part 1, Part 2).

The main new type of communication that I incorporated in this course was to email parents and students progress reports every other week. Because the course was only 5 weeks long, it was important to keep parents and students informed. As a policy, I always allow students to resubmit projects through my course after reviewing my feedback. Even though students had access to their grade books, sending these progress reports seemed to do a nice job of alerting students to potential issues and put parents at ease. A school may already have a schedule for sending out midterm and quarterly grades as mine does during the school year. I have found that student achievement improves when students are parents are more aware of what is going on in the online classroom. It was helpful to employ this knowledge to a summer course and to include detailed information about each assignment for everyone involved.

Click here to download the progress report template:
Word version
Pages version

Impressionist Landscape Watercolor

I have been really enjoying teaching my summer school class so far. My students are creating wonderful artwork and making meaningful connections with the world around them. It has been awhile since I brought my Google Glass out for a spin to create a demonstration video, but today I took it on an adventure in painting "en plein air".



I am very excited to see what students create for this project and I was happy to have an excuse to go paint outside on a beautiful day like today.

Preparing Brick and Mortar Students for an Online Course

This summer, I have the pleasure of working with a group of students who normally attend classes at a brick and mortar school but have enrolled in my online summer art course. I have spent the last several weeks creating a compressed 5-week beginning art course for these high school students and I have really enjoyed building the course and experimenting with a new (to me) LMS, Moodle. I created a syllabus and a welcome letter for parents and then I took some fantastic advice from my colleague Teresa Potter (blog here), to make an introduction and planning activity to help students be successful in an online course.
While most of the year I am working with students who are already very familiar with online learning, these students may be taking an online course for the first time. And they're taking an art course at that, something that confuses even my online veteran students. So I used a part of Teresa's design and combined it with features I have always used in my courses to make a worksheet that would guide students through the freedom they have when working in an online course. Students get to decide when they will work, how they stay focused, and how to be successful in an environment that is not structured for them. 
First, I created a tip sheet for students about how to be a successful online learner, specifically in my art course.

Things you can do to help yourself be successful in this course:

1. Build class time into your schedule: Just like having English class from 12:00-12:50 Monday-Friday, time spent learning in this course should have a dedicated time in your day
2. Familiarize yourself with deadlines: Print a copy of the class schedule and/or mark deadlines on your calendar
3. Be prepared: Get your art supplies early so there is nothing holding you up from completing your work on time
4. Practice with technology early, and have a backup plan: Technology does not always cooperate with us on our time table. Make sure you test for problems and find a solution or ask for help well before the deadline.
5. Take notes: When watching videos or completing readings in the classroom make sure you take notes and write down ideas that emerge to refer to later
6. Ask for help: Unlike in a traditional classroom, I cannot see if you are struggling. Make sure you keep me informed of any issues and reach out to me for help-it’s why I am here!
7. Read your feedback: I will provide detailed feedback for each assignment in this course and this feedback will be instrumental in helping you improve and grow.

Second, I put together a Getting Started Activity which students are expected to complete the very first day the class begins. This beginning portion of the sheet consists of the questions below:

1.What do you know about art?

2. What is you favorite subject?

3. What do you hope to learn or achieve in this course?

4. What is the best phone number and time to reach you?

5. Do you prefer calls, texts, or emails to communicate?

6. What are 3 things I should know about you? (interests, hobbies, learning styles etc.)

I use questions like these to help myself get to know students, learn how to contact them, create talking points for building rapport, and get a general idea of what students hope to gain from the course so I can address their needs. 

The second portion of the sheet is all new to me. It asks students to plan a schedule of when they will complete their work for class and I listed which assignments they need to plan for. 

This activity allows students to take ownership of their learning plan and emphasizes the importance of staying on top of their work. Even my online veteran students could really benefit from something like this. Previously I have offered little help in my own course when it comes to encouraging student planning, but perhaps if I encourage student planning early, students will be more successful. 

Download the complete worksheet here.

Revitalizing Old Projects

This semester I decided I needed to breathe some new life into one of my projects I have been teaching awhile. The students have always done well on it, but I wanted to see them think more deeply than they had been. The project was focused on mixed media. At this point in the semester, students had learned how to use many different media in their work, and the mixed media project was meant to help them think past one art material at a time and use several including non-traditional materials like found objects to create a unique composition.

I decided to update this project by providing a new focus for the theme of their piece and adding an inspirational artist to the lesson. I chose Romare Bearden as the artist and personal culture as the focus. I included a reflective essay in the project where students explain how they represented their culture and why they chose the media they used for the piece. Below is my student gallery for the week. I really enjoyed this new twist on an old project. 

Buried Treasure: Communicating Learning Outcomes

We all have goals for our students. Whether they be state standards and benchmarks we are aiming for our students to hit, or more student-friendly learning outcomes written in language that students understand. I have seen this illustrated in different ways in classrooms I have visited. Sometimes they are posted on the wall by grade level, other times they are printed on syllabi or posted on the introduction page for a lesson.
It is important for students to understand what they are going to gain from our classes and I think sometimes this gets lost somewhere between when we share these desired learning outcomes and when they go in one ear and out the other for students, or aren't read or heard in the first place.
For years, I have wanted to develop a fun an visual way for students to see what they are learning in my Art 1 class and how they are learning it. In my school we use the term "course map" to describe the document that houses all of our learning outcomes and assessments for a course. I decided to create a REAL course map modeled after a treasure map, because as we all know, learning is like discovering new exciting gems!

Click to enlarge

I made this map in Photoshop and really enjoyed it because I am a big nerd. I hope that my new map catches the eyes of my students and helps them understand the journey they are taking in my class. What ways can you think of to help students understand the "what" and "why" of their learning in your class?

Video Feedback

After a bit of a rough semester due to lack of attendance in my live sessions, this semester I have decided to re-focus my efforts on rapport and community building in my classroom. I have several new techniques I am trying in order to do this, but I wanted to share one of these today.

This school year, I have been using a screencasting tool called Screencast-o-matic to provide snippet lessons to my students (more about that here). This semester, I have also been using this tool to provide personalized feedback to my students about their artwork. Below is a sample:


 Video feedback allows students to hear what I have to say in my own voice. It also allows me to draw on the screen in a more animated way than I have been able to before-see here. See below.

I have found that about 80-90% of students watch these videos (something I was not able to track before) and students seem to be more willing to make a revision and resubmit than they are with written feedback alone. I am enjoying giving students feedback in this way and hope to see even more improvements in their work throughout this semester as well as improved rapport!

"Blank Space" Art Teacher Verison

Today I got a little crazy and made a new welcome video for my semester 2 classroom. I cannot wait to hear what they think!

Whatever it Takes

I have hit a little bit of a static time within my classroom these past few months. I haven't had many new teaching strategies I've been trying as I have been focusing much of my time leading my colleagues in completing the Ohio 5-Step Process as Teacher Based Teams. Leadership is also the focus of the 4th year of the Ohio Resident Educator Program which I have been working on as well. It feels refreshing that this week I have finally been able to focus more on helping individual students.
As I have said before, one of the strengths of an online environment is being about to work with students on an individual basis, in fact it is much more rare for me to work with students as a group. This week I have been focusing on engaging students who have not been successful on their own as of yet. Previous to this week I sent out letters, made calls to parents and students, and sent countless emails to attempt to engage these reluctant learners.

This week, I tried putting my money where my mouth is so to speak and invited these struggling students to one-on-one synchronous sessions. For these sessions I prepared slides that walk students through each step of every project in my course. I invited students to attend via phone calls and individual emails (with their names in the subject line!). Once a student entered the classroom I would direct the students through each project step-by-step using the slides on the board and demonstrating each step over the my document camera. These sessions did get pretty lengthy but students were willing to stay, with the goal of passing the course at the end of our time working together. I'll be honest, until this week I have had lackluster attendance in my synchronous sessions, but these catch up interventions are working their magic on some of my most difficult to reach students.

Using Video Snippets in the (Online) Classroom

I have always been a proponent of video in my classroom. They offer great demonstrations of both vocabulary and techniques in a way that visual learners benefit from. Here is a link to some samples the videos I have created that fit into the demonstration category. 

Recently, I have started using videos in a few new ways due to the ability to pull in videos from sources like YouTube and embed them into my classroom pages. I use short, fun videos that I find to spark discussion via reflective questions. I have had a weekly discussion board in the past where I use articles from Scholastic Art to generate discussion, but I have found it is fun to mix up the sources that students are viewing, and it can lead to some great creative thinking! 

This is the first video I used in my discussion board. I looked for videos that were less than 5 minutes long and that could be used to prompt students to think about the big question, "What is art?" I asked them to reflect on the following:
1. Which definition of art from the video do you most agree with?
2. Do you think “bad” art still art? Why or why not?
3. At this moment, what do you think is the most important function of art?
At this point in the course, students have had a little bit of exposure to different styles of art but have mostly focused on drawing techniques. I really enjoyed reading their responses, especially from the third question as it prompted a great range of ideas from personal expression to visual communication and everything in between. 


The other more recent use of videos in the classroom is a variation on recorded live lessons I have used in the past. I have always recorded my synchronous lessons for students to watch at a time which is convenient for them (check out this post for more information on how that works). However, due to a shift in focus this year in my live instruction schedule, I haven't had a high attendance rate for my lessons each week. With this change and the availability of a new tool called Screencast-O-Matic I have begun to make lesson snippets: an overview of lesson content for the week summed up in 5-10 minutes. This week I am out of my office for much of the day due to state testing, so it is especially important that I was able to post a short lesson video into my weekly announcements for students to access this week while they are working. 

Shifting the Focus of Live Instruction

At the beginning of every new school year, we return to the classroom with new focuses, technology, and challenges. Attendance has always been a struggle with live instruction in teaching online for me. In the past it has been offered as a structured lesson once or twice a week which for many classes focused on direct instruction. These sessions have always been optional for high school students as the online environment attracts students who prefer or need flexibility in their education. Because the lessons were optional, it was common that we would only get 5-10% of our students attending them. I have always enjoyed teaching these lessons and I believe my students have gotten a lot out of them in the past.

This year however, my school is trying something new and emphasizing more activity-based instruction in the live sessions and more hours of availability for one-on-one help. I am available for students 3 hours a day, 3 days a week to help students one-on-one in an open live lesson. So far, I have discovered the following pros and cons about the new arrangement:

Pros:

• Students no longer need to make an appointment or call to get one-on-one help which should increase the number of students getting assistance they need.
• Because I have so much live instruction time, I find myself inviting individual students to work with me on assignments they struggled with (previous to this year, I invited students as an entire class to come work with me if they needed help rather than personal invitations).
• Helping students in a live session environment (instead of on the phone) is much more effective in the art classroom because I can employ visuals like my document camera or slides when working with them.
• The switch has encouraged me to make intervention lessons and target the students whose quiz and project scores are low.

Cons:

• Attendance for traditional live lessons is down quite a bit even though the lessons are still offered to students. I'm not sure if students feel like they need a structured lesson but I miss the community I feel it created.
• The switch to live sessions as a main form of help doesn't seem to have caught on completely with students yet so I suspect not all students are attending when they need help

As the year goes on I'm sure I will learn the most effective ways to use this new arrangement to help students and hope to increase achievement and engagement.

Video Game Connections

I am going to admit it, I am a big video game geek! And this week in my classroom I am using video games to build rapport with students and help them connect their learning to the world outside the classroom.

This week they are learning about the foreground, middle, and background. So, I began the lesson with a slide showing how video game artists employ the element of proportion when creating a fictional world. For this example I used my own character from World of Warcraft. The example seemed to catch student interest. 

When I teach this lesson, some of my students have difficulty drawing a room from their own point-of-view for the first time (their assignment for the week). I receive drawings that look like blueprints or where the furniture looks flat or as if it were drawn from several different angles. I decided I wanted to emphasize the idea of drawing what they see by sharing some video game screen shots. The first displays the character, followed by what they see, and finally what a sample drawing could be from that scene.

This week I also included a short writing prompt which I found in Scholastic Art Magazine about video games. The article is called "Is There Art in Your Xbox?". Students read the article and reflect on the questions, "Do you believe that video games are art? Why or why not?". So far I have gotten some great responses and I am excited to help students make connections to different forms of art they already interact with. Later this month, my students will be invited to a field trip at a local art museum to see "The Art of Video Games" an exhibition that focuses on the emergence of video games as a form of storytelling. 

Online Professional Development for Any Art Teacher!

I am no stranger to online PD as my school occasionally offers it instead of face-to-face PD. However, the awesome website The Art of Education now offers online PD for any art teacher several times a year. Today was the first AOE conference I have attended. In previous years, I have attended several NAEA national conferences as both a presenter and attendee and I have thoroughly enjoyed them. However, high cost of travel and registration are preventing me from going this year, but the low cost of the Art of Ed Summer Conference makes it reachable for practically any teacher! Here are my observations from today about what it is like to attend an online conference:
-The first 1000 art teachers to register for the conference received a "swag" box in the mail full of the samples one would normally obtain in the vendor room at NAEA. This is a big perk to me as though it is fun to run around the giant room and create art projects with different supply companies, I always feel I need to spend more time there than I want to. Also, the swag box offered many full samples such as a set of 25 oil pastels, lesson plans with sample materials, block printing ink and block, sketchbook, an issue of Scholastic Art with discount code (great common core resource), re-usable color mixing palette, drink koozie, and an "Art to Remember" mug. I am really impressed with the amount and quality of items in the swag box!
-You might not think you'd make many connections when attending an online conference. However, I had so much fun today connecting with art teachers from all over the world via social media. Using the tag #aoeconference I could see what everyone was saying about the conference in real time. Also, the Art of Ed community offers the ability to discuss the presentations any time after the conference. This means I can ask questions to the presenters after the fact all in one easy place.
-Wow, what a wealth of information! The topics today ranged from incorporating contemporary art, use of tech, specific clay techniques, organizational tools, to breaking down barriers between students and colleagues...etc. There were so many great pieces of advice from art teachers with all different experiences. I felt like each presentation brought me an idea or two that I am excited to incorporate into my classroom.
-Dynamic, fun, and quick presentations! Each presentation was about 10 minutes long and were shared via video that was prepared prior to the conference. This allowed for the most important information to be highlighted (and expanded upon in handouts) and the video format allowed for demos, views of classrooms, and even guests (children of several presenters helped with their videos). As a video-nut myself, it was fun for me to be able to share snippets of videos I've made and screen recordings of my classroom in my video.
-Holy handouts Batman! The conference offers an Afterpass which allows attendees to watch all of the presentations and download handouts from each presentation for 6 months after the conference. The handouts and blogs posted in this resource are so great! I will surely be using them for this coming school year, and of course I have started following all of their blogs!

Today was a great day and I am so honored to have been a part of it. Thanks Art of Ed!

The Open Art Room - Creating Structure as a Team

During my first semester this year, I had a student ask to meet with me one-on-one in our synchronous classroom software, WebEx. Often when I am trying to help students get caught up with their work, we meet and discuss which assignments to focus on and I can show them examples of the projects and answer any questions. I also showed this student demonstrations using my document camera. He really found our meeting helpful and we continued to meet like this once a week until the semester ended. He told me that working with a teacher like this made him feel more like he was in a classroom, like he was not working alone.

This got me thinking, how can I regularly create this environment for students? After speaking with some of my colleagues, "Open Art" was born. Open Art is offered to students once a week. The session is run by myself and 3 other teachers and it is open to students in any of our sections. During the session, we walk students through each step of the weekly project, demonstrate over the webcam, and answer questions as students work individually. We allow students to work at their own pace by letting them roam freely through the slides after we have reviewed them. At the end of the session students will have their project done or developed enough to finish on their own.

Here is a sample presentation from one of our sessions:

We have seen consistent attendance at these sessions and find that students appreciate the extra structure that Open Art offers them. Students know that they can plan to do their art homework during the session and can have someone there to guide them through it. Also during these sessions, our special education teacher is able to open breakout rooms to work with students one-on-one. It has been wonderful to collaborate with other teachers on my team to make sure these sessions run smoothly. I will definitely be implementing Open Art again next year!

Success!

I have concluded my semester 1 with my highest ever passing rate as a teacher. 74% of my students passed Art 1! I believe the passing packet and my other efforts to engage students during the last 2 weeks of the semester really made the difference this time.
The method I used:
1. Send out mid-term grades for the 2nd quarter.
2. Send the passing packet to all failing students (see previous entry)
3. 2 weeks from the end of the semester, send each failing student an email with the subject line, "Name, you are X assignments from passing!" outlining some assignment suggestions to get them to a passing grade
4. 2 weeks from the end of the semester, call each failing student to tell them about the email
5. Last week of the semester, call each failing student who has not completed the work assigned in the email and remind them of the amount of time they have left to complete it
6. Provide an extension of the weekend to complete all missing work

With this method I was able to engage my reluctant learners so they could succeed and earn their required fine art credit. I'll continue to use this method next semester and hope for similar results.

Getting Silly and the Passing Packet

As we approach the end of semester 1 for 2013-2014, there has been a big focus in my department around pass rates. This school year is the first time in Ohio that a fine arts credit is required for all students to graduate. As an art teacher, I think this is fantastic news! However, it has been a challenge this year with an increased population of students being placed in my Art 1 class who do not want to be there and also might not know about the new requirement. Engagement is always a challenge in an online environment, especially when students are not interested in the content. I also often find that students have high anxiety about drawing and art in general. There are many ways I work to soften and break down these barriers of learning in my class through video, step-by-step instructions, live lessons, demonstrations, and working with students one-on-one. However, for the students who aren't looking at my lesson pages at all, it is a bit more difficult to help them. Thus, I have begun to get a little more creative with my approach to reach reluctant learners, and even a little silly. 
I have created a document called the "Passing Packet" which is a word document that includes all of the lesson materials and project instructions for all of the projects students are required to do to pass. I have broken it down to make it as simple as possible. Complete the packet, earn your credit. Now, I do not distribute this information to students who are already engaging and being successful. I only give it to students who have not engaged in the content throughout the first 15 weeks of school. It is my hope that I can engage even the most reluctant learners to engage and pass Art 1. I also worked with my co-teacher Dana to create a fun video that helps remind students we have a sense of humor, and even though they might be frustrated, we are here do everything we can to help.

Remembering Why We Do This

For the past few weeks, I have been collecting data from my post-test for my SLO. I wrote about this test earlier this year when we implemented it for the first time. At my school, this test is 23 multiple-choice questions offered through a website outside of our LMS. Students take this test during the first 3 weeks of school and the first 3 weeks after quarter 1 of Art 1. I started this journey feeling very upbeat and excited to see what my students came into my classroom knowing and how they would grow throughout the quarter. What I have found is some unsettling data.

At the moment (several hours before the closing of my post-test), I am sitting at 58.9% of my students hitting their growth targets. That puts me in the "Least Effective" category as a teacher. Throughout my young career as a teacher over these past 3 years, I have been told nothing but good things about my teaching methods by administrators. My students have given me positive feedback about what they are learning when I speak to them and I have generally felt fulfilled and proud of where I am as a teacher. These results threw a wrench into my teacher ego!

As it is, I am still not sure what is causing my students to do so poorly. I know of the barriers we have that might affect their performance; students not engaging with the content, test anxiety, students tired of taking all of these assessments (one per class, 2 times in 10 weeks), the weakness of multiple-choice questions to assess project-based learning, home environment, test questions with confusing wording, and a lack of effort to name a few. I have gone through many days of discouragement this week, feeling like everything I have learned about education is wrong and all the compliments about my teaching methods have been lies.

But then, I started to look at the data more closely. I began to see students growing by leaps and bounds! Some of my weakest performers have grown by the highest percentage. I even have students who have scored 100% on my post-test. When I was inputting the data of one of my students with special needs and saw that he not only hit his growth target but surpassed it, I jumped for joy! I was reminded why I am a teacher. It is not about crunching the numbers and hitting this arbitrary goal. It is about teaching each individual student and helping each of them grow. Maybe the data isn't showing it, but the students who have actively engaged in learning in my classroom have a wealth of new knowledge. I know this from talking to them, and from watching their work improve every single week.

I will continue to troubleshoot my assessments for my SLO and how I can overcome these barriers so the data starts to really reflect more of what is going on in my classroom. But, there are just some things that you can't quantify.

Am I a least-effective teacher? I certainly don't feel like one.