Ashley Blackwelder Blog Post 1: "The Habit of Kidwatching"

As I read these articles, I find myself thinking about the pressures our teachers are facing right now...and the nagging feeling I have had, as long as I have been a teacher, that I'm missing SOMETHING, or not doing it as well as other teachers are.  There are a lot of terms and catch phrases that we hear constantly as teachers, and those buzzwords change from one year to the next. I know, as our tech person, I've thrown around the term "blended learning" constantly...and watched looks of panic, boredom, or bewilderment flash across other teachers' faces. As teachers, we're supposed to constantly question ourselves, ask how we can improve, and strive to be more effective than in years past.  The hazard of reflecting on our practice in this way is that it is difficult to keep from comparing ourselves to other teachers, wondering what someone else is doing more effectively than we are.
As we strive--and often struggle--to stay on top of everything and keep up with the constant changes that come our way in the classroom, O'Keefe's article is very reassuring to read. She describes her earlier years of collecting observations, "amassing data" just because she thought it was what she was SUPPOSED to do. But, as she points out, there's no one right or wrong way to collect data on our kids; she changes it from year to year, from one topic to the next, and according to what her students need. This is because kidwatching, like so many other responsibilities we have as teachers, boils down to simply knowing our kids. It doesn't matter if we use a cutesy template to record our observations, or record videos of our students reading, or simply jot down a concern on a post-it...and then, like me, forget where the post-it is but remember to discuss the concern in detail when that student's parent happens to call after school. We know our kids, we care about them, we pay attention to their needs, and we do the best we can to help them be successful. If we're doing those things, then we are doing our jobs as teachers and "kidwatchers"...and doing it well!