Name: Lizzy Kelly
Breakthrough Program: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Subject Teaching: 7th and 8th grade science
School Attending/Year: Tufts University, Class of 2012

Hey everyone! It’s been a while since I wrote my last blog post, but so much has happened since then I feel like I’ve already changed in just two weeks. Since I’m a teacher at Cambridge we’re a bit behind the rest of the Breakthrough sites, so I only just started teaching my class on the plant kingdom this week. It was a lot of work but a lot of fun, and I am so excited about the great times and challenges that the rest of the summer will bring.

The transition from orientation to teaching was a really interesting one for me. During orientation I was feeling very overwhelmed and also very nervous about all of the work we had to do. In theory Say/See/Do cycles sounded like a great idea, but when it came time for me to write my own lesson plans incorporating that structure I really struggled. As a science teacher I felt that some of my classes simply couldn’t be adapted to such an interactive teacher style—as boring as it may seem, sometimes you just have to memorize names and facts in order to understand bigger picture concepts later down the line. I was working so hard on these lesson plans and not getting anywhere. I was even starting to doubt that I could be a good teacher since I just couldn’t come up with interactive lessons that fit my topic. Thankfully my mentor teacher, Amanda, had each of the science teachers do a practice lesson for the class. Only a few moments after I got up in front of my co-teachers I already felt far more confidant than I had sitting at a desk staring at my computer. I realized that I had forgotten something—I was going to teach kids! Real, talking, questioning, engaged students, not just robots that I had to go through intensely structured routines with. I felt so much better, and even though my lesson plans still took ages to write I was so grateful to Amanda for having us do that.

And now that I’ve started working with the students I am so glad that we had all of that training. Even though we had a very intense week and a half, I still feel like I have so much more to learn. Every day with my students brings a new and interesting challenge—whether it’s talking out in class, not understanding a new concept, or getting through the lesson plan so slowly I have to give extra homework. One of the strategies that we learned during orientation week that I love is how to implement active participation throughout class. This has helped me so much because I can see how the students are thinking and whether or not they’re understanding a concept. For example, this past Friday I was teaching a lesson on independent and dependent variables. I thought they were perhaps not quite understanding the lesson during the Say/See/Do cycles, and then their whiteboard activity confirmed it. By asking them all to share the answers to the questions I could see a pattern to what they were understanding—almost everyone got the idea of a constant, but the dependent variable was really tripping them up. I have now adjusted my lesson plan for Monday to give them extra practice, and I’m very glad that I realized the issues that they were having so quickly. I can’t wait to go back tomorrow and see if I can help them more. I know this second week is going to be tiring but amazing at the same time.