July 6

OPUS: Reflect to Redirect

The following is a reflection from our planning day with Stephanie Couey (@23steph23) and Ceci Johnson (@crjo89). Great job today ladies! Can’t wait for a new year in OPUS!

OPUS…what is it? By definition, opus is any artistic work, especially one on a large scale. At Winterboro, OPUS is just that- a large work of art, created by students through integrating art and music into mathematics. We believe that students can become “mathematical artists” by learning in a variety of ways: reading, hands-on activities, listening, etc. It is our responsibility to provide a class where all learning styles can be successful. Let’s start by introducing ourselves. We are Cecilia Johnson, secondary mathematics teacher, and Stephanie Couey, 5-12 band director and fine arts teacher. Together, we use math, music, and art to teach 7th-grade math standards to our students at Winterboro High School.
Today, we came together to reflect on our past year (our first year co-teaching together) and collaborate on ideas for improvement in the upcoming year. Through “Glow-and-Grow”, we learned a lot about our strengths and weaknesses as co-teachers in this course. We realized that our biggest areas for improvement were being more consistent in our daily routines with the students and utilizing small-group instruction in order to individualize learning and help our students reach their full potential. One of the areas of improvement was to create a strict daily schedule. It is our hope that by establishing this schedule from day one, students will know what is expected for each task (math journal, tech time, group work, etc…) which in turn will keep them focused and working during the individual/buddy/group project time we use to host our small group instruction. Another area we both want to improve on is creating a positive climate for learning. We are going to work hard getting to know our kids, being strict and consistent on rules and discipline, and modeling what a positive climate looks like — how to give compliments, how to constructively criticize, and how to work together to achieve goals. One of the ideas for this, details of which are still being worked out, is to give the ownership back to the kids through a student-created rubric on our classroom rules. This will be a way to hold the students responsible for his/her behavior. This self-assessment system will help keep the students in check with regards to classroom rules, peer interactions, individual work time, ultimately every part of the time they spend in our classroom. Finally, possibly the most important, area of growth we found is in the ability to “mesh” both fine arts and math into every lesson everyday. It is our goal that our students will see the relevancy of one subject and how it relates to the other, fostering a growth mindset. So many students have the mindset of “I can’t do math, or art, I’m not a math/art person”, by integrating both courses together, we hope to change this closed-minded thinking into an “I can..” type of thinking. We want all of our “mathematician artists” to find success in a way they have never experienced before. Wish us luck as we embark on a this new adventure together! Updates on our progress with many more “Glows-and-Grows” to come.