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Week 4 (April 17 - 21)

 Overall this week went decent. Our CSP students enjoyed a cross-curricular field trip to observe the business department's Shark Pond presentation while also introducing De Morgan's Law. Our CS JAVA courses worked on CodeHS AP practice tests while reviewing the results. 

This week I think utilizing data-driven instruction went well. The reason why we chose De Morgan's Law as a topic, was because the data from the AP practice exam showed that our students needed to go over this the most over any topic. The data also showed that our students were learning the material well as the exit ticket shows an average score of ~4/5. This however is. a brief data set and to see if true learning has occurred we probably will need to touch on this topic on Monday as a quick review. I also think that students were more engaged than in previous lessons, however, this is something that needs continual improvement though and will probably be an improvement area until the end of the year. Baby steps. 

The typical technology continued to be used but I am very much looking forward to the integration of ChatGPT. I did find a specific tool used by educators in social studies to help give feedback with AI and while it will help reduce the workload of teachers I am a bit concerned about the integration when it comes to authentic valid feedback. 

Our students are getting tired and worn out. As we are getting ready for AP testing I can see how students are becoming stressed which has seemed to lead to two outcomes, students hunkering down or becoming overwhelmed with the sheer amount. The thing I as a teacher have been doing is reassuring my students while making sure that they aren't worried about this exam. 

Overall I think my teaching is getting better as I am getting more comfortable with the content. While I still have no experience with JAVA I am comfortable enough to be able to translate it to pseudocode. I also see that I am making connections to make the content more digestible and understandable for my students as I am bringing in concepts they learned from earlier courses into the curriculum. 

You are always a student, never a master. You have to keep moving forward.

Conrad Hall

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