Kelsey Schmitt - Part A - Step 3

Step 3: What might these events mean?

·      To what extent were you were expected to follow a scripted curriculum, or add your own ideas to a curriculum that already exists, or create a unit that is entirely new?   

            I did have to teach narrative writing and I had an end rubric that I needed to use that aligns with the common core standards. Other than that I had freedom with the structure of my lessons. I used the rubric to develop different focuses for each day along the publishing process.

·      What was unproblematic and/or challenging about planning a unit in this context?

            Having never taught a writing lesson before, let alone an entire unit the task seemed daunting at first, especially since there is not set curriculum. However I think it was nice to have the freedom and I think that after a few years of teaching and trying different things eventually you could really have some solid material. It is nice to be able to have the freedom to change what isn’t working for your particular group of students.

·      What obstacles did you face? How did you overcome them?

           

            I found it hard to conference with each student. I underestimated the amount of time it would take to meet. I would try to do roving conferences and would be frustrated when I couldn’t make it all the way around the room. I also learned that students were not used to the norms of conferencing. Some students thought that they could wait to work until I came to them or that I was going to do their work for them. These students were sadly mistaken. I overcame by doing my best and adjusting as necessary. I tried my best to make sure the class knew what the expectations for the day were.

·      How did working on developing your ‘core practice’ influence the types of learning opportunities you were able to offer your students?

            My core practice of conferencing did influence the time I got to spend with each individual. I felt that I was able to positively affect my students’ learning opportunity by giving some much-needed one on one attention. Since my students were writing personal narrative about a topic of their choice, I also got to learn a lot about my students as individuals. I think by allowing my students to make a choice of what they wrote about provided a more meaningful learning experience since it was a topic of their choice/interest.

·      What dilemmas (if any) did you face and how did you manage them?  Consider issues that may relate to developing your professional identity, developing strong teacher- student relationships, constructing relevant curriculum, or assessing students in meaningful and productive ways.

            Aside from underestimating the conferencing timing, I also struggled with monitoring the entire classroom while conferencing at the same time. It was really hard to make sure that the entire room was on task and give each student I was meeting with my full attention. I could occasionally look up and try to praise good behavior but I found it very difficult. I also felt like that I needed to get through as many conferences as possible and I thought that the more I looked up the longer each conference took. I really need to develop the eyes in the back of my head and multi-tasking abilities.

·      What enabled you to be successful?

           

            I think that my mini lessons and flow of my unit were successful. My students were able to create a product to the best of their ability at this time in their learning progress. I could also say that last year’s third grade teachers allowed my unit to be successful in that many of students seemed to already know the material I was teaching, it just seems they need more practice one the execution.   

·      Did the unit proceed as you expected? Why or why not?

            Overall, it did proceed as I expected. My students were able to complete the task, however I was slightly disappointed when I was grading that I did not have more 3’s. I know it is the beginning of the year and they are still developing, but I after all of their hard work I wanted to think of them as more successful.

 

·      What surprises or “aha moments” did you experience?

            My main “aha moment” was realizing that the room was starting to fall apart in the middle of a conference with one of my students. It didn’t matter how great that one-on-one time was, there were a great deal of other students starting to get off task that I needed to reach.   

·      What do you still need to learn about teaching in this target area, about your developing your ‘core practice’ and about teaching literacy in general?

           

            I would like to develop a way to have conferences seem like more of a routine. I want to be able to go about making my conferencing even more effective. In general (not really related to my unit/practice) I want to learn more about taking more effective anecdotal records about my students on a regular basis, to show student growth.

Catie Watson - Part A Step 3

Inquiry Three

Part A: Interpreting Evidence and Making Claims

Step 3

Teaching from a basal reading program was extremely challenging. I found Reading Street to be a very complex and confusing program with mediocre lesson plans to teach practical reading skills and strategies. Many of the texts/passages were random and quite boring. The examples the program provided to model the skills/strategies were oftentimes confusing and hard to follow. Unfortunately, my mentor teacher is required to teach literacy using this program, which can be very constraining at times. Although I was limited on what I could use to teach during my unit plan, I was able to create some new ways to have my students practice applying the learned skills and strategies.

Although I did not particularly enjoy using the Reading Street program, I did like the fact that my lessons and objectives were already established for me. Instead of trying to come up with an entire unit plan on my own, I was able to take what Reading Street gave me, and work to adapt the lessons to better suit my students. I was also provided with all of the texts that were used during my unit, as well as guided reading books that went along with the unit’s objectives.

I faced many obstacles during my unit plan. The first one was when I taught my students about cause-and-effect relationships. As I mentioned in my previous blog posting, many of my students had a difficult time distinguishing the cause from the effect. Once I took a closer look at what Reading Street was “telling” me to teach, I was able to identify where the problem was occurring. Reading Street’s lesson had me teach my students that the effect can be found by looking for “What happened?” and the cause can be found by looking for “Why did it happen?” I spent an extra day teaching this strategy and was able to clear up any confusion my students had. Both the cause and effect were events that had happened. Figuring out which event CAUSED the other to happen was crucial in order for my students to understand the relationship.

Another obstacle I encountered during my unit plan was that I did a poor job of designing and implementing some of the worksheets I used. Instead of being a tool for independent practice, I used the cause-and-effect worksheet during my modeling of the strategy. This allowed my students to simply copy down answers that we discussed as a class, rather than allowing them to use the strategy and show me what they knew with their own examples. I was able to overcome this obstacle by carefully monitoring my students’ understanding during guided reading groups and the answers they provided on their weekly worksheets. Although I was not able to gather a lot of information on what my students knew based on the cause-and-effect worksheet, I was able to collect data during guided reading groups.

Although my unit did not go exactly as I had planned, my daily presentations were a successful component of my unit. I was able to use various images and questions that kept my students engaged and interested. Many of my students seemed to be excited to talk about the questions I posed during my lessons, and they enjoyed the funny pictures and images that related to their own lives (such as images of basketball players and gymnasts, etc.) I also had success with my “sticky note” method. I was able to work on developing my core practice of “Writing about Reading” by using this method, and the students really seemed to enjoy it. I was also able to extend this method into their independent reading novels, and collected more data about each of my students and their comprehension.

As I had mentioned in my previous blog postings about my first two lessons, my unit has taught me how important it is to plan ahead and anticipate student responses. Now that I have been teaching Reading Street for several weeks, I have learned how to analyze the skill/strategy and what the program provides me with to teach the skill/strategy. I am better able to anticipate what my students might be confused about and what concepts and/or words I should emphasize. I have also learned the importance of creating effective worksheets and assessment tools. I believe worksheets should be used as a way for students to demonstrate their understanding of the given concept. During my unit, there were several times where I had my students complete worksheets that ended up being meaningless and a waste of time. Instead of assessing my students’ understanding, the worksheets were used to copy down other students’ responses. I have begun to realize what types of worksheets are beneficial and what types are futile.

There are several things I still need to learn about teaching literacy. I need to learn better ways of assessing my students’ progress. Taking more detailed anecdotal records might be a good way to track my students’ progress and help me know which students need extra support. I also need to learn more ways to finesse the Reading Street curriculum. I would like to talk with my mentor teacher and find out if it’s possible to bring in other texts when I feel the Reading Street texts are inadequate. As I continue teaching, I hope to learn more about literacy in order to become a better teacher.

Caroline Paredes
Lesson #1 Reflection

·         What students learned and which students struggled with the lesson.

After looking back on my students KWL chart it becomes quite clear that different students gathered different things from my lesson. However, there is still a general trend of what students seemed to catch on to most or were most interested by. For the K portion of my student’s KWL charts, the vast majority of the classroom (about 90% of those who responded) included the statement “Fantasy is fake” or a close variation of this statement which still included the word
fake”.  About 50% percent of responses failed to provide any further details about what they meant by this. After and during my lesson, when chances were given for the students to fill in the L segment of their charts, the majority of students wrote down a lot of the elements of fantasy that were discussed in our conversation on the topic of fantasy and were also in the fantasy clip we watched as a group. These included fantasy having a common theme of good vs. evil and heroes vs. villains, magical creatures and creatures that can talk, the use of weaponry in fantasy, and the fact that there have been several instances where fantasy texts have been made into various other forms of media (i.e. film). Students which struggled most were those who were unable to remain focused during our conversation and for the time they had to fill in their KWL. Of these students, 2 of the 3 are resource students who are either cognitively or emotionally impaired. The third is a student which we have been having a lot of difficulty with in terms of controlling her explosive behavior. These students failed to participate with the class and did not complete their KWL charts to my standards (which were not very high considering that this was mostly a pre-assessment). 

·         What are alternate reads of your students’ performance or products?

Alternate reads include assuming that the three children who did not participate actually did have knowledge about the fantasy genre or acquired some, but they simply failed at reporting it. There was also some suspicion from both my MT and I that students were filling in part of their K and W column when they were supposed to be leaving it alone or filling in the L column.

·         What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?

While this is still somewhat tied to my third objective, I learned that my students have A LOT of knowledge on texts which were adapted into films. I had originally thought that they would have a lot of trouble thinking of fantasy texts which had been made into films, even WITH my video clip which included several examples of these films. When I asked the students to provide me with examples, every single arm shot up, and I got correct examples every time with the exception of two books or book series which had been made from movies (i.e. Avatar the Last Air Bender and Avatar by James Cameron). This tells me that their mental library of fantasy titles is quite large (as is their knowledge of popular media!).

·         When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?

I planned, and have actually already conducted, a “post-assessment, formative assessment” on common elements of the fantasy genre. I had been re-teaching material for the entirety of their first week by re-iterating several of the common themes of fantasy to my students and then having the kids draw comparisons between these elements and their Coraline text; looking to see how Coraline fit several of these criteria and how. I gave a quick true/false assessment then a few days later on the characteristics of fantasy to my students. I graded them all while they were in library, and when they returned we went over their assessment and I discussed every question. Special emphasis was given to the two questions which tripped up the most students, which were “All fantasy books have a theme” and “All fantasy books have a conflict and a solution”. They seemed very interested and engaged when I went over this, and I imagine it is because it was still fresh in their minds and they were interested in knowing how they did.

·         If you were to teach this same lesson again, what would you do differently and how do you think the changes would improve students’ learning?

I would take extra measures to ensure students understood that they were not to fill in more of their “K” column after doing it on their own time. This could include anything from having students flip it over at their seats to collecting them if the temptation proved to be too strong. This would help me because it would allow me to get a more “pure” idea of what their knowledge was before starting our discussion on the fantasy genre. I would also have students re-iterate instruction and important points back to me, because that holds them more accountable for their attentiveness and they also often enjoy hearing one another speak instead of just hearing me speak all the time. I would make a clear decision to have students either add or not add to the L column of their KWL chart during this lesson. In future lessons, I imagine myself actually collecting their KWL chart after they complete the K and W, and then having them fill out the L at the very end of the unit to see what they were actually able to retain. This would help me see what I did a good job teaching (or perhaps focused too much on) and what I needed to move my focus on for future classes.

·         What did you learn so far about implementing your ‘core practice’ and what do you need to do to continue your professional learning?

       This lesson did not give me a lot of insight into my “core practice” because it was the first lesson taught and focused more on the development of genre knowledge. However, I have learned that my plan thus far is working quite well for what I want to accomplish in terms of reading comprehension. I have been learning along the way that since this lesson was given, I need to up the amount of time I spend explaining comprehension concepts to students, modeling, time that is used for students to share out with me and each other, and also time for them to discuss responses. Because of this I have been doing so accordingly and as time allows.

Catie Watson - Lesson Reflection #2

Lesson Plan Reflection 10-31-12

• What students learned and which students struggled with the lesson.
• Many of my students did very well during this lesson. The majority of the class was able to identify cause-and-effect relationships throughout the text. I was very impressed with their sticky note responses. Several of my students struggled with cause-and-effect because they simply switched which event was the cause and which was the effect. Some students failed to complete the assignment and did not write down any cause-and-effect relationships. 
• Many of my students were able to use their background knowledge and jot down some notes on their sticky notes. Many referred to past experiences with basketball. Those that struggled made the mistake of "making connections" instead of identifying "background knowledge" (which could be easily confused). Some students wrote about how they would feel if they were the main character. Some students simply stated something that happened in the story, but they failed to explain their past experiences with the event.
• What are alternate reads of your students’ performance or products?
• I may have misread my students' performance because of how I interpreted their sticky note responses. Since I asked them to jot down a short phrase/sentence about what they were thinking in terms of background knowledge and/or cause-and-effect, they may have not been able to successfully express their thoughts. If I would have had an opportunity to ask them about what they were thinking, I may have realized that they were able to successfully identify background knowledge and/or cause-and-effect.
• What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?
• I learned that many of my students connected with this story and enjoyed the narrative text. I have found that my students seem to enjoy fictional stories better than informational text. Many of them also love sports and found this story to be very engaging. 
• When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?
• I will spend more time re-teaching the material during guided reading group for those that need additional support. I may direct questions about the concepts to students who need extra practice identifying examples.
• If you were to teach this same lesson again, what would you do differently and how do you think the changes would improve students’ learning?
• If I were to teach this lesson again, I would try to shorten the amount of time I spend on teaching vocabulary and going over the Question of the Week prior to reading the main selection. I felt as though many of my students started to lose focus by the time we began reading and using the sticky notes. Thankfully I feel as though the sticky notes helped them to re-focus on the lesson and concepts. 
• What did you learn so far about implementing your ‘core practice’ and what do you need to do to continue your professional learning?
• My students absolutely loved using the sticky notes during the reading. They were excited about taking notes and asked if they could keep the sticky notes to use again. I also believe this helped them stay focused and engaged in the reading. Since they were required to be responsible for identifying examples during the reading, they worked hard to pay attention and find examples to write on their sticky notes. I plan to use this method again! I also hope to incorporate other ways for my students to write about their reading.

Catie Watson - Lesson Reflection #1

Lesson Plan Reflection 10-30-12

• What students learned and which students struggled with the lesson.
• Many of my students struggled with cause-and-effect relationships. They often identified the “cause” as being the “effect” and vice versa. Once I asked them which event was causing the other, they were able to correctly identify the cause and effect.
• After the lesson, I realized that the worksheet that I had students fill out as we read through the story was not a good measure of whether or not my students understood the concepts. We worked as a class to identify the cause-and-effect relationships. I called on several students to identify the relationships and then we wrote them down on the worksheet together.
• Although I could not use this worksheet as an assessment, I do think that I kept my students’ attention since they were required to be following along. I was not able to use the worksheet to assess which individual students struggled with the lesson.
• During guided reading group, I was able to identify three students that were having a particularly difficult time with cause-and-effect relationships.
• What are alternate reads of your students’ performance or products?
• Like I mentioned before, the worksheet that I had my students fill out as we read was not a good assessment tool since we completed it as a class.
• What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?
• While the five student volunteers were reading their paragraphs, I realized that the passage that we were reading was somewhat difficult for many of my students. Their fluency suffered due to unfamiliar words and complex sentences. Although many of my students have shown great fluency skills while reading narratives, I believe this type of text (informative) was more challenging for my students to read with good fluency.
• When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?
• I will spend more time tomorrow going over the fact that cause AND effect are BOTH events, however one CAUSES the other. I believe the fact that Reading Street “tells” me to teach the students to ask “What happened” to identify effect and “Why did it happen” to identify cause, created a lot of confusion for my students. Clarifying the idea that both are events, and stressing the fact that one causes the other may help clear up this confusion.
• I will also spend more time working with students who are struggling during guided reading groups. Directing questions at these students and helping to reinforce the concepts will hopefully help them grasp this material.
• If you were to teach this same lesson again, what would you do differently and how do you think the changes would improve students’ learning?
• If I were to teach this lesson again, I would not use the questions “What happened?” and “Why did it happen?” that Reading Street suggested that I use. I believe this was the main reason why so many of my students were confused about cause-and-effect. Asking “What happened?” is confusing because there are multiple events happening. Identifying which event caused the other is the key to this comprehension skill. I would have also provided more concrete examples of cause-and-effect relationships if I were to re-teach this lesson.
• What did you learn so far about implementing your ‘core practice’ and what do you need to do to continue your professional learning?
• I have learned how important it is to plan and anticipate how my students will perceive the material I teach. I had expected my instruction about cause-and-effect to be enough teaching for my students to fully understand this concept. I had not anticipated the confusion and how the students might mix up the two. Planning and anticipating is crucial in order to be prepared for whatever challenges my students might face.

Kelsey Schmitt - Lesson Refection

Lesson: Writer's Workshop - Endings (Day 2 in my unit plan)
Date: 10-23-12

• What did students learn and which students struggled with the lesson?  


I think that the first part of my lesson was very effective. The students really responded to editing a poor ending together. All students seemed engaged even our writers who struggle. I drew upon my students' ideas and we were able to have a great conversation about what makes a strong ending.
Some students struggled with their writing time. During my lesson the principal had to come in and adjust our recess time to later in the afternoon. This seemed to create some chaos and element of concern about when recess would happen with many of the students. I noticed that it was difficult to conference with an individual and keep the rest of the class on task and not so concerned about their recess time.

• What are alternate reads (interpretations) of your students’ performance or products? 
My field instructor was here to observe this lesson. So he had an another interpretation to offer.  \He was very impressed with the class discussion but also was able to see how some of the students were off task and chatty after the recess postponement. I was surprised that he liked the beginning part of my lesson so much, I thought it went well, but he acted very impressed and said that he felt he learned something from watching. He commented that he liked how was doing the roving conferences and working with each student individually.

• What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?
I learned that they knew more about strong endings than I had anticipated from previous years. I had seen that many were struggling with this aspect of their writing so that was part of the reason why I chose to focus on them for a lesson. It seems as though they knew what makes a good ending but are having a harder time applying it. This is something I am going to keep in mind for the rest of my unit. 

• When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?
I think that the students who are struggling with their ending will get additional support during their conference time. If they have a not so hot ending, we can look at it together and I could help make suggestions and ask them questions to help develop a better conclusion.

• If you were to teach this same lesson again, what would you do differently and how do you think the changes would improve students’ learning?  
If I were to teach this lesson again, I would try harder to use the eyes in the back of my head that I am trying so hard to develop. I really struggled with giving an individual my attention during a roving conference while monitoring the entire group at the same time. My class is particularly chatty and I know that the recess postponement played into their distraction. I think that if this were to happen again I will foresee the off task behavior due to this adjustment and then I could know to reprimand the students more for being off task. My field instructor suggested saying to an off task student. "I see this is where are you are now, next time I come around the room I would like to see at least 2 more sentences." This helps to give some accountability to the individual who is off task, and I really liked that suggestion. I think that by acknowledging the off task behavior and holding the students accountable would improve their learning.

• What did you learn so far about implementing your ‘core practice’ and what do you need to do to continue your professional learning? 
I have learned that conferencing can be challenging. I was very optimistic that I would easily be able to make my way around the room to all 26. However I was only able to see about half the students during the lesson. Some students needed more help than others and required more time than I anticipated. For example one of the students didn't think he had to work until I came to him and I did tell him this was unacceptable. I plan to be very explicit with the entire class during the next lesson that my expectation is that you are to working the entire time. A conference with me does NOT mean I will be doing any of your work for you, I am only here to help. I did learn that many of students benefited from the conferencing and it was nice to see many of them catching on and really focus on their ending and what we talked about during our group mini-lesson.

Initial Blog Post - Kelsey Schmitt

My authentic question to my fellow bloggers is.....

What was the most helpful part of the assigned readings this week in terms of helping you prepare for your own lesson planning and what makes you say that?

For me I really enjoyed reading the sample 5-Day writing lesson plans in Writing Essentials because I found it to be most helpful for my planning. I chose writing as my core practice and conferencing as my target area to focus on for my own unit planning. I specifically paid close attention to the "Hero Writing" unit on page 323. This writing workshop format is very similar to how it is currently set up in my classroom, but in some ways it is different. Sometimes I feel like we are starting too many different pieces and not giving the students ample time to work and revise any of their writing because we are always moving on to the next mini-lesson with a new writing prompt. For me it was really refreshing to see a somewhat realistic and manageable way to have a mini unit with a single focus (heroes) and have the students be able to create a "published" piece in only 5 days. In my head writing conferences with a student had to be at least 10 minutes per student over the course of a longer period of time. My school only has writing four days a week for 60 minutes or so if we are lucky; so I was thinking I would only be able to meet with a few students a day. This book suggests if they have had enough time to edit and collaborate with others the average conference time per student is only 2 minutes on average because they have already done a lot of the work themselves!  It seems so simple but this was really cool to hear!  Reading this unit made me see how my unit could be different than what I was originally envisioning.

Was anyone else enlightened by what they read this week? :)