Name: Courtney Deuel

Position: Fifth Grade/ English-Language Arts

School: Perry Elementary School
District: Perry Community Schools 
Years of teaching: 12
Courtney is a 5th grade teacher at Perry Elementary. She graduated form the University of Nebraska at
Kearney, “UNK”, in 2011 with her bachelors in elementary education and ESL K-12. She got her masters in
2016 from UNK with a masters in curriculum and instruction with an emphasis on reading and special
education. She primarily teaches reading and writing to her 5th graders now as the 5th grade is split up by
subjects. Over the years she has taught every grade level K-12. She spent the beginning of her career working
with EL students of all levels but has been a 5th grade classroom teacher for the last 7 years. She loves
teaching 5th grade and loves to see her students get excited over a novel or writing they created. One of the
reasons she likes 5th grade is that they are motivated and excited to learn. She has loved her time teaching in
Perry and can’t see herself doing anything else.

Interview Questions:
What projects do students complete?
Courtney incorporates STEM/Computer Science projects during the 5th grade MORE time. MORE in our school
is an intervention/enrichment time that is built into everyday of the week. It is a 30-40 minute block of time.
One of the things that 5th grade has their students do during this time is to use Spheros. They have a variety of
projects that revolve around the Sphero. Some of these projects are making chariots pulled by the Spheros, ,
the Grinch stealing presents from Whoville, Santa’s sleigh and reindeer among other things. The students then
must design the chariots or sleigh and code the Sphero to pull them. They are given a certain objective for the
challenge and the coding must match that objective, but students have freedom on how to meet that goal. In
her English classes she has used Scratch or Tynker to have kids do a book review. This is one of the options that
students can choose from, but she rarely has students choose this method.
How do you have students collaborate?
Students have multiple opportunities to collaborate in her classroom. Courtney has her desks typically set up
in pods to make conversation and discussion easier. In reading, students have to share viewpoints, read novels,
and help each other edit work almost on a daily basis. As students become better at collaborating throughout
the school year, she has them work in literature circles with very little direct instruction from the teacher,
forcing them to collaborate and communicate with one another. During MORE time, when the majority of their
STEM based projects occur, students are almost always in groups completing challenges together. 
What method does the teacher use for assessment?
Courtney uses a mix of formal and informal assessment. For the formal assessments, she has common
formative assessments that they use as a 5th-grade team. For informal assessment, she will use observation
and student discussions to determine proficiency. In reading, the primary subject she teaches, none of our
assessments are project based, so she relies on their common formative assessments. For writing, they have
rubrics that have been created as a 5th grade team for grading students’ writing projects. As of now, they have
no formal assessments for computer science projects, so any computer science projects that are completed
are graded based on whatever the teacher deems appropriate. 
Does the teacher use rubrics for project-based learning?
For most projects she grades from a rubric that she creates and shares with students when introducing the
assignment to them. Most of the projects they do are not part of their standards based grade that goes on
their report card. If the project is connected to a standards-based grade, then she uses a rubric that the 5th
grade team has created that they all use for grading. 
Is there more than one project required in the course?
At the moment Courtney says that computer science is not a required course, and she doesn’t solely teach
computer science so there is no certain number of projects that must be completed. At our school they do
want at least 1 coding project to be completed during the year. Generally, this is expected during the national
coding week. Even though there is no requirement for computer science projects her goal is to incorporate a
computer science based project option into each of her reading units.
What percentage of the student's grades are the projects worth?
Courtney doesn’t grade the projects that they complete due to the fact that computer science isn’t a
requirement of our standards based grading. The focus our school has put on grading is for math, reading,
writing, science and social studies.

Additional Questions:
What is the biggest challenge you have encountered with incorporating computer science into the
classroom?
The biggest challenge I have faced when incorporating technology and computer science is just ensuring the
computers/ internet are actually working that day. It seems more often than not, when I plan on completing
some sort of computer-science based activity, at least part of my class has computer problems that slow them
down, or keep them from doing the project entirely. I also struggle incorporating computer science projects
into the already full school day. Finding the time to complete projects can be hard if you’re running
interventions for students that were not proficient on a graded standard. 

What are you most excited about for this following school year?
Last year my class was a dream. They were kind to each other and excited about school. I am feeling optimistic
about the group coming up and am excited to hopefully be able to incorporate some more computer science
with them. 
Interview Reflection:

What things did you learn in the interview that you will implement in your classroom?

I have worked with Courtney for many years now. We do work in different grades but both of us are upper
elementary teachers and so there are many things that the 5th grade does that I think are great ideas. The
thing I have to be careful with though is making sure that I don’t step on their feet by doing something they do
each year. This is also something that they have to watch out for as well because they don’t want to do things
we have already done with our students. We both are very fortunate to work in teams that work very closely
together and try to provide each of our grades with very similar opportunities even when we have 6 classes
per grade. One of the things that I have done similarly but would like to incorporate more into my own classes
is using coding projects as a way for students in my reading class to present things they are reading. I thought
it was a good idea to give them the opportunity to do a book review using a coding platform. This would be
something that we could both do in our grades and hopefully as they move from 4 th to 5th grade, they can
build upon what they have done in the past and make even better projects.

How will your classroom differ from this teacher's philosophy?

I think that Courtney and I have very similar ideas when it comes to teaching computer science. One of the
ways we might differ is that our grades use our MORE time a bit differently. 5 th grade uses their MORE time for
mor project-based things where we are focused on switching kids around to hit math skills and make sure they
are mastering the essential standards we have. This means that I have to try and use more of the time
throughout the day to incorporate computer science in. I am able to do this a bit easier than 5 th grade due to
the fact that we are for the most part self-contained.

What kinds of adaptations will you have to make for virtual or distance learning in case of a shutdown?

I do think that many of the things we do for computer science in class could very easily be done by students at
home as long as they have an internet connection and their computers. That would by far be the biggest
struggle and one that our community had to deal with when we actually did shut down for COVID in the Spring
of 2020. Teaching in a lower socio-economic community does put some limitations on what all students are
able to accomplish and do just because of their home circumstances. The school did take measures the next
year to help students that needed an internet connection but on a wide scale this would be very difficult to do.
Another area that would become challenging would be to have students collaborate. It would be much harder
to have kids work together to try and accomplish a task, especially in elementary school. As students get older
it becomes more viable but honestly, I don’t see my 4th graders being very good at working with someone in a
different location over nothing but a computer they need to use to do a task as well. A third issue would be
using the robots. This week the EdWeb video showed them working on a robot from distance, but this would
be very hard to accomplish in a large group. You might be able to do it in small groups or one on one with
students, but this would take up a bunch of time. Most of the robotic things that I have done over the last few
years would be very hard to accomplish in the case of distance learning.