Professional Growth Reflection

As I reflect on my student teaching experience I realize how many erroneous notions I had about the compensatory effects technology might provide in the classroom. I started with a comparative abundance of technological savvy as compared to the teaching staff, so, initially I was able to be of quite a bit of assistance to the staff in that regard. But what surprised me was how unfamiliar many students also were with the basic functioning of their district-assigned laptops. Many didn't know where files could be retrieved after saving. One student asked me how to add a page on Microsoft Word. I had read and heard anecdotes like this before, but it was startling to realize how comprehensively phones have now fully supplanted computers. My generation threw itself at desktops, very quickly learning the ins and outs in a free-wheeling era of digital literacy. But the future arrived with supercomputers that were pocket-sized. So, for all the fancy Powerpoint transitions I had up my sleeve, I think, in retrospect, that it may have appeared more anachronistic than I want to admit. For one thing, my lesson on Boolean search term operators was supplanted, almost in real-time, by the staggering rise in artificial intelligence during the same month I presented it. This is an example of how I learned, over the course of the experience, to pivot away from over-reliance on the tricks of my era, and move back towards those of an even more previous era that nevertheless remain prime in developing and sustaining healthy classrooms and student-teacher relationships: proximity and movement management, attention to transitions, varied instruction and constantly checking for understanding don't lose value. Once I began to focus on these, my teaching became more effective, and less tethered to my notions or notes.

Learning from the old master

In the early days of my student teaching experience my mentor teacher was negotiating with me about when to start phasing me in to teach the class a bit more. The lesson he suggested to me was a primer on plot structure. But I was hesitant, ultimately because, as I admitted, sheepishly, I still felt that I didn't deeply understand why the ancient Greeks were so obsessed with tragedy – the most notorious of all plot structures. He understood this. He said that modern attitudes about morality often obscure how ancient peoples thought about it, and that my outlook was less ignorant than anachronistic — which was charitable. He explained that I was making a very common mistake in assigning to these bleak endings the moralizing takeaway of most modern readers who miss a happy ending. But he explained that this reframes the (properly understood) protagonism of a character like Oedipus into that of a moral degenerate, at fault for his own downfall. And that mistake, he emphasized, stems from the commonly misunderstood literary trope of the "fatal flaw," originated by, of all people, Aristotle. This part I did know, but I didn't know its significance. The word for fatal flaw is actually the same word the Bible will often translate as "sin," which, more accurately, means "missing the mark," from its contextual origins in archery. He explained that, if you actually read Aristotle's Poetics, in it he deliberately and explicitly contrasts this with the Greek term for what we would think of as sin. But it's a different word. And what he's doing there, my mentor explained, is emphasizing the fact that tragic error happens despite good intentions from good people, and that tragedy was meant to elicit sympathy from a Greek audience, and deliberately not the kind of judgements modern readers often casually assign.

This was a revelation. So, helpfully buttressed, I ended up teaching the lesson on Plot Structure and borrowing that insight to help explain the appeal of tragedy to the class. When comparing the plot structures of others stories, and finding examples for each, a further deepening of understanding occurred: Modern people, especially in the United States, might have such an acute difficulty in intuitively grasping the appeal of tragedy because our most famous national myth is the American Dream: a shape of progress that, plotted out, is the exact inverse of the classic shape of a tragedy. My mentor teacher had helped me understand why our national narrative arc would seem just as incommensurably incomprehensible to the ancient Greeks as they still seem to us. 

Rotating the hierarchy

During an after-school professional development meeting with several other departments we discussed the importance of addressing the kinds of social hierarchies that often negatively influence small group dynamics. I was happy to hear the other teacher's experiences with this, as I'd witnessed an uneven distribution of conversation in our own table group discussions and wondered what could be done, besides waiting for the unit break to restructure seating arrangements.

The session focused on shared staff experiences regarding implementing structured role rotations, where each table group member assumes an alternating set of responsibilities. The facilitator, our school's assistant principal, modeled this strategy by dividing us into short story analysis groups with roles for each of us that would shift around every 10 minutes. The roles would be tied to specific skills and each role was necessary for the group’s success. After practicing this we all discussed how it actually serves a very specific purpose: to redistribute authority more equally, making it possible to hear a more diverse array of perspectives.

This was an excellent use of professional development time and the anecdotes were very telling, with several staff mentioning how visibly uncomfortable the louder or more capable students were with this arrangement — with some even requesting to do the whole activity by themselves rather than participate in this way. Whereas my pedagogy focuses on retraining student attention, this is a good example of the need to retrain teacher's attentions on highly salient, equity-improving instructional choices like this one. The exercise helped clarify the importance for teachers to be aware of their own potential for blindspots — and the surprising sociological consequences that can result from neglecting to intentionally and skillfully structure classroom space. In future English classes, I can imagine applying this strategy to create skill-specific, role-based inquiry groups investigating literary devices, characters, themes, symbols, and other elements of fiction in a much more equitable distribution of opportunity.

Collaboration

One of my technological contributions to the school was to set up the GoGuardian web-blocking software for the faculty of the Language Arts department. All of it was ready for use but had lain latent because its distribution by the administration had not corresponded with allocated time to train the staff. Only one day had been reserved for training by the end of the previous summer. This had predictable results. The district's internet blocker was notoriously inadequate in blocking any except for the worst of the web, so students were commonly found playing games, busying themselves with other homework or generally training their attentions away from the ongoing lesson at hand. 

With permission of the administration and in consultation with my mentor teacher I had, by the time I began leading class, compiled several GoGuardian reports for review by staff and administration. This formative assessment data provided many insights into how such task-switching behavior affected student's time management, impacted learning outcomes and indicated significant losses to learning time in class. Based on this data, my mentor teacher and I identified several students whose persistent reliance on non-class related distractions had significantly diminished their participation. In many such cases we intervened by using this data as a means to initiate soft check-ins about the student's current goals, time management, and expectations for how they expected this off-task behavior could affect their overall grade.

But more than that, this collaborative analysis between mentor teacher, department staff and administration eventually led to a renewed effort by several teachers to take these implications more seriously. And it ended up subsequently shaping my approach to lesson planning and classroom management in the weeks that followed my final reports. And I believe it will continue to. When we quantified the number of distractions we also noticed when off-task digital behavior peaked — usually during transition times or periods where sustained focus was most required. There were short periods of time when I used GoGuardian's real-time monitoring feature to initiate brief check-ins with students who continued to exhibit this behavior, but by the time I had began my student teaching and recording my demonstration observations I had modified many of my planned lessons to exclude technological components entirely and had been granted permission to implement the full extent of the software's capabilities. This had the added benefit of encouraging other teachers to request my assistance in setting theirs up as well. This experience was surprising. I did not expect the data to be as clear as it was with regard to the impact laptops had on student engagement, with the strong implication that I needed to focus time redesigning my instruction to actively preempt such pervasive disengagement. 

With little exaggeration, I think this window of perception into the extent to which technology can be co-opted by students to exacerbate the most fundamental of classroom problems has shifted my orientation away from many tools I considered promising at the beginning of the program. It has also encouraged me in what I consider to be healthier pedagogical directions. Despite the GoGuardian software remaining on, I took the opportunity — with the encouragement of my mentor teacher – to experiment with lesson plan designs that focused more on social-emotional aspects of collaborative learning and forced me away from the front of the class in a way that made it more comfortable to move from table to table. I altered several lesson plans that had originally included Nearpod collaborative boards and instead focused on practicing my own mobility, conducting the conversation as I would have, but providing an embodied presence that was previously lost to proximal distance. These modifications have also helped my growth as a teacher by deepening appreciation for the importance of quality formative assessment data and how it can function as a teacher's way of actively listening to the learning needs of the class. The collaboration with fellow staff also added to my confidence and is an encouraging sign of the institutional value I can provide.

Validation from the NEA

Since beginning this program I have received the National Education Association's flagship magazine, NEA Today, four times a year, and found their features on current research in the field of education engaging and helpful for charting a path through the abundant bevy of research-based instructional strategies. They have provided useful frames through which to interpret the latest discussions regarding technology in the classroom, and generally take a pragmatic, neutral stance on the topic, which allows many different perspectives to be voiced. But during the course of my student teaching, the NEA published a more insistently-titled article, "Take Cellphones Out of the Classroom, Educators Say," (Walker, 2025) whose print-version title was clearer and truer to my experience: "I Don't Want To Be The Phone Police." The article describes a growing movement of teachers who are campaigning against cell phone use in classrooms. Reading the article felt like reading tales from my own classroom, with the clear experiential inference that phones don't enhance but instead distract and disrupt student learning. In my own experience, and in the experiences cited in NEA Today, it figures as an incessant impediment to meaningful engagement. Even when away in backpacks the phone's implicit siren-song constituted a clear barrier to deeper engagement. The article helped remind me of the importance of intentional presence in the classroom, and how technology can put distance between the very dynamic that best facilitates learning. It reminded me of what I learned from my mother, of teaching's fundamental relational quality; and the fact that where presence is missing, learning is, too. The teachers in Walker's article emphasized that only with cell phone removal is a reclamation of attention, discussion, connection and, ultimately, relationship possible. This resonates with the heart of my teaching philosophy, which asserts the primacy of unmediated, meaningful interaction over faddish technological shortcuts ― regardless of the marginal increase in assessment data. And it helps define my evolution from a novice instructor, reliant on tech trends, to a more discerning one, active in shaping technology’s role. The NEA thus helped confirm reconsideration of instructional strategies that I initially supposed naturally engaging, instead of what they too often are: an unnatural rewiring that reinforces reliance on cognitive crutches. It deepened my conviction that shortcuts in the learning process do no one any favors, and as an educator I should have no part in it without deeply considering the extent to which a limited role for technology might positively add to my classroom's culture.

Another very useful gift from my student teaching experience was the increasing awareness I gained of how vast a spectrum of capability and need much exist in every high school classroom. Part of meeting a student where they're at is being able to address their idiosyncratic learning styles, along with their abilities and interests. For this reason I'd most like to continue developing more effective differentiation in my instruction. Some of my most meaningful personal victories were with very difficult students – those who my mentor teacher confided "maybe shouldn't even be in this classroom." And while these victories wouldn't have been possible without maintaining a steady posture of non-judgemental equilibrium that psychologist Carl Rogers (1957) called "unconditional positive regard," I would like to go beyond this level of interpersonal respect to a more systematic focus on improving my instructional responsiveness. As that awareness grew I made it more actionable by tailoring aspects of lesson plans to certain students, but I understand that effective, diversified forms of differentiation require deeper study and application than I was able to accomplish while student teaching. My goal is to be able to show the kind of preemptive respect that anticipates and addresses student needs prior even to offering such unconditional positive regard. 

Where the future leads

As I've tried to convey, for all my life I've been in love with the process of learning. And I always find opportunities to master the skills I'm most interested in. And when it comes to learning effective differentiation strategies, I am fortunate to be located near several adequately resourced organizations that afford these opportunities. I plan on utilizing them. In between substitute teaching and helping raise my eight-month-old daughter I will use this interregnum to leverage opportunities from the professional development-driven organizations in my area. One of these is the Puget Sound Educational Service District (PSESD), which offers an array of training to local educators, and is currently ― as of this writing— offering a workshop on differentiated instruction. The PSESD also provides opportunities to connect with other educators who live in the area, who I would love to meet and begin networking with, in hopes that one day such connections could benefit my students, colleagues and community stakeholders. Our Edmonds School District, which previously employed my wife, and nearby Edmonds College, regularly provide our neighborhood accessible professional development activities, which I will also be looking into, in addition to the workshops provided by the Washington Education Association (WEA), which are known for offering resources to assist with problems of inequity and the needs of divergent learning styles. It is also currently providing a course on differentiated instruction. By the time I receive an offer of full-time work I will have already completed one of these workshops and will be one more step along the path of further integrating it into my pedagogy.  

When hired, I plan on greeting my new colleagues with an immediate – hopefully not too abrupt – offer of assistance in collaborating on lesson planning and co-teaching wherever there is need. This is in hope that, while helping, I can also learn how others effectively deploy differentiation strategies in their classrooms. The onus is on me from day one to develop professionally in this regard, so I will make the first offer and burden no one with a cold shoulder. I already live with the personal and professional impulses to develop these skills in instruction, and so finding helpful materials to further incorporate a growing theoretical understanding can be expected.

References

Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal 

of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), p. 96. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045357.

Walker, T. (2025, January). Take cellphones out of the classroom, educators say. NEA Today, 43(5), 28.