Reflective Practice

One More Wake Up

By this time tomorrow I will be finished with my work for National Board certification.  My test is at 11:30 tomorrow.  I feel ready, like I've run a marathon studying and now just have to run the last few blocks.  I've attempted to narrow down each assessment center exercise to some big ideas that I can apply to most any stimulus.

Today I've spent at least five hours studying, of course getting way off track as I did...reading articles about Sarah Palin, updating my Netflix queue, fixating on Pandora, reading random blogs that had nothing to do with anything, and putting books on hold at the library.  But, you gotta take a break sometime.  So now, my final (well, maybe) act of studying: summarizing here.

Exercise Eins: Reading Comprehension

• Metacognitive strategies
• Double Entry Journals
• Graphic Organizers
• Literal understanding
• Inference
• Think Alouds
• Mosaic of Thought
• Strategies that Work
• Reality Checks
• To Understand

Exercise Zwei: Oral Language Development for ELL

• Strength/Weakness...Goal...Strategy...Rationale
• Vocabulary...Use correct vocabulary related to specific context in discussions with teacher and classmates...Read aloud texts related to contexts, making picture cards afterward where student draws pictures and writes word...Drama...Field trips...BookFLIX
• Grammar (articles: a, an, the; pronouns: I, they, we; tenses: past, present, future)...Student will use __________ (specific articles, etc.) correctly in conversations...Reader's theater to hear the sounds and become familiar with the articles, shared reading, poems, chants, to see, hear, say examples of correct grammar...then engage in conversation to assess and practice correct use of grammar.
• Sentences and phrases vs. one word...Use complete sentences in conversation...teach child to use sentence stems...practice and assess in conversation.

Exercise Drei: Emergent Literacy

• Phonemic Awareness (ending sounds, beginning sounds, middle sounds)
• Spacing
• Sight Words
• ...Student will use _________ sounds correctly in writing...
• Students will use spaces between words consistently in writing
• Students will write and read the sight words _______ and _______ correctly.
• Shared writing to model thinking about the sounds and figuring them out (stretch it out like a rubber band), Elkonin boxes ("push the sounds up"), Making words, Starfall.com, Mentor texts, Shared reading, Word/picture sorts, Word Wall, Multi-sensory work (sand, sandpaper, shaving cream, act it out), cheers, chants, songs

Exercise Vier: Analyzing Reading

• Monitor comprehension
• Attend to visual cues/decode correctly
• Teacher modelling/Think alouds
• Double entry journals (reading-writing connection, self-evaluation, reflection, assessment tool)
• Teach cross checking (arms cross the body--"does it look right, sound right, make sense?")--involves learner, accomodates kinesthetic learners
• Word study to increase decoding ability

Exercise Funf: Visual Text

• Identify message and how use of graphics, text, literary devices communicates that message, identify target audience and how the text targets the audience.
• Literary devices: irony, humor, hyperbole/exaggeration, satire, theme, symbolism, analogy, mood, point of view, metaphor, allegory

Exercise Sechs: Writing Development:

• Strengths, Weaknesses, Goals, Strategies, Rationale
• 6-Traits
• Graphic organizers
• Mentor texts: contextualized grammar instruction, model
• Mini lessons
• Conferences: constant feedback, assessment, tailored instruction
• Small groups
• Teacher modelling
• Study-driven

Assessment Center Exercise 1: Reading Comprehension, Unpacked

Subject: Reading Comprehension
Stimulus: Analyze a student's comprehension of text
Prompts or Questions:

• identify one strength
• identify one weakness
• cite specific examples that are tightly connected and insightful
• identify a teaching strategy
• explain appropriate rationale with evidence from research or theory

Stimulus Examples (from Home Stretch):

• inferring
• main idea/details
• 7 comprehension strategies
• Beginning, middle, end
• Problem/solution
• Synthesis
• Use text features/structures

Study Resources:

• Strategies that Work
• Reading with Meaning
• Best Practices in Teaching Literacy (Gamell)
• Literacymatters.com
• Voices from the Middle
• Developmental Continuum (Campbell-Hill)
• Yardsticks
• Continuum of Literacy Learning (Founas & Pinnell)

The microphone

In order to make quality videos, NBPTS and my group leaders recommended purchasing an external microphone, so I ordered this one.  I hope it works.

Entry 3 Drafted

I have gotten as far as I can in my draft of Entry 3.  I am glad I took that one on first because it was really difficult.  Speaking, listening, and viewing.  Tough for me.  I will say I learned much more from doing this entry than I thought I would. 
I ended up creating a huge PowerPoint (50 some slides) to guide my teaching for the unit I'll teach on Listening, Speaking, and Viewing.  I don't think this is how I would normally tackle this issue.  I would normally integrate these ideas into a year of literacy study, but the way this is set up, I need to be able to show that I am intentionally teaching A LOT of stuff at the same time so this is what I came up with.
I based it on our study of exploration and the triangular trade.  I think the kids will love it because it is so visual.  I find it scary to think about teaching this and videoing it.  My plan is to video every single session so that I can just pick and choose the one I want.  I am hoping I will get at least one good session!

Listening and Speaking Rubric

And here it is...for entry 3...ready to try out when school starts.

Download Listening and Speaking Rubric

Planning for Entry 3

I'd really like to download the "Stranger than Fiction" soundtrack for this work, but I am out of iTunes money, so it's Priscilla Ahn again.

In chapter 9 of his book, Stead addresses Visual Literacy.  I was enlightened.  I was unsure what this meant until I read this chapter.  I had thought it had something to do with looking at websites or powerpoint presentations or movies and being a wise consumer of those types of media.  As defined by Stead in this chapter, it seems that is broader than that.  In his main example, visual literacy means helping students understand how to read a map and make inferences from the map.  For my purposes, it is important for me to remember this progression that Stead outlines:

1.  Literal understandings
2.  Interpretive Understandings (Inference)
3.  Evaluative Understandings
4.  Visual Literacy

The development of ways to talk about inference are very important prior to the visual literacy instruction because that is the bread and butter of being visually literate: being able to infer information from a visual.

More Stead for Entry 2

Now I've just downloaded Priscilla Ahn...iTunes will love me by the time this is done on March 31.

From Chapter 3: The Art of Retelling

Session 3 (p. 41): Children Deconstruct and Reconstruct in Pairs or Individually
I think that this would be best done in the guided reading groups because 1) texts would be at "just right" level, and 2) they would have more support in the small group setting.  This would be a good strategy to work on for at least a week in the small groups.  I could see it being very successful there.

Again, Stead recommends ending with reflection, which I NEED to do more often.  It is so effective.  He adds this to the reflection chart from sessions 1 and 2:

After "Write down the key words..." he adds (in session 2, actually):

• Think about the key nouns, verbs, adjective, and adverbs
• Make a list of them, highlight the most important

and in session 3:

• Write the most important nouns, verbs, adjective, adverbs in graphic organizer.
• When you have finished writing or saying the retelling, go back and look at the original piece
• Ask yourself these questions:
  
  • Have I included all the important information?
  • Do I need to add anything?
  • Can I find what I have said in the original piece?

Extending and Modifying the Web Organizer

Stead discusses extensions of the web:
"...we discovered that when working with nonfiction narratives such as biographies, our web organizer needed modification because information was often presented in a sequential order...We brought the children together, brainstormed different ways to take notes and came up with a variety of examples." (p. 46)

I really like Harry's post-it note method, first, because a kid came up with it, and second, because it is just so stinking logical.  You write notes on stickies, then you stick them to a piece of paper, then you can rearrange them for a variety of purposes: most important ideas, sequence, etc. 

Further:
"We also stressed that these organizers did not have to be used for every nonfiction book or article read.  The last thing we wanted to do was make reading nonfiction an arduous task that included taking copious notes."

Amen!

BUT...the fact that Harry and others were able to create their own organization structures was O SUCH a good assessment of the fact that they were able to internalize and apply these strategies.

Therefore, here is my attempt to put together a mini-unit on deconstruction and reconstruction.

Assessment data that leads me to believe my students need this instruction:

• Lowest group of readers continues to score low in retelling information on QRI-IV in nonfiction text
• Lowest group of readers continues to have difficulty answering comprehension questions which shows their monitoring and comprehensions is still troublesome, especially when contrasted with their oral reading accuracies of 98-100% of the same texts that they score 40-60% comprehension
• Other students in the class give retellings so overwrought with detail in conferences as to be unintelligible.

Here is the outline of the mini unit: Download Mini Unit Deconstructing and Reconstructing Text

I plan to begin implementation in January, after finishing our round of study of exploration using our essential questions and RAN charts.

I will use the instruction in this mini-unit for my entry 2 submission.

"Indolence is a delightful but distressing state; we must be doing something to be happy." -Mahatma Gandhi

Entry 4 Things to Remember

In spring 2008, Joyce Jimmerson from WSU Cooperative Extension Service visited the class and taught them about worms and how they make compost.  The kids were then able to teach other classes about it.

Homework

O how I hate it.

For the last two years, while working on my master's degree, the only way I could get myself ready and actually sitting down to do homework was with the mental bribery of food.  The kids and Norman would go to racquetball and I would have two or three hours to work.  And would I use it?  Of course not...I would procrastinate and procrastinate (much like I am doing now) and then get some food that I would never let my kids eat or eat in front of them and then eat it while I worked.  It was the only way I could get myself to work.  It was not good.

Now that I am working on my National Board Cert it is music.  I sit down and procrastinate by looking around in iTunes and usually downloading something.  Today it was Amy Macdonald This is the Life.  Very good music and very good for putting off what is next.

Oh, and I also downloaded the five free sock patterns from Knitting Daily.