Target Area, Elizabeth Gutowski

1.     Describe your target area for guided lead teaching.

My target area is an author study of Kevin Henkes’ books. It will focus on story elements and cross-text connections.

2.     Approximately how much time per day is allotted for your instruction in this area?

40-60 minutes are allotted each day per reading.  However, this time is usually split fairly equally between instructional time and independent reading.  So, I will have about 20-30 minutes per day for this unit.

3.     Which Common Core State Standard(s) will you work toward?

Common core standards I will work toward during this unit are:

·         RL.3.1. Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers.

·         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.

·         RL.3.7. Explain how specific aspects of a text’s illustrations contribute to what is conveyed by the words in a story (e.g., create mood, emphasize aspects of a character or setting).

·         RL.3.9. Compare and contrast the themes, settings, and plots of stories written by the same author about the same or similar characters (e.g., in books from a series).

Michigan GLCE’s I will work toward during this unit are:

·         R.NT.03-05.05 respond to individual and multiple texts by finding evidence, discussing, illustrating, and/or writing to reflect, make connections, take a position, and/or show understanding.

·         R.NT.03.03 identify and describe characters’ thoughts and motivations, story level themes (good vs. evil), main idea, and lesson/moral (fable).

·         S.DS.03.02 discuss narratives, conveying the story grammar, and explain why the story is worthwhile and how it is relevant to the storyteller or the audience.

·         R.CM.03.03 compare and contrast relationships among characters, events, and key ideas within and across texts to create a deeper understanding by mapping story elements, graphically representing key ideas and details, and asking questions as they read, including a narrative to an informational text, a literature selection to a subject area text, and an historical event to a current event.

·         R.NT.03.04 explain how authors use literary devices including prediction, personification, and point of view to develop a story level theme, depict the setting, and reveal how thoughts and actions convey important character traits.

4.     How will teaching in this target area provide opportunities for students to learn important content and/or skills that relate to their lives?  In what ways does this learning include learning literacy, learning about literacy, and/or learning through literacy?

This target area teaches two sets of important skills that are beneficial because they will help facilitate comprehension.  Students will learn to compare and contrast texts and also to identify story elements.  Both of these skills will help students comprehend what they are reading.

5.     What types of classroom talk take place within this target area? To what extent is the talk teacher-led, student-led, or focused on higher-level thinking? What norms for interaction would you like to build within your classroom as you teach in this target area (e.g., see ideas in Chapter 6 of Strategies that Work, the Berne & Clark 2008 article, or draw from some of the readings done in TE 402 on classroom talk)?

The types of classroom talk I would like to include in this unit include whole group, small group, and pairs.  I would like some talk to be student-led but I will have to build up to that because my students are unfamiliar with that type of classroom talk.  I think the discussion will be focused on higher-level thinking when students make connections between texts.  Norms I would like to build include: listen respectfully while others are talking, ask questions, critique ideas (not people), and encourage everyone to participate.

6.     Which ‘core practice’ do you want to work on developing/improving as you teach in this target area (refer to document “Resources for Developing Core Practices”)? How will focusing on this core practice contribute to your own professional learning?

The core practice I want to develop as I teach this unit is writing about reading. This will contribute to my own professional learning because I am curious about this core practice and how writing can help students take away as much as possible from reading.  I am also very interested in integrating literacy instruction, weaving reading and writing together.

7.     What resources within the community, neighborhood, school district, school or classroom do you have to work with in this target area?

I have checked out Kevin Henkes books from the local and school libraries.  My mentor teacher has given me a small folder with reproducibles such as venn diagrams and story element charts.  She also gave me a resource book about effective read-alouds.

8.     What additional resources do you need to obtain?

Additional resources I might need to obtain are some teacher resource books about cross-text connections and/or story elements. I will also look into the resources available from Kevin Henkes’ website.

9.     How will you pre-assess your students in your target area?

I designed a pre-test to gauge students’ knowledge of text-to-text connections and story elements.  I will ask students to demonstrate their knowledge of these concepts using a book we are currently reading in class. 

10.  What else will you need to find out about all students in your class to help you develop lesson plans for your Guided Lead Teaching?

I also want to find out about students’ beliefs about themselves as literacy learners.  I will administer a general reading survey to gain knowledge of students’ beliefs about themselves as literacy learners and their interests and motivations as literacy learners.

11.  What else do you need/want to learn about the ‘core practice’ to support your planning and teaching?

I want to learn more about the kinds of writing students can do about reading. I don’t want students to write in the same way throughout the unit.  I will investigate different ways to write about reading.

12.  What concerns, if any, do you have about planning and teaching your unit?

I am somewhat concerned about planning this unit without a curriculum guide to build off of.  I am familiar with extending and tailoring lessons from a curriculum guide but for this unit, I am designing each lesson from scratch.  I am planning on having several conferences with my mentor teacher about my lessons before I teach to help me with this concern.

Julie Crist: Target Area Questions

1.       Describe your target area for guided lead teaching.

o   For my literacy unit, I am focusing on the Making Meaning portion of our day.  Making Meaning incorporates reading comprehension into the day and allows for the students to answer questions about a specific text type.  For this two week unit, I will be introducing nonfiction text into the classroom for exploration.  In science we will be beginning Bee reports, so my MT and I thought introducing Nonfiction would be a nice way to integrate the two subjects.

2.       Approximately how much time per day is allotted for your instruction in this area?

o   There will be approximately 30-40 minutes set aside each day for this component of literacy.  This will be plenty of time to make it through the lesson and maybe extend the lesson to another aspect of our district literacy program (i.e. Writer’s Workshop, Reader’s Notebook etc.)

3.       Which Common Core State Standard(s) will you work toward?

o   1.RL.5 Explain major differences between books that tell stories and books that give information.

o   1.RIT.1 Ask and answer questions about key details in a text.

o   1.RIT.2 Identify the main topic and retell key details of a text.

o   1.RIT.4 Ask and answer questions to help determine or clarify the meaning of words and phrases in a text.

o   1.RIT.5 Know and use various text features (e.g. headings, table of contents, glossaries, electronic menus, icons) to locate key facts or information in a text.

o   1.RIT.6 Distinguish between information provided by pictures or other illustrations and information provided by the words in a text.

o   1.RIT.7 Use the illustrations and details in a text to describe its key ideas.

o   1.RIT.10 With prompting and support, read informational texts appropriately complex for grade 1.

o   1.SL.3 Ask and answer questions about what a speaker says in order to gather additional information or clarify something that is not understood.

4.       How will teaching in this target area provide opportunities for students to learn important content and/or skills that relate to their lives?  In what ways does this learning include learning literacy, learning about literacy, and/or learning through literacy?

o   By providing the students with this information about nonfiction text, they will able to locate information using the tools the text provides them.  They will be able prioritize important facts in a piece of nonfiction literature.  They will be able to share their findings with their peers in informal discussions.  Finally, they will be able to put their knowledge of informational texts to work through the creation of a Bee report.  The Making Meaning program is specifically designed to introduce students to a variety of different texts so they are learning literacy in this sense.  The students have yet to explore nonfiction text in 1^st grade so I am very excited I get to introduce this new concept.  I will be defining what nonfiction is and how it differs from fiction pieces.  They will get to explore the tools within the books such as the glossary, and table of contents.  This is how the students will learn about the literacy.  The students will put their knowledge of nonfiction to work in our science unit when they develop their individual bee reports.

5.       What types of classroom talk takes place within this target area? To what extent is the talk teacher-led, student-led, or focused on higher-level thinking? What norms for interaction would you like to build within your classroom as you teach in this target area (e.g., see ideas in Chapter 6 of Strategies that Work, the Berne & Clark 2008 article, or draw from some of the readings done in TE 402 on classroom talk)?

o   Making Meaning is very much a teacher-led program in which the teacher reads a story and engages the students in a content-based discussion throughout the lesson.  At times we will pair the students up to share their ideas and then call them back to attention for a large group debriefing period.  We are working on having the students predict and retell stories to their peers as well as locate components of a story in their book boxes.  I want the students to be able to focus on the key vocabulary words and be able to tell the difference between a nonfiction and fiction story.  My MT and I have been focusing on having the students be respectful listeners by looking at the speaker, waiting for a peer to finish their thought, and raising their hands if they have a question.  These rules help to maintain the classroom management as well as teach the students to be self-disciplined. 

6.       Which ‘core practice’ do you want to work on developing/improving as you teach in this target area (refer to document “Resources for Developing Core Practices”)? How will focusing on this core practice contribute to your own professional learning?

o   The Core Practice I want to improve on as I teach this unit is Comprehension Strategy Instruction and Assessment.  I feel this is the most important aspect of the Making Meaning program and to this age group of students.  This core practice will help me develop questions to push the students to answer with more than a one-word response.  The students need to be able to use the nonfiction text I am introducing to find information about a specific topic.  I have noticed through the DRA testing that the students are becoming more fluent in their reading, but they do not understand what they read.  I believe nonfiction text will challenge the students to do both.

7.       What resources within the community, neighborhood, school district, school or classroom do you have to work with in this target area?

o   Open communication with my MT is going to be the most beneficial tool in regards to Making Meaning.  I have been to a Professional Development day titled, “Writing about Reading” which I hope to incorporate a little bit after this two-week unit.  The PD day discussed tools in which lower elementary students can use in order to interact with informational texts.  One tool they introduced was sticky notes in which the students could write information they felt to be important down on paper to incorporate into a piece of nonfiction writing.

8.       What additional resources do you need to obtain?

o   I need to obtain the books laid out in the Making Meaning curriculum in order to direct my lessons.

9.       How will you pre-assess your students in your target area?

o   I want to teach a mini-lesson that focuses on a piece of nonfiction text and observe how the students react to it.  I have observed the students being excited over animals, bones, and mummies in which they have read about in fiction books.  I am curious as to how they would respond if they read text that was real to them and they could observe each day in their environment.

10.   What else will you need to find out about all students in your class to help you develop lesson plans for your Guided Lead Teaching?

o   I need to interview the students to see their personal experiences with nonfiction text in kindergarten.  I have been differentiating instruction based on developmental levels in the classroom and I need to gather more information about student interests in order to choose ‘good-fit’ nonfiction books for the students.

11.   What else do you need/want to learn about the ‘core practice’ to support your planning and teaching?

o   I would like to learn how to monitor comprehension in a more concrete form in a large group lesson setting.  I am able to record individual progress during a small group lesson or one-on-one interview, but I am challenged by comprehension record keeping while teaching a large group. 

12.   What concerns, if any, do you have about planning and teaching your unit?

o   I have always taught fiction based lessons and connected them to the students’ personal experiences through that type of text.  I am curious as to how well I am going to do when the information is real.  This may seem like a strange concern, but first graders are full of questions.  How am I going to maintain control while answering 24 different questions at once? 

2nd Readings

As a Child Development major, I have a LOT of experience with Anecdotal Records. I have been using them for the past 2 years in all of my preschool lab experiences. I have had practice writing them, reading them, sorting them, and therefore have also had a lot of practice observing children before writing these records. I feel as if they are very resourceful and come in great hand when trying to assess children on what they know and what they are capable of doing, as well as to be able to plan lessons for all of the different individual children in class.  Reading this article was a great refresher about anecdotal records and how we can use them as educators to examine and understand children's literacy learning experiences.

I found it interesting to understand the research behind using these and all of the information that supports this type of assessment. I enjoyed reading this article and I think and plan that in the future I will use this type of assessment to asses my students to see what tasks they are capable of doing and how they are keeping up in class. I thought it was interesting to include a table of helpful abreviations that one could use to help make these assessments and observations happen quicker since one of the things I have realized since being in the classroom the past few weeks is that time is precious and there never seems to be enough of it. I can see myself using these types of records this year to help me get to know my students on a personal level as well.

I thought the table of verbs on page 3 was a great contribution to this article to really help us understand how to write an anecdotal record and what type of vocabulary we should use when we are describing the children in our classes. I also thought the rest of the tables throughout were helpful tools for us to see what an anecdotal record should look like and what it should contain.

Strategies That Work

In the readings for this week, I found that I learned SO MUCH from the chapters we read in Strategies That Work. It was so great to finally read a text that when I started reading it, I didn't want to stop! I am normally more of a skimmer when it comes to reading, but with this text I found myself grabbing my highlighter and labeling important facts, things I agreed with, and so forth.

I learned a lot from these chapters, some information that I already knew but it was good to have a refresher. For example, in my opinion and in my experience as an educator thus far, I have seen and personally witnessed how important it is for the "text-to-self" connection. We are more likely to engage in reading and understand it when we have something to relate to. As an educator, I don't really have any interest in reading about accounting, which is what my brother is currently studying, so I would most likely not be as engaged in reading about that.  However, based on a quote from the reading that "when we connect our past experiences to new information, we are more apt to engage in the reading as well as understand it," I would try my best to do this while I was reading about accounting. I would try my best to not only relate to it somehow, but to try and comprehend.

I also believe that reading is so much more than just reading the words. This text gave me some new insight about children and their comprehension. I think it is so true that at a young age, children are so focused on reading the words correctly and decoding that they forget about the meaning of what they are actually reading. Reading is as much if not more about comprehension than it is about decoding. The example in the text of the teacher who had a child read the page but then he couldn't even go back and tell her what he read was a great example of how important comprehension is. The reader skipped right over an important and fascinating fact because he was so concerned with the decoding of the text. I loved the teachers method to think of reaching the end of a page as a red light- he would reach the end of a page and the think about what he was reading before going on with the text. This helps readers really appreciate what they are learning and what they are reading and shows them to focus on comprehension as well as decoding.

I can't wait to keep reading this textbook and to keep learning more about strategies that work and how I can apply them in my class this year. I am looking forward to keeping learning about ways to incorporate strategies that work into my classroom and applying what I am learning in this class to the classroom where I hold in my hands the education of 24 amazing young students.

Professional Dilemmas: Hybridizing and Finessing

One area of my teaching in which I am confident is informal assessment. I feel very comfortable taking anecdotal records, doing student interviews, observing, etc. When I use these kinds of informal assessments, I feel like I can gather a complete picture of a student’s strengths and areas for improvement.  One area of my teaching in which I can improve is management. I need to be more consistent in managing behavior and stopping disruptions before they escalate.

I think I will definitely learn a lot this year. Given the diversity of academic needs in my classroom, I think a learning opportunity this year will be differentiated instruction. We have learned about differentiating in the past but I think this year, I will really be able to put that idea into practice.  I will learn to differentiate lessons for each of my students’ academic needs.  I think I will also try to learn more about autism this year.  On my class roster, I have one student who is in a self-contained Autism Spectrum Disorder room full time. I want to learn more about this student, her strengths and needs, and autism in general.  I think this will be an opportunity for me to learn more about autism, special services, and the complexity of self-contained and mainstreaming situations.

I enjoyed the Kersten and Pardo article about finessing and hybridizing.  I think it presents a more realistic picture of the challenges that today’s teachers face.  Many articles contain great research and theory but the translation to practice is lost because today’s teachers are facing so many restricting policies and standardized assessments.  However, this article demonstrates how teachers can comply with these strict policies but also incorporate what they believe is best practice.

I think I will be able to hybridize my literacy practices with respect to basal readers.  According the article by Kersten and Pardo, hybridize means blending two approaches.  For example, my school uses basal readers to test students’ reading and assign their reading level.  However, I think basal readers leave a lot to be desired, especially in regard to student interests and comprehension.  I think allowing students to choose “just right” books that they are interested in is a better way for students to practice and be motivated by reading.  I also believe that basal readers aren’t great for assessing or practicing comprehension.  According to our textbook, Strategies That Work, active readers interact with the text, read with a purpose, and respond to reading.  Basal readers provide limited opportunities for these activities. However, I can hybridize these two practices by complying with district and school policies regarding testing with basal readers, but also providing time for students to access the classroom and school libraries to check out books for independent daily reading.  In this way, I can incorporate both practices into the literacy curriculum.

I think at this stage in our careers, finessing is harder than hybridizing.  According the article, finessing means manipulating policies so that some aspects are attended to but others are ignored.  While I agree that this seems like a successful way for teachers to negotiate competing policy and practice, it seems like a safer task for teachers who have jobs and are somewhat established.  For new teachers, and especially teacher interns, I wonder if “finessing” would be judged more harshly by other teachers or administrators since we are not as established.  Do you have ideas about how you might “finesse” your literacy practices? Are you concerned about the tenuous balance of attending to and ignoring some aspects of policies?  Do you agree that this might be more challenging for us, as interns, than established teachers?