About an hour ago I got home from a meeting with other mentor teachers of student teachers from UC Davis. I'm teaming up with another teacher at my school to mentor a UC Davis student; the other's teacher's two classes are the "primary placement", while my one class is the "secondary placement". "Secondary placement" means that my student teacher will not take over actually teaching my one class until next semester, but will observe and assist until then.
The class in question is the class I've been writing about on this blog, most recently here. We gave a test in there on Monday. The results were disastrous. Of the students present to take the test, a full 25% of them failed. More than a couple had scores in the 30s and 40s--yes, percent. Yes, there were several high grades as well, but that doesn't make those F's disappear.
At this meeting of mentor teachers this evening, the supervising teachers from UC Davis stated that a recent study of "what makes a good mentor teacher" showed that while good and bad teachers shared many commonalities, one difference stuck out: good teachers showed "vulnerability" to their student teachers. They, for lack of a better way to put it, let student teachers see the mentor teacher struggle and even fail, and didn't try to cover this up. This shows the student teacher that things don't always go swimmingly, and that a "growth mindset" applies to teachers as well as to students. A failed lesson isn't the end of the world.
I think those test results above qualify as "struggling" and "failing" to teach my students as well as I should have.
Because of a quirk in scheduling peculiar to my school, I have a 2-hr prep period tomorrow. From 8 to 9 am, my student teacher and I are going to meet. Since she's been observing my teaching, I'm going to solicit her thoughts on my instruction. I'm going to listen to her observations of the class, and see if she has any suggestions for things we might work together on to improve student performance. She'll be teaching the class herself in a few months, I'm sure she'll want them appropriately prepared, so it's in both our best interests to have a frank discussion about what we can do to provide better instruction.
I'm thinking that this constitutes "showing vulnerability".
Update, 9/27/17: We had a good, productive discussion today. We'll try a couple different things, most notably avoiding the textbook (awful) and me lecturing. When practicing problems, we'll utilize the old stand-by of "I do, we do, you do"--which I always try to do, but time constraints in this course are bad, so I don't always get to. Now I have to be more explicit in my personal expectations.
There are a couple other things we'll try as well.
Also, this class is full of students who haven't really had to work at math before. It was easy, so they didn't develop study habits for math class. Been there, done that! I recognized that in the faces of some of my students today, and was able to address it with them. Those things they've never had to do before--coming in before and after school, actually studying for tests and quizzes--they have to do them now, and they're not used to it.
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