Tag: Writing

MTOY Essays – Discovering The “Aha” Moment

~ Kyle Shack ~ Leave a comment

In the fall of 2023 I was honored to be nominated for 2024-2025 Michigan Teacher of the Year (MTOY). As part of the nomination process, each nominee submitted a collection of essays responding to various prompts related to their career, experiences, key educational issues, and Michigan schools overall. While the audience of each essay was the MTOY committee, it felt inauthentic to keep my ruminations private, languishing in a forgotten folder on my desktop. The opportunity to reflect on these questions and formulate my ideas was a wonderfully rewarding experience twelve years into my career, and one that I would like to share if for no other reason than to push myself to keep these ideas, and the process, at the forefront of my mind while I continue to engage in the deep work that is education.

Formatting note: Each essay was limited to no more than 2 pages, double spaced, size 12 font. My original drafts exceeded this by several multitudes, but I appreciated the exercise in concise expression.

MTOY Essay #1:

What motivated you to become a teacher? What was the biggest obstacle you encountered in your journey to becoming a teacher, and how did you overcome that obstacle?

Early in my educational journey, I discovered my passion for working with and helping people. While nearing the end of my Political Science Pre-Law degree in college and contemplating law school, I decided to take an elective called “Reflections in Teaching.” This course opened my eyes to the science of learning and sparked a profound interest in the “aha” moment – the moment when understanding dawns and everything falls into place.

Studying learning and education allowed me to experience and embrace that “lightbulb” feeling firsthand. The more I delved into the field, the more fascinated I became with all the elements that contribute to the process of learning and comprehension. Each time I witnessed that “aha” moment, I realized it was the feeling I had always cherished, and I wanted to explore it further. I wanted to understand how to foster it in others and provide support along the way.

Discovering the intricacies of this epiphany shifted my vision and career path. I made the decision to change my major and pursue a degree and career in education. However, this sudden shift came with challenges. I was well into my junior year of college, and I found myself a year behind my peers who had been dedicated to the field of education from the start. This meant I had to navigate a change in my financial timeline and add over thirty additional credit hours to my educational journey.

To address these deficits I focused my energy on the element of the discipline that had drawn me to the field, which was the process of learning. I knew that extending my degree by thirty undergraduate credits, and the required year of unpaid internship was going to be a strain, so I identified how I could address this while also deepening my understanding. I used this as an opportunity to become a student employee within the College of Education at Michigan State University, serving in the role as a Technical Intern throughout my undergraduate studies. In this role I juggled the act of working and learning to ensure my financial possibilities aligned, but more importantly I took the opportunity to live in the discipline beyond the walls and hours of my teacher prep program. 

As a student employee I served the faculty of the College in their technological needs and was able to turn my relatively late transition into the field of teacher preparation into an opportunity to learn by doing. Assisting academics and practitioners in molding their craft allowed me to think deeply and reflect on the practice, and how I envisioned my own career as a facilitator of learning. Through this experience I truly lived the notion that the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone. Without the constraints that guided me toward being a student employee, I am certain I would not have been as successful or prepared when I joined the field as a practitioner.

Improving Writing by Empowering a Growth Mindset

~ Kyle Shack ~ Leave a comment

The correlation between a growth mindset and student success is easy to see. We all want our students to view learning as a process, not as a static goal or finish line. As Carol Dweck explains in her book Mindset, a growth mindset is the attitude that ability and intelligence are not predestined, but are ever evolving, growing and developing. The “wicked problem”  for me has been addressing students who have developed a fixed mindset, especially older students who often arrive in my room with little experience related to the value of a growth mindset.

As I began to consider ways I could incorporate characteristics of a growth mindset into my pedagogy, I reflected on the approach my students take to writing assignments. Traditionally, I have assigned students a writing task as a summative assessment at the end of a unit. I provide time in class to work on the assignment, and offer my help to students as they work through the writing process. This culminates with a due date, when the writing is set to be complete.  However, I have noticed that many of my students default to the human tendency of finding the shortest route to accomplish the assigned task. From a student’s view, that route involves writing as little as is required, turning it in and moving on from the assignment. Since only one grade is entered when the final product is turned in, it is easy to see why brainstorming, prewriting and most importantly revisions feel like “extra” work for a student approaching the assignment with a fixed mindset.

For these fixed mindset students the assignment feels like an opportunity to demonstrate their current writing ability, not an opportunity to learn. Proficient writers will view the assignment as a chance to demonstrate that they are “good” writers, and struggling students will see it as a chance to prove they are “bad” writers. In both scenarios, the student’s view that their ability as a writer is “fixed” can hinder their growth.

As Dweck explains in her book, students can develop this fixed mindset through messaging.  When a writing assignment leaves no time for improvement, feedback or reflection, it can communicate to a student that the goal of writing is the final product, not the process of learning how to create a quality piece. The danger here is that students learn that their job is to get it “right” the first time, or not at all.

To address this, I decided I needed to rethink the way I implemented writing in my classes. The goal is to remove the emphasis from “fixed” elements of writing, and to place the emphasis instead on the “growth” elements. The structure of a writing assignment should communicate that writing, like ability and intelligence, is a never ending process of growth, failure, revision and development. Instead of assessing a student’s ability to complete a final product, assessment is focused on the improvement of writing.

My first attempt at communicating this message is to place the emphasis not on the final product, but instead on the revisions. For my students final writing project this trimester, the rough draft they turn in will be worth roughly 25% of their final project grade. The remaining 75% will be connected to revisions of their writing, with the focus of the assessment being on the inclusion of teacher feedback in those revisions. This not only communicates that the revisions are the most important part of the process, but also that growth is the determiner of a grade, not static ability.

The goal of this change is to communicate to students that success is not the measurement of talent or intelligence, but instead success is found in the process of learning and growth. As noted by Dweck, a student’s mindset is developed through constant messaging. I don’t expect this small change to create a room full student’s demonstrating a growth mindset. As all teachers know, students bring their prior experiences with them each and every day, both the good and the bad.  However, I view this as an opportunity to reverse the messaging and communicate that I am not interested in judging their skills, ability or intelligence, but celebrating their development as young writers and learners.

 

Works Cited

Dweck, Carol S. Mindset. Robinson, 2017.