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.