Inquiry 2 Part A

Inquiry 2 Part A:

1). The target area I will be working with is Comprehension Strategy Instruction and Assessment.

2). I have approximately 45 minutes per day for instruction in this area. However, this amount is flexible and can be altered at any time.

3). The Common Core Standards I will be working toward are CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.3.1 Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers. The other standard I will be incorporating into this unit is CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.3.3 Describe characters in a story (e.g., their traits, motivations, or feelings) and explain how their actions contribute to the sequence of events.

4). Students must comprehend reading and writing throughout their daily lives. If they are reading a sign outside, looking at a magazine, or reading the TV guide, they must use comprehension skills to understand the text. It is pertinent that my students are able to take text and create an understanding from the words they see or hear. Students will learn about literacy as they are taught the various strategies to make sense of the materials they are reading. I believe it is important for me to teach students that if they cannot read a recipe, they will be unable to successfully carry out an everyday task. Literacy includes everyday activities that they, their families, and those around them take part in. Students can also learn through literacy because comprehension is understanding the text they read. If students read about the planets, they are utilizing literacy to achieve their understanding. 

5). Within this target area, the talk will begin as teacher-led. I will model how to read effectively and demonstrate how to use comprehension strategies. I want my students to view how to productively have a conversation about a text by observing first. However, as the unit progresses, I hope for my students to be leading conversations and building ideas off one another. Following the ideas of Berne & Clark, I will have the instructor begin the instruction and talk, but as the days go on I will have more and more students supporting conversations. I wish to conclude my lesson with students solely discussing their understanding of a text in a group setting. I will closely monitor student discussions and step in when appropriate. I know that this practice will not come right away and will require an immense amount of practice.

6). The core practices I wish to work on closely are activating and connecting background knowledge, questioning, and visualizing. During this week's planning, the third grade teachers discussed how important it is to concentrate on the practice of visualizing. If students are able to visualize what is happening in a story, they will be much more likely to retell the story and answer comprehension questions more accurately. Teaching visualizing will strengthen my own professional learning because it will require me to be creative and thoughtful about what activities will truly get students visualizing the text they are reading and listening to. I have ideas of students creating their own illustrations and detailing for me what they see as they hear certain passages. By visualizing, students will draw inferences from the story and state these ideas aloud. Students will clearly state exactly what is occurring and suggest their levels of comprehension with their levels of visualization. 

7). I have several resources available to me. The resources I will be working with are the student basal reader, the teacher's edition, the making meaning books and curriculum, and the school library. My classroom also has an ELMO and Promethean board that are great technological resources that will assist my unit plan lessons. There is a public library in the community that is also a great resource to find additional books that would be beneficial. The third grader teachers are also a great resource because they always have a multitude of ideas and resources to work with. 

8). Additional resources I will be using are the websites my teachers use for meaningful activities. These websites include teachers pay teachers, super teacher, and other various sites that have valuable content. I will have to make activities including retelling prompts, summaries, graphic organizers, and comprehension questions that effectively assess student progress.

9). Students are assessed formally in the third grade with the DRA. This is currently taking place in my classroom. I plan on pre-assessing students both formally and informally. I constantly informally assess my students as I ask them about what they are reading. Before my guided lead teaching, I hope to continue to read passages with my students and ask them to respond to various questions and have them make connections within the text. To get an idea of each individual student's comprehension skills, I would like to read a passage aloud, demonstrate effective reading strategies, and then ask students to respond both aloud and in writing the answers to a series of questions. This will help me gauge the levels of understandings and where I need to help students.

10). I hope to find out more about my students' abilities to demonstrate comprehensive strategies. I want to know if they are able to take past experiences and background knoweledge and incorporate this into their learning. I also want to know how strong they are in questioning a text, close reading, and visualizing a story. I will have to do this through my informal assessments. By doing this, I will continue to learn about my students as learners. In order for my unit to be successful, I must figure out what areas truly need to be practiced. I want to know what strategies are strong and those that are inhibiting my students' understanding of the texts they read. I will start by observing the class as a whole and then focus on individual students that struggle with certain approaches. 

11). I will need to do more research on visualizing. When I hear visualizing, I simply think of students sharing what they believe a story looks like and what they see as they hear or read a text. However, I know this process does not come naturally and specific activities guide this core practice's understanding. Students need guidance to begin mentally picturing each event in a story. I am very interested in working alongside my mentor teacher and fellow interns to come up with strategies to best accomplish this practice.

12). I am very excited to begin planning and teaching my unit plan. I have an immense amount of ideas and resources I would like to incorporate. However, I am concerned about trying to cover too much in my unit plan or individual lessons. I want to make sure to keep my lessons concise and purposeful. I will have to be careful that I am not stretching for too much to be done at a time. I want each student to be engaged and comfortable with the content. This makes me nervous about what to include and what to leave out.

Inquiry 2 Part A (Q 1 - 12)

Inquiry 2 Part A:

1. The target area I would like to focus on for my guided lead teaching is point of view, its importance and the effect it has on a writing piece as a whole.

2. I have about 45 - 50 minutes a day if necessary for my instruction.

3. The Common Core Standard I will be working toward is CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.2.6 Acknowledge differences in the points of view of characters, including by speaking in a different voice for each character when reading dialogue aloud. I would also like to tie in the standard that states, CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.2.3 Describe how characters in a story respond to major events and challenges. 

4. By teaching my students point of view, I hope to offer new opportunities for them to create writing pieces that are both authentic and enjoyable. The students will be able to recognize how point of view allows them to add their own voice to their writing pieces. Point of view is also an important literacy element that the students will need to recognize when reading in order to comprehend and understand the writers purpose. 

5. Our class does not currently have classroom talk in this target area. I hope to build a student-led classroom talk where the students can read a book on their own and come together as a class to discuss the books they have read. Ultimately, I would like the students to be able to have a classroom discussion where all ideas are respected. I would like my students to be comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas with their classmates. I would also like the students to be able to carry on a conversation themselves, responding to one another in a fluid manner. 

6. I plan to work on improving the core practice, responding to reading, with my students. Read-alouds occur a lot in my classroom but the students do not very many effective discussions about their responses to the reading. With the topic of point of view, reading is important for the students to see examples of point of view in books we read every day. One book specifically, "Voices in the Park" by Anthony Browne, does a great way of showing point of view through the writing and by the actual appearance of the text on the page. I think presenting this book to my students would be extremely beneficial.  

7. I have many resources that area available to me. The public library will be able to supply me with the Anthony Browne book. Our classroom is also equipped with a Promethean Board. My mentor teacher has introduced me to Promethean Planet where she finds interactive activities for the students to get up and get involved. I am looking forward to incorporating some point of view activities into my guided teaching. 

8.  My mentor teacher has many books she has collected over the years that she can supply me with. At this time though, I do not need to obtain additional resources.

9. I plan to pre-assess my students both formally and informally. I would like to hold a classroom discussion about point of view before teaching my lessons in order to get a better understanding of what they children know and what they do not know. I would also like to have some sort of writing activity to get the student's prior knowledge about point of view. Asking the students to write a short story first from one person's point of view, then from another's, will be a great way for me to see if they truly understand the purpose and benefit of point of view.  

10. I would like to make my lessons as authentic to my students as I possibly can. I would like to continue to learn about the lives of my students outside of school in order to choose books and activities that they can relate to and connect with. This will allow my lessons to be more authentic and meaningful to my students. 

11. I would like to learn more about my core practice in order get the most out of my lessons. I would like to learn about the different techniques that other teachers have used in order to have students successfully respond to the readings. It would be beneficial to the students and myself if I could have the opportunity to speak with other teacher about successful ways they have implemented discussion into their classrooms. 

12. My only big concern I have when planning and teaching my unit is having it adhere to all students in my classroom. Based on recent testing, the students in my class come from a wide range of literacy understanding. Some students are as low as a kindergarten reading level while others are on level with second grade material. I want to make sure that my lesson is challenging enough for all of my students without it being too easy for some and too difficult for others. 

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Making Writing Meaningful

In my third grade classroom, we have spent an immense amount of time trying to get students thinking about writing. We have asked them "What makes a good writer?" and "Why is it important to be a good writer?" Students appear overall disinterested about writing. When students are asked to write, I get very opinionated responses. This includes sighs and comments about how writing is "boring" and "takes too long". I am not sure where these negative attitudes about writing come from. Putting myself back into the third grade classroom, I do not remember disliking writing. However, I do not remember any specific writing instruction. With the implementation of the Common Core State Standards, writing is of utmost importance. Writing is a way in which students can demonstrate their understanding from texts, convey meaning, and support their own ideas. I believe students are overwhelmed by writing and it is our duty as teachers to ease their fears about the writing process.

This week's reading really got me thinking about myself as a writing teacher. The opening quote by Mem Fox that "Writers don't improve their craft unless they have a real purpose, a real audience, and a real investment in their writing", definitely supports my writing philosophy. If students do not see a purpose in what they are doing, their motivation and performance will definitely struggle. Students need to feel that their writing has importance and is being viewed by others for a true reason. Routman shares that we have made writing way too complicated by breaking the aspects down (141). This practice causes students to lose engagement. By making writing super specific and focusing on little skills, students are missing the overall picture that writing is meant to convey important ideas. I understand this rationale and definitely agree. However, I am at a loss of the best ways to do this. How can I have my students working on writing in meaningful ways without over-focusing on how they format the piece, their grammar, and the details they include? I am not sure how to find the perfect balance. Routman breaks it down very nicely on how to begin and I definitely believe the suggestions are beneficial. One idea I would enjoy examining further is to focus on the quality first. It is better to look at the formative process over time rather than summative components. One study by fifth grade teacher Debbie Fowler demonstrated a teacher's conscious decision to move away from the rubrics and to focus more on the quality of writing (143). The changes Debbie made to her writing curriculum definitely benefited her students. Once shying away from specific guidelines, Debbie and her colleagues were able to identify true improvement with better quality work written with a meaningful purpose to real audiences (145).

The work of Debbie and her colleagues brings me back to the classroom discussion we had this past week. How can we as teachers include these nontraditional teaching methods, but still reach each Common Core Standard? I definitely see this as an opportunity to finesse instruction. It is important to maintain the school curriculum while implementing new ideas into the classroom context. Routman suggests how to keep standards in perspective. Routman assures teachers that when they teach writing well several of the standards will be covered (153). I definitely believe that in order to accomplish a comfort of incorporating standards into my own teachings I will need more practice. I believe this literacy course will be a great asset into teaching me how to best do this.

In terms of daily writing in the classroom, I believe that once my students become more acquainted with the daily five, daily writing will become much more visible. Lately, students have been taking part in free rights to questions and we have also practiced writing in constructive response form. I definitely believe writing is going to be covered daily in my classroom. I really think that Routman's ideas of peer talk will be a good asset to these daily writing activities. The students in my classroom are very chatty and enjoy talking to one another. I would love to get them talking about their writing processes. I know that this will not be easy, but with lots of practice students will begin talking about content and becoming better writers with the support of their peers. It will definitely require me to circle around the classroom and make sure that conversations focus on the content (183). Students need to learn how to discuss their writing as a way to communicate what they need help in and the overall reasoning and message they are trying to share.

I definitely hope to get my students more excited to write. I know this is going to be a challenge. However, this is a problem I see a solution to. If students are given multiple meaningful writing activities, they will consistently begin to recognize the importance of writing.I definitely want to work with my students on a regular basis and discuss with them how they feel about writing and what they struggle with. I also believe that classroom discussions on how writing is going will help the class as a whole understand where everyone stands with the writing content. Sharing as a class and teacher how we feel about the writing process will bring it even more relevance. During our classroom free writes, my mentor teacher has told me the importance for me to write as well. This way, students will begin to recognize just how important writing is and realize that I think the task is valuable enough for me to take part in it to. I would love to hear both of your thoughts on the writing in your classroom, the attitudes of your students, and how you hope to making writing look by the end of the year.

Blog Post 1

As the school year is beginning, I anticipate facing and working through several professional dilemmas as it relates to my students as people as well as teaching literacy and making meaningful connections to students’ lives.  One of the biggest issues I expect to face is making connections with the literacy content.  I feel that all students come to school with a working knowledge of the world around them.  As educators, I feel that part of our job is to use the content to connect with the world students know and will get to know.  For example, during a lesson on understanding and identifying the elements of a story, (plot, setting, main character etc.) it is important to understand that most students know how to identify these elements and it is usually easiest to make this connection to television shows.  The difficult part is to show students that they have prior knowledge that will make it easier to understand these elements beyond the television and into the classroom.  I think this step is most important when dealing with a student who might lack educational confidence.  We all get at least one student who has settled into the “I can’t” role; however, being able to address and use a students’ prior knowledge is the best way to prove to the student that they can.  However, it is important to use what they know and what they like to show the student this connection.  With such a diverse group of individuals, it will be very important for me to familiarize myself with the things students are familiar with in order to make connections to literacy content.

I also think that using cultural similarity and differences will be difficult for me as an educator.  As I get older, I become increasingly aware of my cultural identity.  I am aware of how my culture has shaped my upbringing, my education and my life as a whole.  However, this journey to cultural awareness did not even begin for me until I was a freshman in college.  So when dealing with 2^nd graders, it is important to think about how cultural identity plays a role in their lives. 

So early in the year, I have already seen how students might handle differences and similarities.  One example would be our student who is in a wheelchair.  When our student first came into the classroom, I expected there to be questions, or even maybe even a small amount of teasing; however, the students welcomed him with open arms.  The class immediately was very helpful to Dorian*.  No one has asked about why he is in the wheelchair and everyone was extremely helpful towards him.  So as I was trying to get prepared to deal with what might be a “sticky” subject, it was something that did not necessarily need to be addressed in class.

One thing that I think might be easier for me when dealing with my students would be my ability to relate to a vast range of circumstances.  For example, today a student pointed out to me that another students shoe was “broke”.  When I looked at the young lady’s shoe, the sole had come a part.  I thanked the student for letting me know and I did not address it with either student.  At the time, I felt this was best because I had been there before.  I had been in situations where my family might not be able to afford new things no matter how bad I have wanted or needed them.  I have been homeless, hungry, unsure of where I was sleeping the next night, worried about my parents’ worries, etc.  Having to deal with such situations as a teenager and older helps me to understand where my students as 2^nd graders are mentally when we hear that these things are going on.  So on a case by case basis, I am able to understand situations and use them to shape how I am approaching students academically. 

I am hoping that the situations I listed as potentially difficult become easier as the year progresses so that my own nerves don’t get in the way of me being the educator I know I am capable of being.