Facilitator and Collaborator:
A facilitator and collaborator is one that is not only a leader but also one who is able to take what they have learned and apply it to real-world situations. Being a facilitator and collaborator means having excellent communication skills. This is something that I am going to need to master as an educator. I am going to have to communicate my intentions and beliefs to not only my students but parents, colleagues, and administrators as well. Furthermore, it is crucial that I maintain excellent communication skills when working with others so when issues arise, I can effectively find a solution and make sure everyone’s needs are met. When facilitating classroom curriculum and specific lessons, I am going to need to take into account that not all students learn the same. As an educator, I am going to have to find ways to collaborate with my students in order to provide them with adequate educational opportunities. Lastly, an effective facilitator and collaborator need to be an active listener. In order to create a positive and productive learning environment, people need to value each other’s ideas just as much as they want their own ideas to be valued.
Evidence #1: MACI 311 Teaching and Learning Math Concepts, Skills and Critical Thinking Tutoring
In MACI 311, Teaching and Learning Math Concepts, Skills, and Critical Thinking, the main bulk of our classwork is one-on-one tutoring once a week. At the beginning of the semester, we were paired up with an elementary school student from El Sol Elementary School. Each week we meet up with our students via zoom and facilitate a math lesson that the tutors created. My student is in the fourth grade. At the beginning of my time working with my student, I had to run a MASC Diagnostic Assessment on her to determine her math level. From there, this would determine the level of difficulty I would use in the lessons I created for her every week. Every week I created a lesson plan based on a specific topic that was either decided by my professor or one that I got to choose. From there, I could modify the types of math problems that I would give my student to make sure they aligned with her math level. Along with creating the lesson plan, I would create a Jamboard or a Google Slides presentation that would provide my student with interactive activities. I tutored my student for 40 minutes every Monday for 10 weeks.
Over the course of this experience, I had tutored my student and learned how to be an effective facilitator and collaborator. I learned how important communication is with not only my student but also with my supervisor who supervised all the tutoring sessions I had with my student. My supervisor would watch the lesson I did with my student every week and then give me feedback. She would always communicate with me exactly what I needed to improve on. Meeting with my supervisor allowed me to collaborate with someone who has real-world experience teaching these same concepts I was teaching my tutee. This open communication provided me with insight into what things I could do to make myself an even better tutor.
Furthermore, I collaborated with my classmates many times throughout the course of my time tutoring in MACI 311. During the last couple of weeks of class, we switched up the tutoring format so instead of one tutor tutoring one student for 40 minutes, two tutors would tutor three students for 20 minutes each. This not only broke up the time but also gave the tutors experience with working with multiple students at one time instead of one. When we switched to this group tutoring, it allowed the tutors to communicate with one another and collaborate on our lesson plans each week. Sometimes we would do a lesson all together or one of us would teach the beginning part of a lesson and the other tutor would finish the lesson.
Each week I created a lesson plan and then facilitated it all on my own. There were times where the original lesson plan did not go as intended and I had to improvise on the spot. This was a learning experience for me because in the course of my time in both MACI and IES I have created dozens of lesson plans yet, rarely was I able to implement them in a classroom setting. With MACI 311, every week the lesson I planned was executed and I got to see what it was like to create work and then actually put it to use. Overall, I think this experience allowed me to grow not only as a future teacher but as an effective facilitator and collaborator.
IES 205 was one of my favorite classes I have taken at Chapman. This class was a fun and exciting experience where I learned a lot about what it means to be an efficient facilitator in a classroom setting. This class was the first time where I had to create a lesson and activity on my own and apply it to a classroom setting. For the final project, we created a lesson that would theoretically be taught to a grade of our choice and use our classmates as our students. Prior to this final, we did a group project where we had to pick a lesson idea that was able to be applied across interdisciplinary curriculums. Although, with this group project, we did not have to actually provide the materials and execute an actual lesson like we had to do with the individual final project. Therefore, I decided to do my final project on rainbows and use the interdisciplinary subjects of science and art.
For the final project, I had my “students” watch an informational science video of how rainbows are formed. Then, I showed pictures of the art project that my students would be creating. For this project, I showed my students a finished product of what their art project would look like as a way of modeling. I then provided them with step-by-step instructions on how to complete the project as well as all the pre-cut materials they would need to execute this project. After I gave them time to do the project, I asked them some closing questions to gauge their understanding.
With this project, I was able to facilitate a lesson that I had created on my own for the first time. This was my first experience of what I would be doing for the rest of my life. I got to see what things worked well and what things did not work well when facilitating the project. I learned how to effectively communicate with my students to make them knew exactly what they would be doing. I also learned to collaborate with them to make sure that their needs were met and they had all the necessary materials to succeed. Going back and looking at this project now, there is a lot more I would have changed to make it more diverse and accessible to all types of learners. This class was a foundational class for when it comes to being a facilitator and collaborator. I have learned so much more about creating and facilitating effective lesson plans for students of all abilities since I took this class and I will continue to improve my facilitating and collaborating skills.
Evidence #3: IES 412 Teaching and Writing K-12 Middle School Writing Project
In IES 412 Teaching and Writing K-12, we had to learn to be facilitators and collaborators when writing our own Multi-Genre project and then as mentors for middle school students. Every week for a little over an hour, my class would drive to Santiago Charter Middle School to work one-on-one with middle school students. I worked with a 7th-grade student to help him write his own mystery story. I worked with my mentee for 10 weeks as part of an after-school program project where I helped him choose a topic of his liking and then helped him write, revise, and edit his work. I also collaborated with other mentors from my class and their mentees in peer-editing workshops as a way to encourage the students to give constructive feedback to their peers.
Throughout my time mentoring my middle school mentee, I learned how to facilitate proper writing elements and structures. First, I helped my mentee brainstorm ideas and find things he was interested in to potentially write about. After he landed on a topic, I assisted him in writing the mystery story he envisioned. At first, we drew out an arc of his story so we knew how it would start, end, and what would happen in between. When we got to the major writing part of the project, I had to learn to find a balance between giving my mentee the answer and letting him figure it out on his own. For example, with his spelling, I would have him type out a word himself and if it was wrong, I asked him to try to figure out the correct spelling without my help. Additionally, his ability to type was nowhere near the experience I have with typing so I had to find a balance of typing the words for him and helping to facilitate his independent writing.
At the end of the 10 weeks, my mentee’s finished work was put in a literary magazine that was compiled with all the work from his peers and other students in my class. As a facilitator, I think it is important to model the work that you are implementing. This is why I was glad that my class was also doing our own form of writing based on a topic of our choice at the same time our mentees were. This showed the mentees that there was a purpose behind the assignment and even the people who were helping them write their assignments, had to do work of their own. Furthermore, I learned how to effectively collaborate with my mentee by helping him to write his mystery story. There would be times where he did not know what should come next in his story and would look to me for guidance. I would work with him to come up with ideas as to what could happen next in his story without making the decisions for him.
Evidence #4: MACI 312 Contextual Teaching and Learning of Science Lesson Plan
In MACI 312, Contextual Teaching and Learning of Science, we learned how to apply all the concepts and organizational skills we have learned in our other MACI and IES classes to science classrooms. The main bulk of the facilitating and lesson planning I have done has been with the language arts, so MACI 312 allowed me to learn how to apply those skills to a science-based classroom. In the class, the final project was to create an instructional unit lesson plan where we utilized UDL strategies. This was a collaborative final project where I was able to work with two other students in my class. Together we created lesson plans that spanned over the course of 2 weeks on the topic of weather. We had to critically think about how to adequately cover the bulk of this topic over the course of two weeks. Each of us had around three complete lesson plans individually that contributed to the total lesson plans. When creating this lesson plan we had to make sure it achieved the goal it was intended to while also making sure to utilize UDL strategies.
While I was actually not able to facilitate this lesson in a real classroom setting, this was one of the more extensive lesson plans I have made. Prior to this class, the longest lesson plan I have done was only a 4-day lesson plan. This assignment taught me how to differentiate the instruction and keep the class interesting while also finding a way to make the lesson last for a specific amount of time. Because I worked on this assignment with two other students we had to figure out how to make our individual lessons differ from one another. We could not do anything that was too similar because in theory, all the lesson plans would be facilitated to the same class. This forced us to collaborate with one another in a way I never had to before. We not only had to collaborate with each other to make the lesson plan cohesive, but we also had to make sure to not use the same kinds of informal and formal assessments. With this project, in particular, communication was the key to our success. With this key assignment as well, my teacher offered us feedback on how we could improve the overall cohesiveness of our lesson plans. This honest communication fostered an even greater sense of collaboration within my group members.