What I learned from a week of TeachFX
Guest Contributor: Daniel Lee
I became a teacher because I believe students from all backgrounds deserve a high-quality education from invested teachers, and I am constantly adjusting my teaching strategies to ensure my students are in a productive learning environment. But as a first-year teacher, it can be difficult to target where change is needed in my lesson structure or delivery without direct, explicit feedback.
Recently, I was introduced to TeachFX by a friend and decided to try it out in my classroom. After only a week, I realized how much I needed the formative feedback that the application provided!
What has been the most helpful for me has been to review my TeachFX data across the classes for the same lesson and see where inconsistencies occur. Here are some of my takeaways.
In my first year teaching I admit my classroom management is still a work-in-progress, and with my toughest sections (in terms of management) I see less Silence, more Teacher Talk, and more Group Talk:
These are areas where classroom management was an issue. See all those (undesired) blocks of Group Talk?
My large Group Talk time (which I am okay with) helps me realize that I need more structure behind my group work, whether it be including more think-pair-shares or a tighter structure (e.g. assigning roles for each student).
My low Student Talk in comparison to Teacher Talk and Group Talk is a direct result of lack of synthesis after activities, and poor facilitation of full-class discussions. This will be something I want to work on, along with stressing academic vocabulary.
Notice that after the group activity ends, I don’t provide students with time to discuss and synthesize what they learned in he activity!
Minimal Silence informs me I need to include more wait time and opportunities for students to work on their own. Currently, my classes might have too much partner work time, which has been something I’ve played around with throughout the year.
What I’ve found really helpful in conjunction with the application are the blog posts. I appreciate the brevity of the posts and how quickly I can obtain insights that I can readily implement or look out for the next day while teaching or afterward through TeachFX.
Using TeachFX also gave me a couple ideas for my school:
My school recently ran a PD where we taught a segment of an upcoming lesson to receive feedback. The PD was really valuable, for both veteran teachers and new teachers like me, but with how time-intensive the exercise was, we realized it would be impossible to do this kind of thing regularly. But now, we could solve this time-capacity issue by using TeachFX.
The experience of using TeachFX also got me interested in the professional learning workshops that TeachFX offers. Imagine how valuable it would be to target areas of improvement through TeachFX data!
Even after only a week’s worth of data, I saw how powerful insights from TeachFX can be. I’ve even had the opportunity to share these insights with my PLC during our weekly meetings. As someone with minimal teaching experience, it was very encouraging to be able to thoughtfully contribute to discussions where other new and veteran teachers are learning together. I’m excited to continue to use TeachFX in the classroom and hope other teachers will adopt it to advance their teaching practice as well!