Reflection on Week 1

First of all, I learned a lot about my own perspective.  I'm finding it really hard to separate my identity as a teacher when looking at the idea of "virtual schooling is a positive innovation."  My thoughts about motivation, use of resources are all linked to my identity as a high school teacher in an under-served neighborhood.  In some ways I think this gives me a good perspective but I need to try in future weeks to also try and take more objective view on the research.  Or, I should try and look at the perspective of someone who works in a very different kind of neighborhood.

Overall I learned a lot that I did not know before - all I previously knew about online schools were graduate school classes! In fact, all this information about K-12 online courses got me so excited that I brought some of the ideas to my instructional leader at school to see if we can start offering some classes online next year.


Further, the idea of disruptive innovation was completely eye opening as far as how the school system has been forced to morph over the years.  Lately in NYC there has been a push to treat the DOE like a business, from how charters schools are run to choosing a business woman to be the new chancellor.  However, this article shows that schools and school systems are NOT businesses and should not be treated like one.  Which leads me to the question of ....why does the government insist on treating schools like a business?


My biggest question so far is probably how can I implement some of these ideas into my school? How can NYC sustainably implement ways for online learning to be widespread and meaningful?

Week 1: About Me

I'm Sara Gerstein and I am a New York City Public School teacher and a student at Teachers College. I am in my fifth year of teaching and I teach 10th grade Science (Earth Science) at a high school in Washington Heights. Over the years I have also taught 6th, 7th, and 8th grade. I was a Geology major at Cornell (undergrad) so I love Earth Science! I also direct the school musical - this year we are doing Bye Bye Birdie.  I am currently in the Communication in Education program at TC.

When getting my Masters at City College (CUNY) I took two classes online through Seminars on Science (part of the Natural History Museum here in NYC). I got a lot out of those classes and I wanted to try online classes again. The content of the classes were really interesting; that is probably what made the class a positive experience for me. It was a successful model for graduate level classes but I wonder how successful it can be in a K-12 situation.

I'm interested in figuring this out - I'm curious how online learning can complement an in-school education. The school I work at is very small so we struggle with finding time and teachers to offer credit recovery classes for students who fail courses. (We previously had after school courses taught by teachers at our school, but this is not really a sustainable option) I would love to explore ways to offer this online to make it more manageable for all involved.  As far as bringing the online world into my classroom so far - I have not done too much.  I have a rarely updated class website and I'm exploring using some websites (like Study Island) for formative assessment.  Hopefully I'll learn a lot more this semester!