Reflection

Throughout my guided lead teaching, I learned a lot as a teacher and got to know my reading group students faster than I expected. The first day of my guided lead teaching was the third time that we met as a reading group. So I tried to remember their names and match their names with their faces before I actually teach my lesson because I did not know half of my reading group students’ name. Unfortunately, I couldn’t memorize all the names by the time I teach my first lesson and I was very frustrated because I could not call on students.
I decided to do quick write at the beginning of every lesson. The first day’s topic was writing about their favorite book or a movie. The purpose of this topic was that I wanted to naturally lead them to talk about the elements of literacy (characters, plot, setting, characters, and theme) by sharing their favorite the book/movie. When I asked students to share their quick write, many students raised their hand which was very exciting for me and also for them because they wanted to share their favorite book/movie and I could see that students are engaged in the lesson so far. After sharing several students’ quick write, I asked if they know anything about fable because that was my unit topic because I wanted to have little discussion on what is fable and what are some famous fables that they have heard before. However, it was absolutely silent when I asked them what fable is. Then, I thought it was the vocabulary that they did not understand, so I asked if they heard of the story of The Tortoise and The Hare because this story is the most common fable but again nobody knew what it was. My MT and I were very surprised that students did not know much about it. So instead of discussion, I ended up explain what a fable is. I realized that lesson plans are really a plan. It is to help me plan and think ahead before I actually teach. On the first day of teaching I learned that I never can expect what will happen in the class.
On the second day of teaching, I read a story from South Korea which was a folktale but it had a lesson in the story so I decided to use it. Students did not have much knowledge about South Korea which I assumed. First I used a globe to show where South Korea was located and told them how long the flight duration is. Students could not believe how long the flight is and was amazed by the fact that planes are going over the Pacific Ocean. I gave them a chance to ask any questions that they have about South Korea and I was so glad that almost everyone’s hand was up. I think it was a great way to introduce South Korea very briefly and read a story from South Korea which was very suit for the lesson. After reading the book, students had to fill in the literacy chart which they have to identify title, characters, theme, and setting of the story. I noticed that most students could tell me the message from story but they cannot make it as a general statement. For example, the moral of the story was greediness will be punished and hardworking will be awarded but students are being too specific to the story and said the lesson was the old greedy man became a baby because he drank too much magic spring water. So I had to explain that I need to tell them moral of the story should be general so that it can apply to other situations. After reading Korean folktales, I was going to give them very short fable to read with a partner but we ran out of time. However, I did not think students were ready to read themselves and trying to find out the theme of the story anyways, so I thought it was okay to skip the last activity.
On third day, we read Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters and students were very engaged in the story. With this story, after reading a page, I stopped and ask them questions such as what happened in this page? What did you think will happen next etc. Stop and ask questions was working well because students were guessing what will happen next and re-telling the story of each page in their own words. I knew that most of my students comprehended the story because after reading the book, students could answer comprehension questions about the story. However, they could not find the moral of the story. Students are saying that like mean sister was very mean in the story or the nicer daughter became a queen. So if I could teach this same lesson again, I would maybe give them a moral of the story first before we read the fable or a book. Then, students can see how the moral applied in the story and maybe connect that moral to other situations. Apparently it was too hard for students to identify the moral of the story after doing several times. Half of my students’ quick write, it is very hard to read and cannot spell the basic words. For one fable, students took turns to read and it took longer than I thought to finish the story because they could not read well and couldn’t recognize words or decode words. The hardest part was that sometimes students who are in special education joined our class and sometimes they came to the class in the middle of a lesson. That was very disturbing other students and my MT and I could never quite figurate out when they are with us and when they are not.

Reflection on Literacy Lesson

This particular lesson was intended to introduce the concept of a writing conference to my fifth graders. One thing that I noticed is that students have had almost no experience with talking about their own writing, which threatens their meta cognitive development. When I read about the idea of writing conferences in "Writing Essentials", I knew right away that this is something that I wanted to try.

So, basically, that is what the lesson was about. I read them an excerpt of one of my favorite books, "The Book Thief" (which many of you have read in TE348), during one of the lessons before this, and we have used what we have read to work on the reading strategies of the week, which were compare and contrast. The students were supposed to use a Venn diagram that was created the day before as a guide, and write a few paragraphs that depicted the similarities between themselves and Liesel, as well as the differences between themselves and Liesel. As students wrote these paragraphs, I worked to meet with all of them to talk briefly about their writing, and filled out a T-Chart with them. The T-Chart had "I can..." written over one column and "I'm working on..." written over the other column (the same format that is suggested in Writing Essentials). Along with the students' suggestions, we would add one thing in each category, and then have the students continue to work on their paragraphs using these suggestions, with the intention that they will continue to do the skill listed in the "I can..." category and focus on improving the skill listed in the "I'm working on..." category.

This was the lesson that I was formally observed by my field instructor with, and I am actually really glad that I was because I got a lot of awesome suggestions. Together, we discussed what students were using the writing conferences purposefully, and the students who were really unaware of how to approach the writing conference. The students who were able to zero in on their strengths and weaknesses were the students who generally excel in writing. For example, I have one student in my class who has the potential to be an EXCELLENT writer - all she is really lacking is the technical stuff, but the natural talent is all there. She was able to zero in on that completely. She knew that she excelled at using vivid descriptions and she knew that she has a really strong voice in her writing. She was also able to target her weakness of grammar, and she voiced her desire to improve on this in order to make her writing even more extraordinary.

However, the majority of students really struggled. I was expecting these struggles, since I knew that talking about their writing would be something brand new for my class, and thus, something that may be incredibly difficult for my students. They are just used to handing in their writing and being done with it. They see their grade, accept it, and move on. However, this does not lend much opportunity for students to meta cognitively understand what must be done for them to continue to improve their writing. This lesson, then, was meant as a just an introduction for these types of skills in order for them to get their feet wet.

Robin, my field instructor, was super helpful when it came to the reflection piece of this lesson. She applauded my intentions here, and encouraged me to continue to try writing conferences. Although I would say the intentions were lost on most students, she did not want me to be discouraged, but use this as a way to improve next time. She had many suggestions for the next time that I use writing conferences in my class (and I really want to use them again, because I think this will open their world up so much and make them think critically of their writing and strive to get better!!!). For example, she suggested that I should have be way more explicit when introducing my writing conference idea to the students, especially because this is something that so foreign to them. I should have told them EXACTLY the type of conversation that was expected of them, so they would know where to start when I met with them. For this, a "fish bowl" between my MT and I would have been ideal. In addition, Robin suggested that I should have had students had a item in the "I can..." column and an item in the "I'm working on..." column ready to go. This would have gotten our conference off with a strong start, and I could immediately assess their meta cognitive skills, and also I could help them get on the right track, or confirm they were on the right track. This would have been less time-consuming, and way more efficient.

Overall, I am really glad I did this, even though the students really struggled, because it at least got them thinking about this idea. I am really glad that I got to talk to my field instructor and get her feedback, because I feel really inspired to continue with writing conferences, because I really believe in the benefits of them. :)

Lesson Plan Reflection

While teaching my reading unit, I found that a lot of it did not go as expected. This isn’t a bad thing. I just realized throughout guided lead teaching that you cannot plan for everything. For my reading unit, I planned all of my lessons in advance. While teaching it, I found that I had to revise every single one of my lessons. Either we ran out of time because of how much discussion we had, I found something new that I wanted to do, or I altered the lesson so that their was chance for more participation and partner work.

I reflected on each and every one of my lessons and because of these reflections, ended up revising either the next days lesson plan or the rest of the weeks lesson plans because of something I noticed or thought of while teaching and reflecting. The first week of my Reading Street unit, the focus was on the comprehension skill and strategy compare/contrast and visualizing. There was also vocabulary that the students needed to learn and be able to apply in their own context. The lesson that I reflected the most on that week was my second lesson. In this lesson, we had a good discussion about what the students already knew about compare/contrast and visualizing, what we had talked about the day before, and different experiences they had with this skill and strategy. This discussion went very well and I found that it went longer than what I was expecting. I then read to the students a chapter of the book The Circuit, which is about a boy that is part of a migrant family. He shares his experiences in each chapter of the text. While I read, I modeled comparing and contrasting myself to the character, as well as when I visualized the text. I also had given students a sticky note and told them the purpose of the sticky note was to take notes on things they found were alike and different between the character and them while I was reading. After reading the chapter, the students shared examples they found of comparing/contrasting themselves with the main character, as well as parts that they visualized while reading. The students were able to give me a lot of really good examples of both the skill and strategy. After our discussion, I then explained how to make a Venn diagram using the examples. I found while doing this that some of the students seemed bored. While reflecting on my lesson, I realized that something I didn’t do was pre-assess the student’s prior experiences with Venn diagrams. I knew that each of them had seen one but I did not assess whether they had made one themselves and knew how to make one. I realized afterward that I should have applied the students more during my modeling and explained how to make it while including the students. When writing my examples into the Venn diagram, I could have used the students for help in asking where each thing should go, etc. Once the Venn diagram was done, I moved on to a vocabulary activity. In this activity, we read a section of text in the Reading Street book and practiced using context clues to help figure out the meaning of the vocabulary words. I explained to the students how to do this, and made up an example where I used context clues to figure out the meaning of an unknown vocabulary word. After this, I had the students read and practice using context clues with the first word in a whole group setting. I then found that we had run out of time and could not do this with the rest of the vocabulary in the text.

After my lesson, I had the help of my field instructor in reflecting on my lesson. We agreed that the beginning discussion had gone too long and ended in the vocabulary activity having to be shortened. Although I really enjoyed that our discussion went well and that many of the students were participating, I do think that I could have slimmed it up and possibly had the students write in their reading journals and only share a few examples so that we had more time for the vocabulary practice. Due to spending so much time on the skill and strategy, none of my students seemed to struggle with it. I made sure to check in with students at all different levels during our discussion and while sharing examples so that I had an idea of where everyone was at. This being said, students did not receive as much instructional time on the vocabulary. During the vocabulary activity, I was having them practice using context clues to figure out the meaning of words. If more time had been given to that, students could have practiced more how to do this and understood why it was purposeful. The vocabulary is very important for the students to know and because the discussion went longer than I had predicted, there was less time for it and it affected their understanding and application of the vocabulary. Therefore, I revised my next day’s lesson so that students were given more academic support in this area and were given the opportunity to practice and apply the vocabulary words. Something that I noticed while we were practicing the strategy and skill and reading the text was that students after the chapter was read, students were making inferences about why things happened, as well as predictions as to what would happen next. This was not something that was part of my objective, but I fed off of it and had the students explain why they thought that. I was really happy to see that they were using prior knowledge of other comprehension skills and strategies to help them in understanding the text. Another thing that was noticed while I was teaching, and earlier said, is that the students seemed bored while I was explaining the Venn diagram. I do think that if I had pre-assessed the student’s experiences with Venn diagrams that I could have applied them more while I was modeling because they already knew a lot of what I was talking about. Also during my reflection, I wished that I had included more partner work for the students instead of being almost entirely whole group discussion. I know that the students really enjoy working in partners. Therefore, I revised my next day’s lesson and had them work with a partner of their choice to fill out a Venn diagram comparing/contrasting one of the partner’s with the main character of the book. On the back of the Venn diagram, I had them practice visualizing by drawing a scene they remembered from the book. This proved to be a lot of fun for the students and I was able to walk around and talk with them about this assignment and see how they were able to apply the skill and strategy for that week.

Overall, I thought that the lesson went really well. There were some changes I would have made, such as shortening the discussion on the strategy and skill and spending more time practicing the strategy and skill and also understanding the week's vocabulary words. Although the discussion was good, it would have been more purposeful to put more of a focus on the strategy and skill in action, rather than talking about it. Also, the vocabulary words are important for the students to know, therefore more time spent learning and applying them benefits their learning. I also would have incorporated more partner work into this lesson, such as developing the context clues activity into a whole group and then partner work activity and also turning the venn diagram activity into a partner activity like I did for the next day's lesson. The students seem to work really well with partners and enjoy doing interactive activities, therefore I would incorporate more of it if I were to teaching this lesson again. What I learned from my reading units overall is that you cannot expect things to go as planned. Making reflections and revisions was a continuous thing, and I saw that because of the reflections and revisions made that the unit went great, flowed well, and was effective for the students. I really enjoyed teaching my reading unit and I'm excited to continue to teach reading and gain more experience with teaching, lesson planning, and developing units.

Response to Breanne

I definitely see how literacy is incorporated into Science and Social Studies in my placement. Actually I have seen more literacy in Science and Social Studies class compare to English Language Art class. There are a lot of writing in Science and Social Studies class because students need to write lab reports do research on the topics that they are learning in Social Studies class and write down information about it. Now the MEAP test is done, I can wait to see the real English Language Art class. Until this year, I was always placed in either Kindergarten or first grade. So I never got a chance to see a textbook used in the classroom. However, now I see how textbooks are used in classroom and textbooks contains very important contents but the way it is used in the classroom does not really delivery the contents to students. For example in Social Studies class, students take turns to read each paragraph. I see many students are not paying attention when other students read for them. Then, when we go to computer labs to do research on the topic that they learned, not many students know what they have to research on. Thus I think if we start to use some practices to be actively reading through textbooks, they will really benefit to students to comprehend the textbook better.

The first chapter that I read from Strategies That Work was chapter 12 titled Content Literacy: Reading for Understanding in Social Studies and Science. Much of this chapter focuses on different practices that can be done to helps students comprehend text in Social Studies and Science. Many Social Studies suggestions were creating things to help summarize all the information, whether using writing or visuals. Such as: concept maps, story maps, maps of countries and cultures, time line of historical events, journals and personal narratives, etc. A couple of these comprehension strategies I will be using in my reading unit. These include: concept maps, a journal, and a time line of events. For the time line, I plan on reading a book that is historical fiction and having students apply the comprehension strategy sequencing to put the important events in order. This will not only teach students a comprehension strategy to use during reading, but it will also tie in Social Studies and help them to recognize a strategy that could be used in the Social Studies curriculum. The Science reading practices in this chapter also include creating things such as posters, mind maps, and picture dictionaries. Many of them were visual representations, but there were also things such as keeping journals and everything focused around summarizing information. This chapter showed me that many of the science and social studies practices for content literacy center around making meaning of the text that is being read in order for students to walk away with the big idea and concepts from the text. There are many different ways shared in this chapter and each of them help to make connections and push student’s thinking. They are also different activities that encourage engagement from the students and serve to keep the student’s interest. This chapter helped give me ideas for different practices I can use when designing my units. It reminded me of the importance of implementing practices like these in all areas and not just during reading time.
The second chapter of Strategies That Work that I read was chapter 14 Reading to Understand Textbooks. I knew right away that this chapter would be interesting because I know that many students find reading from their textbooks to be boring and therefore do not take much meaning from the text that they read. This is exactly what the chapter says at the beginning. That no student has ever walked into the classroom loving their textbook and that often the text books either have TMI (too much information) or NEI (not enough information). The big idea of this chapter is that it is up to us to set up our lessons so that students are not just reading to “memorize” the text to complete an assignment or test, but that the students are actually thinking their way through the text. This chapter shares some practices to be actively reading through textbooks. Some of these practices include: being selective about what is read, coding text with sticky notes, merging thinking with new information, discussing in small groups, using the jigsaw strategy, etc. All of these practices help to make reading out of textbooks bearable, as well as beneficial for student’s learning. We need to make sure that students understand the purpose of reading the text, and are comprehending and making meaning of the text as they read it. These practices got me thinking about textbooks in our curriculum and how some of them could be used to help students to become active readers while they are reading them. For example, with our textbooks in science, I personally think that they are very boring to just read, and so I understand completely why my students would think so too. Therefore, when we read out of our textbook, I think I am going to implement some of these strategies to help my students make connections and taking meaning from the text. One practice that I really liked was either making sticky notes on thinking and new information or making a two-column think sheet labeled Notes or Facts/My thinking. This will help students to write down new information that they learned and make connections with their own thinking of the new concepts. This chapter provided me with a lot of practices that I can use in the future for subjects such as science where the main reading source is their textbook.

Response to Carolyn

In my TE classes, we have talked few times about a scripted curriculum. Many of us including me think a scripted curriculum can be helpful but it is not realistic. If a teacher is reading from a scripted curriculum, we don’t need to go to college and take classes to learn how to be a teacher and learn how to teach students. Also with a scripted curriculum, I think there is a limitation. I have not seen a scripted curriculum for real, so I am not sure how it is written but every class is different. Nobody can expect what kind of students will be in our classroom. Each classroom needs their own instructions and modifications depend on the students. I am not sure about the idea of reading being a collaborative effort. I like the idea of students help each other to understand the text or guide them to read. However, at some point they all should learn how to read and comprehend by themselves without help from others. And I am surprise to hear that it is supposed to take around 3 weeks to train students but your class been going on the sixth week of school and still have quite a ways to go. I am sure students are bored doing it because it has been dragged or last for so long when it should not be. Also, I am not sure if students can handle “coach” other students even though they have been trained. Using my 5th graders as an example, most of them do not like to read so my MT and I always pushing them to read during silent reading time. If not, they will just daydream and look for chance to talk to their neighbor. So imagine students are in a pair doing reading together when they don’t care about reading and not taking this serious, I don’t think this will help students at all.

This week, I decided that I wanted to discuss PALS. In Leslie, PALS is a big deal. My MT makes it sound like there is a lot of pressure from high-up people, such as our principal to make sure that our students are being trained almost everyday in PALS. For those of you who may not know what PALS is, it is a scripted curriculum that stands for Peer Assisted Learning Strategies. Apparently, it has recently been released to schools after a decade of research and development. Essentially, students are being trained on how to "coach" other students while they read/comprehend, making reading a collaborative effort. The training process requires students to sit in pairs, while the teacher/intern reads from a script, while the students are supposed to be listening intently to what is being read.

We are still very much in the training process. It's supposed to take around 3 weeks to train; however, we are going on the sixth week of school, and we still have quite a ways to go. According to my MT, once the students are trained, the program yields great results. However, the training process is rough. From what I have witnessed, I find the program to be incredibly tedious, and the students do not seem to taking it too seriously. I feel a bit ridiculous reading the script to them everyday.

So, my question is, for those of you that also do PALS, what are your opinions on it? What are the results? For those of you that do not use PALS, how do you feel about a scripted curriculum? How do you feel about the idea that students are being trained in a rigorous manner? How do you feel about the idea of reading being a collaborative effort?