image courtesy of http://goworldupdates.com/2019/07/16/literacy/
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While engaging with the Literacy Learner Analysis project, I worked with an individual learner, pseudonym Amy, in order to analyze her literacy development and provide effective, data-based instruction. Through interviewing the student's parents, and speaking with the student herself, I was able to gain insight into her interests and dislikes. With this, I also administered numerous assessments to take a deep look at Amy's literacy knowledge.
Analyzing the results of these assessments, I was able to determine an effective plan for our lesson sequence that would be tailored to Amy's needs and interests. I was focused on providing Amy with instruction based on best practices of teaching literacy. |
In the past years, my instruction of poetry has been limited. Limited to a single month, lacking a curriculum, and lacking a resource base to specifically find poems to use for instruction. I have always loved reading poetry and felt saddened that it was not present within my classroom for more than just a few brief weeks. I have seen students dive into the brief poetry unit with joy, and other’s apprehension. However, just when it seems we are beginning to scratch the surface, the unit is over and we must progress to the next. In order to combat this, throughout TE 883 I developed an extended Poetry Unit Plan for the entire approaching school year. Grounded in the reading and research completed in TE 883, I used much of the research based work of Georgia Heard, Awakening the Heart, as well as Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, in The Poet’s Companion.
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Image courtesy of https://www.amazon.com/All-About-Words
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As an educator working in a primarily bilingual second grade classroom, vocabulary and word knowledge created a stark contrast in my room and made the language abilities of my ELL’s versus my native English speaking students both evident and harmful. Analyzing the academic text All About Words by Susan B. Neuman and Tanya S. Wright was intriguing to me.All About Words introduces readers to the importance of words in a child’s literacy development. This text promotes the idea of narrowing the achievement gap prevalent in the American school system, through planned and monitored word knowledge acquisition strategies. Through the analysis of this text I was able to clearly see the ways this could benefit my personal classroom of students. In my professional opinion as an educator, the text All About Words is both thought provoking and effective for growing one’s literacy teaching practice.
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It is best practice to use individual literacy assessments to target instruction towards improvements individual students require in reading and writing, (Morrow & Gambrell, 2019). In order to assess second grade student's literacy development, I deeply analyzed data collected from a variety of assessments. Specifically focusing on Literacy pre-assessments found within the academic text Assessment For Reading Instruction written by M.C. McKenna and K.A. Dougherty Stahl. These assessments included the informal phonics inventory, the Fry sight word inventory, the Spelling inventory, and numerous running record from the Qualitative Reading Inventory written in both expository and narrative style. The data gathered from these assessments was then used to produce goals for each student's literacy development, along with creating a plan of action for the student's upcoming academic lessons.
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Images Courtesy of https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-Cognitive-Model-McKenna-Stahl-2009_fig3_282550319
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Image courtesy of : https://www.ingramspark.com/blog/why-we-love-books
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As a lover of literacy, I want to promote the same adoration for books and series that I was instilled with from a young age. I want to not only instill a deep love and desire to continue reading within my second graders, but also open their minds to inquiry and analysis of texts that they come into contact with. Reading between the lines, searching for implicit meaning, and decoding imagery that beautifully disguises messages or underlying themes. These skills that I aim to teach my students; I too must master as a lifelong learner. Analyzing an acceptance speech for a prestigious children's book award not only inspired me to reread and deeply analyze numerous books I have gotten comfortable teaching with, but it motivated me to to reread text with a purpose of growing as a learner and educator and plan literacy lessons with intention .
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Image courtesy of https://sde.ok.gov/equity-plan
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In order to develop teacher capacities for culturally responsive pedagogy, a culturally responsive school leader must collect and analyze school data in order to find cultural gaps in achievement, discipline, enrichment, remedial services. (Khalifa 2016). In order to grow within my capacity as a culturally responsive education leader, I decided to respond to the racial achievement gap in education by focusing primarily on the discipline practices present within the K-12 school I work at. Through data collection and analysis, I was able to see the way discipline practice was inconsistent across all grade bands within the school. Taking this data, I developed a vision of learning for our school community in which discipline practices are culturally responsive and in no way contributing to the equity debt in education.
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As culturally responsive educators we need to require ourselves to be better advocates for our student’s and the things they need to be exposed to within a text. Viewing the literacy textbook, Treasures, through the lens of an ethnographic researcher was an eye opening experience for me as a second grade teacher. Treasures is a Macmillan/McGraw Hill Second Grade Literacy textbook used in the school I currently teach in just a mere few years ago. Treasures alludes, through the occasional inclusion of photographs of multicultural people, that it is filled with rich stories of diversity and inclusion. However, as I utilized the Assessing Bias in Standards & Curricular Materials Tool to assess the curricular materials present in the textbook I realized the extremely filtered views present in the text. Rating the textbook on different categories such as Invisibility, Stereotyping and Cosmetic Bias, allowed me to realize that using this textbook in my extremely diverse second grade classroom would hinder my students’ growth as culturally responsive citizens.
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Image courtesy of : https://ccsso.org/resource-library/states-leading-equitable-education-all
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Professional Development Powerpoint |
In the Spring of 2019, I participated in a mentorship program within Network 3 of Chicago Public Schools Literacy Department. Through observing my mentor in her practice, and through the constructive feedback she provided to me while she observed my practice, I was able to truly dive deep into the balanced literacy block within my classroom.
At the end of this process, I led a teacher Professional Development to a group of twenty other teachers in Network 3. The teachers came into my classroom and observed a guided reading lesson, and balanced literacy center rotations. I then taught a mini lesson to the adult learners on how to create rigorous guided reading lessons for high level learners in elementary. Here I have shared both the lesson plans, professional learning goals, and powerpoint from the professional development. |