Week 4

Hey guys, instead of having someone post here, I am just going to post the questions and then ALL of us can respond with comments (our answers). I thought that would be easier than someone having to worry about responding and not responding!

1.    Describe your target area for guided lead teaching.

2.    Approximately how much time per day is allotted for your instruction in this area?

3.    Which Common Core State Standard(s) will you work toward?

4.    How will teaching in this target area provide opportunities for students to learn important content and/or skills that relate to their lives?  In what ways does this learning include learning literacy, learning about literacy, and/or learning through literacy?

5.    What types of classroom talk take place within this target area? To what extent is the talk teacher-led, student-led, or focused on higher-level thinking? What norms for interaction would you like to build within your classroom as you teach in this target area (e.g., see ideas in Chapter 6 of Strategies that Work, the Berne & Clark 2008 article, or draw from some of the readings done in TE 402 on classroom talk)?

6.    Which ‘core practice’ do you want to work on developing/improving as you teach in this target area (refer to document “Resources for Developing Core Practices”)? How will focusing on this core practice contribute to your own professional learning?

7.    What resources within the community, neighborhood, school district, school or classroom do you have to work with in this target area?

8.    What additional resources do you need to obtain?

9.    How will you pre-assess your students in your target area?

10.  What else will you need to find out about all students in your class to help you develop lesson plans for your Guided Lead Teaching?

11.  What else do you need/want to learn about the ‘core practice’ to support your planning and teaching?

What concerns, if any, do you have about planning and teaching your unit

Week Three Blog

Please forgive me for being 25 minutes late. It took me that long to realize I was signed into the wrong google account to be able to post!

When reading for today’s post about writing in the classroom and conferencing and how to go about it, I kept thinking back to a date last year during my placement in a first grade classroom. My former MT ran Writer’s Workshop every afternoon and it always worked out really well. We would conduct roving conferences with the students, helping them out about whatever their mini lesson was about that day. On one occasion, we had a substitute and we tried to run the usual workshop. It was utter chaos. Our goal was for the students to write and we were not even able to keep their attention on that, let alone be able to talk and help individual students. Which is why I thought of class management when asked what sort-of expertise we as teachers would need to develop in order to follow Routman’s advice. When a teacher can effectively manage students, then I think all of Routman’s ideas are possible.

I consider developing a trusting classroom environment to be essential as well. Especially if the teacher wants to run the whole-group conferencing, which Routman considers incredibly important. In order for students to get up and read their work to their peers, they need to be comfortable with both reading aloud and sharing their work with others with the goal of improvement. With a trusting environment, students feel comfortable taking risks without feeling afraid.

What do you guys think? What other types of expertise would one need in order to run with Routman’s ideas?

BLOG 1

I gathered that the main idea behind this week’s reading is that educators need to be responsive to their students’ individual developmental stages, needs, and interests in order to create an engaging and collaborative comprehension-learning environment.  This semester we will be asked to get to know our students in great depth in order to create lessons that are culturally relevant and engaging.  I anticipate a struggle in maintaining a distinction between my personal and professional life.  I think it is a difficult balance to achieve being friendly, but not friends.  I wonder how involved I may become in my students’ lives without it becoming emotionally straining.  I hope to be able to establish and compassion for my students without creating an unhealthy attachment for them or for me.  I guess that this dilemma addresses a larger issue about what it means to be professional in the teaching community.  Are personal relationships with your students unprofessional?  How much distance is appropriate? 

Now after hypothetically achieving a balanced yet informed relationship with my students, how do I incorporate what I have learned into my literacy instruction?..  My educational experience at MSU allowed me to broaden my idea of literacy into something much more dynamic than simply reading and writing.  I understand that literacy exists in multiple contexts and that every context requires a different skill set.  Students with a more comprehensive variety of exposures are better equipped to function in a variety of contexts.  The ability to take in, process, and convey information in a variety of formats is highly valuable and must be enriched by a teacher.  While this broadened perspective of literacy is wonderful, sometimes I find myself being slightly overwhelmed by it.  How am I supposed to design lesson plans with a clear and achievable objective, within such a giant beast of a concept we call literacy?  I want to become more proficient in my ability to address a more concise goal within my individual lessons, all while working towards the BIG idea of literacy.  

Week 1- DEVELOPING CORE PRACTICES FOR EFFECTIVE LITERACY INSTRUCTION

The thoughts for this week were:
Consider the ideas discussed in today’s readings on effective approaches to comprehension instruction as well as the cases about teaching dilemmas we discussed during our first session. What types of professional dilemmas do you anticipate needing to manage this year in relation to developing your professional identity, building strong teacher-student relationships, constructing relevant curriculum or assessing students in meaningful and productive ways?

 Give specific examples of areas where you feel confident in your planning, teaching, and assessing and areas you feel you need to learn more about. Given what you know so far about your classroom context, what opportunities might be available to you for learning this year? What ideas do you have about how you might want to ‘finesse’ or ‘hybridize’ your literacy practices?

     The entire time I was reading through the texts, especially in actually approaches and practices to comprehension, I was noticing that a lot of it seemed like common sense. I think modeling should be a definite explicit activity for the teacher to do to teach student and in the end create an implicit action. Sharing out loud a thought about a line and decoding for meaning would example for students ways to practice and comprehend text. I think this is something I can definitely do within my own practices. During read-alouds, think-alouds and other instruction, modeling how I would decode texts to understand the meaning could eventually be taught until that responsibility is ultimately the students. In theory, it sounds great. Example instead of telling. Explicitly SHOW the class how to do it, instead of just saying, read. 
   My problem with this is while I feel confident in my ability to example techniques for students, particularly during guided reading and read-alouds, these examples in the classroom almost seem like it is a one-on-one or with smaller groups. When there is a classroom of 25-30, all on different levels, I feel like you still have to differenciate. And how to do you keep students engaged in this activity and focused on the explicit technique lesson when students can't focus (for example, A.D.D., A.D.H.D, or special ed students). Currently in my classroom, I have a mixture of students who love to talk. While we are trying to get the talking in control, I still am trying to figure out how I can teach a technique while keeping all students interested. If I do it once, only some students catch on. If I do more than once for all students, then students who grasp it the first time become bored. 
  I think most important, besides differentiating, is trying to hybrid lessons. When there are state requirements as well as district curriculum that is so "by the book" and time-crunched, I worry the time constraint is a big problems for trying to tweak lessons. I would love to be able to do the steps to release the responsibility to students, however with their academic levels and the time constraints, I worry that there are still some students who will not be able to fully take comprehensible responsibility.

Hello!

Testing, testing, one, two, three!