Speaker: Jessika Collins, Middle School Science Teacher, Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp
What benefits did you gain from access to Teaching Channel?
Jessika Collins: I loved having access to the teaching channel. It was probably one of the top things that I liked about. I teach that I didn't even expect myself to like, really enjoy that much. Not much of a video person I really like to read. Um Sometimes I have like a hard time focusing. So I, I wasn't expecting to really enjoy that part of the I teach program. But the teaching channel was like, beyond anything I could have expected like to be helpful. Um Something that was really difficult for me getting back in the classroom was like trying to remember all of the different things that my teachers in the past had done that I liked. And since it's just been so long since I've been in a middle school environment, I, I just had no idea like what to expect. And so like watching the videos on the teaching channel and seeing the different like classroom cultures. Uh it was so helpful and I was able to like, pick and choose things and the videos that I felt would be really helpful for my kids and for my teaching style. Um and something about like observing other teachers is like, if you were already teaching, then that takes away time from your own classroom and um being able to use the teaching channel, I could just watch those videos whenever I had time, like during my plan period or whatever, I wouldn't have to find coverage for my class and um take a personal day or whatever it be um to be able to see into these different classrooms. And I'm also like a science teacher. So the culture for science is much different than like the culture of like a math room or a English room. And so um just being able to see like the different ways that uh different classes were use like group work and um table buddies and things like that. Like that was super helpful and things that I um like I had forgotten about just since it's been so long since I've been in middle school. I think it also like really helped uh set my, my expectations for like what to expect behavior wise from the kids. Um You know, I'm, I'm 29. So it's been a few years since I, I've been in middle school and just like the maturity level was um I mean, it's not what I was expecting. Like the eighth graders, they feel al adults, they feel like they're adults, they, some of them look like they're adults already. Um But they like very much are not like there yet in terms of like maturity level and like higher order thinking. Um And so just watching some of the videos on teaching channel from some of the other middle school teachers, like, well, how you can meet those kids there, like how you can like start to encourage that independence but also like for yourself, like remembering like they're still Children and they still want to have fun and like things that um like high schoolers wouldn't necessarily appreciate like a middle schooler still will. Um So uh that was so, so amazing and so worth the time just going through the different things on teaching channel. Um And then something that my school started doing with our PLT time, like our um our planned um community time was um we started doing like math interventions and English interventions and I'm a science person. So uh at that time when um the English and the math teachers were asking us for help, like one of the first things I did was go to teaching channel and look at some of these English classes and some of these English classes and some of these math classes and like interventions that they're doing in their classes. So that when I pulled my small group during PLT time that I would be able to um actually reach the kids and still like give them resources and content that um that they needed. Um So like seeing those frameworks that those English and math teachers were using on teaching channel were beyond helpful for um helping encourage literacy and math in these um and these kids that we were trying to uh trying to help before state testing time came.
