Anna Gomberg

1. Tell us a little about your current job. What do you enjoy most?

I now live in California where I teach in the infamous public school system. My school, is a High School in Oakland California. I teach Environmental Chemistry and AP Environmental Science. The students I teach are in the Green Energy Academy where they are given many experiences over their time at school that are intended to prepare them for jobs in the Green Economy. Their subjects are interrelated with a number of interdisciplinary projects and they receive many opportunities to interact with local professionals.

The thing I enjoy most is the intention to ensure that everything I teach is grounded in relevance to my students and the work that my colleagues and I do to ensure that we are preparing our students to be ready for the real world of work. I am especially proud that our focus is on Green Energy as this means I am working to ensure that my students are able to support themselves in the future but also that they will be ready for the environmental challenges their generation faces .

I also love the students I teach - Oakland is incredibly diverse in many ways (I am often the only white person in my classroom) and a large percentage of my students received free school meals. I have learned a lot about culturally relevant and critical pedagogy whilst learning more about the extent of the inequality that exists in the USA. I feel incredibly useful doing the job that I am doing whilst at the same time understanding that I will always have more to learn and ways in which to improve.

2. I see you have come some way from doing the MTeach. What would you say are the key things about the MTeach that have stayed with you?

It was great to have a space with other new teachers that was not in my school - having access to outside perspectives was really valuable and helped me keep my understanding of how schools operate greater than my own experience. I think for me the most important thing about the MTeach was the way it prevented me from having tunnel vision in my own practice. Designing and carrying out a research project whilst I felt like I was barely surviving helped me to be a little more objective about my classroom and elevate my thinking beyond classroom management (which was of course my biggest challenge).

3. What did your dissertation/ practice based enquiry (RPBE or PBE) explore? What did you find out and how did it influence you?

I looked at student engagement and whether having students teach each other during a period of revision could increase student engagement. Learning about how to enact action research in my classroom has stayed with me, I have not done any projects where I have designed research and gathered data in the same way but I am always performing cycles of inquiry in my classroom in one way or another. This experience certainly helped me to be more reflective and taught me how to focus on student outcomes primarily. I am regularly eliciting feedback from my students; always trying out new things and experimenting with different forms of data collection that can inform my next steps.

4. How was the MTeach work different from School or other professional development courses (e.g. INSET)?

The MTeach was far more academic. I appreciated being given research papers to read and really trusted the people who were teaching me. At my school training was not often grounded in research (or not overtly, at least).

5. The MTeach is for teachers only, it often uses the sharing of participants classroom experiences/practice as a starting point, how did this work for you?

Great, as mentioned before, it was really good to be with other first and second year teachers who were from other schools. We were all in similar positions so could really give each other good advice.

6. What is your next career move?

I am staying where I am for a while! As a Science Teacher Leader and Science Department Chair (not a paid position in my district, unfortunately) I am enjoying developing my leadership skills whilst still remaining full time in the classroom which I hope to do for as long as possible. There are new standards which are about to be rolled out in California and Oakland is an early implementation district so I've been part of the first round of training for that. I've also been enjoying working with other teachers on the interdisciplinary Graduate Capstone Project that Seniors (final year of High School) complete. This has included teaching students how to conduct research. I hope to continue working on this for a while.