Half-Day Wednesdays Reflection

Being a teacher means being a learner. Knowing this and believing in this made me incredibly
excited to have the opportunity to participate in multiple “Half-Day Wednesdays” at Auburn
Middle School. Half-Day Wednesdays are a half day of school for the kids and the second half
was devoted to meetings and professional development for teachers. These provide the space
for teachers to have conversations about best practices in education, listen and learn from
presentations, and learn from each other. During these meetings, important school wide
information and updates are often shared and staff has the chance to have their voices heard.

Throughout these meetings, I had the opportunity to learn from staff members about their
professional development trackers and participate in discussions about student learning and
success.

During one particular meeting, we were asked to split into randomized groups, read a short
article and then discuss it with our group. The most interesting part was that each of us in the
group had a different article. This meant the discussion was incredibly rich and varied. The
groups were determined by which card you picked out of a deck. This meant you could end up
with a music teacher, a student teacher, a math teacher and an ed tech all in the same group,
with the same goal: to learn from each other. When it came time for discussion, each person
had a different perspective on each aspect of the articles. All of the articles chosen had a central
theme. After we had had time to discuss the different articles with our groups, we were asked to
go find the other people with the same article. We repeated this discussion process. Finally, we
came back together as an entire staff to discuss the central ideas and themes.

On another specific half-day, we went through a specific Marzano target that all teachers were
working towards. This specific half-day was at the very beginning of my student teaching. This
was an immense help for me to gain a working understanding of the Marzano targets that would
become so integral for my lesson and unit planning. By having this opportunity to listen and
participate in standards based discussions with the staff, I was able to have a base
understanding of the content standards needed to plan. This also prompted several discussions
with my mentor teacher about the standards and their structure as related to English Language
Arts. As I began to lesson plan, I knew how the learning targets were structured and how they
progressed through a base knowledge, to a deeper understanding. By having this opportunity to
learn and be exposed to the standards on a all content basis, to having discussions about
standards with my mentor, I can confidently say have I a better working understanding of the
Marzano ELA standards now.

Throughout these Half-Day Wednesdays, I was able to listen and learn about the different
aspects of teaching and education. These meetings were incredibly helpful for me to listen,
learn, and collaborate with members of the school. This was a great opportunity for me to learn
about different resources, different approaches, and understand different aspects of teaching
and the school.