My goal for this semester was to implement the Depth and Complexity icons in my classroom in a way that would improve learner agency. I wanted to use the icons to empower students to make choices about demonstrating mastery in a personalized way and in various subjects. The reason for this is that although things are very personalized in my classroom and we focus a lot of student autonomy, the one area that I feel could have more student input is assessment and determining mastery. This is tricky, because while my students set goals and they know how to determine if they have met those goals, many of the assessments we use (like in math, for example) ultimately are graded by me, the teacher. I loved the idea of using the Depth and Complexity icons to prompt more open-ended thinking in my classroom and was eager to encourage my students to use these icons to craft responses that would show deep levels of understanding. My first step was to make the icons visible in the classroom since they were entirely new to my students. After attending the training, I turned the icons into magnets for my white board so I could use them frequently and easily. After this, I began using the icons in conjunction with familiar assignments, when giving directions, and on our weekly agenda. This helped to build familiarity and make students more comfortable with what many of the icons meant. I introduced them to Big Idea, Details, Unanswered questions, Multiple Perspectives, Language of the Discipline, Over Time, Patterns, and Rules. Since this was a shorter-term goal I decided to focus on those symbols - when I implement this in the future, I will start familiarizing students with the icons earlier in the school year so I have more time for them to be comfortable with all of the icons. From there, I added the icons to student assignment documents so that students would link what was being asked of them on specific assignments with the images. After using the icons on student documents and assignments and students were pretty familiar with at least a few of the icons, I was ready to challenge them with open-ended responses and see how this would help them demonstrate mastery in a personalized manner. Knowing that my ultimate goal was for students to choose icons that they thought would best help them to show mastery for a topic, the first step towards that was to ask them to show mastery with an icon that was provided (still an open-ended question). My teammate and I decided to use the "Ponder" frame from our Depth and Complexity training to challenge students to explain two of our main focus areas - Changing Earth and Energy. Students are in the middle of building personalized impact projects linked to these areas based on their interests, so it made sense to have them show mastery of these larger topics. We also knew that we have done many activities this year and learned a ton of content linked to both of these areas, so we were eager to have students show what they knew. Below are some examples of student products, and what was posted as far as expectations: One thing I immediately noticed was that students wrote a LOT when they were allowed to explore a concept in a more open-ended way. My students were able to tie together topics and activities from various points in the year and synthesize information at a higher level than they would have if I would have provided a list of questions. I had a lot less questions about if they had written enough or if their responses were sufficient, because just the use of the icons with an open ended question was enough to challenge students to gauge if they were meeting expectations or not. Finally, I gave students the "Ponder" activity again once they were more familiar with it, but left out the icon so they were able to choose one. We wanted to use this in another different subject area, so my teammate and I chose to see how this would work with our personalized math. For this, I filled in the topics based on what students have recently learned in math (which is different from student to student). We discussed a few options of what icons might work for math and why, and then students were asked to choose an icon or two and write about it with the purpose of demonstrating mastery of that topic. Below are some student samples: Overall, I loved the challenge that this posed for students - asking them to think about what they learned on a deeper level and determine how they could show mastery of that. I would definitely use this strategy in the future to build learner agency, and I look forward to starting it earlier in the school year so that students have more time to be familiar with the icons and use them across disciplines more. I was very pleased with the quality of student responses in just a short time frame of working on this goal this year, so I would be eager to see what heights future groups of students would reach with more time.
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This year, our first professional goal as a fourth grade team was to co-create success criteria and exemplars using our Wonders writing curriculum. In the past, we have had students create success criteria and work on creating exemplars (see previous blog posts), but we had not yet done so using the Wonders writing curriculum. This was for several reasons - getting adjusted to a new curriculum, focusing on adding personalization/autonomy to the reading component first last year, and the difficulty of the writing program. In fourth grade writing, we typically start the year with descriptive paragraphs, which allows us to focus on details, adding support, and paragraph format. Many fourth graders enter the year without these skills or need reminders about basic formatting and organization before we can proceed with more challenging concepts. In the Wonders writing curriculum, the first genre of writing is expository essays with text evidence, which is a big jump. Last year, we used this mostly in a whole group and small group format with students later in the year, then we as teachers created success criteria and exemplars and taught students how to use them to build autonomy. However, this year our goal was to start this earlier in the year and have students engage in the process of creating success criteria and organizing exemplars themselves.
We still started the year with the building blocks of descriptive writing and paragraph format, figurative language, topic sentences/conclusion sentences and supporting details, but we shortened the amount of time we would typically spend focusing on those things and instead went directly into Wonders writing. We led students through a first example of expository writing with text evidence as a class shared writing activity, guiding them through discussing sources and filling out a planner, then working together to use the planner to create a paragraph. We decided as a team that it is more beneficial at this point in fourth grade to have students work on one good paragraph using text evidence, rather than a 5-paragraph essay. This allows us to still focus on mastering the building blocks of writing within this challenging genre of writing. After our shared writing experience, we scaffolded students' second experience with expository writing. with text evidence, as they were much more familiar with the format and procedure of Wonders writing. Students were able to work in partners to discuss the prompt and one of the sources, and we met as a class to discuss the two other sources presented in the Wonders curriculum (there are a total of 3 sources with each prompt). We decided as a team to discuss the two more difficult sources as a class because there was a lot of challenging vocabulary and this would allow us to make sure everyone understood what they were reading. From this point, students worked in partners to fill out a plan in their Reading, Writing Companions, focusing on a central idea, three supporting details (in their own words), and finding one piece of text evidence from each source to support each detail. Finally, students independently used their planners to write paragraphs. This allowed us to get a variety of writing samples for our exemplar activity and to make sure that our exemplar display would truly represent where students are currently at right now with this type of writing. To prepare for the exemplars/success criteria activity, my teammate and I traded writing samples so that students in each class would not be analyzing writing from their own class and to remove that possible distraction. We then sorted through them. selecting a progression of 7 different writing samples that displayed common inclusions/omissions in the writing from fourth grade right now. We did have our own thoughts about what things students might pick out when analyzing the writing samples and putting them in order, however we did not provide that guidance and left it up to students to decide. We put students into groups of 3 or 4 and gave each group the same set of 7 pieces of writing. Students were given directions to read all of the examples, discuss the differences and similarities, strengths and opportunities with their groups, and then label each piece of writing with a sticky note. Each sticky note needed to have a number 1-7 (7 being the best), and 3 bullet point notes about what that piece of writing included or did not included to serve as reasons for why they ordered the exemplars the way that they did. I was impressed with how well most of my students did with this activity, and the quality of the conversations that took place. Many of my sticky notes had comments that were rather "surface" level, such as "good punctuation" and "neat handwriting", but students were discussing things like what made a good conclusion, which conclusions actually mentioned the central idea, and what text evidence actually looked like when incorporated correctly. Students who are typically very quiet or not very confident showed themselves to be leaders in these groups and had strong opinions about what made a good paragraph or what was missing from others. We have done this process in the past as a fourth grade team, with previous classes, and I always enjoy the discussions it brings out. However, I did not know what to expect with this different format of writing through Wonders and teaching text evidence so early in the year. I was pleasantly surprised! Going forward, the co-created exemplars and success criteria are displayed on the wall in our classroom. They will remain there throughout the year because this is a type of writing that we focus on a lot and in. different contexts - with opinions, with personalized research, and to communicate our learning with our inquiry projects. Students will use the display to analyze their own writing, to determine where they are currently at, and what they need to do to improve and move forward. This will help build autonomy and student confidence. This year, my instructional goal is to personalize our new reading curriculum, Wonders. We shifted from a model of all small-group reading instruction and workshop time for other students to a 90-minute block of direct teaching every day (sometimes longer). While this new curriculum does include a wealth of information and is definitely rigorous and interesting, the change in format did not suit all students. Many of them had a difficult time staying focused and listening for such a long amount of time, even with shifting some work to partners or small groups instead of all whole-group instruction. My teammate and I made it a goal to redesign the format of our literacy blocks without losing the integrity of the new curriculum, but to still make this literacy time accessible for all students and more flexible.
While this is still a work in-progress, one of the changes we have made are to shift some of the activities around between days based on how long certain things take. The planned curriculum, for example, would include tons of instruction on days 1 and 2 of a unit, but then towards the end of the unit (days 8-10), the instruction might take only 20 minutes for each day, or there would be just one activity. Noticing this allowed us to shift activities and minilessons to other days so that there is more balance and there is an average of 20-30 minutes of whole group instruction per day, instead of 90 minutes (sometimes more) most days and 20 on other days. After our students completed all of unit 1, we also noticed that there are similar procedures and routines that repeat themselves in each unit. Now that students are familiar with them, we have shifted some of those routines to partner work or independent work. For example, if we read a text through as a whole-group and discuss it on one day, then the next day students may reread the same text with partners and answer discussion questions together, rather than doing both days whole-group. In addition to shifting the activities around between the days in a unit to balance them better, the shorter amount of whole-group teaching time has allowed us to reintroduce small group lessons (still from the Wonders curriculum). So far, my students seem to enjoy the small groups and the book sets are very engaging. I like that the book sets go along with the essential question for that unit, so that what we are discussing in small groups corresponds with what we are discussing in whole-group instruction, and it all works together to build a large bank of knowledge for each students. Teaching small group lessons allows me to meet all students at their personalized levels and challenges my students more, since they are asked to discuss texts in a smaller setting. I meet with all of my students in a small group every day, since the small-group books are broken up into four short sections with discussion questions for each section. Then, on Fridays, students work on independently answering small group comprehension questions that are included at the end of each text. The shifts I have made so far make me feel more successful in meeting all of my students where they are at, and I believe that they also make my students feel more successful because they are able to focus more successfully during our literacy block and participate more frequently, while also having some time for independent work each afternoon. I do anticipate that there will be bumps in the road where I need to continue "tweaking" things, but so far I'm pleased with how far I've come. Following up on my goal for this year, my students have been focusing on inquiry-to-action projects within our three major areas of study for this year: Changing Earth, Energy, and Colorado History. We used A.J. Juliani's LAUNCH process to guide each step and help define success criteria for each part of this process.
To help us ensure that we were completing each step and help students with visuals of what each step meant, I created thought organizers for each step or "letter" of the LAUNCH process. We talked through the steps as a class, beginning with "Look, Listen, and Learn" for L. We met together as a whole group to co-create mind-maps for each of the three areas. We had already used much of the first semester this year immersing students in content through hands-on activities and being-theres, as well as research and reading/writing activities, so students were very familiar with each content area. We used this as a way to bring together all of our thoughts and ideas about everything that we had done and learned within each area. After we had displays on each area, students chose their favorite topics to write questions about ("A"). They chose one of the three larger areas to create their own mind-maps, then used ideas from there to narrow down and ask open-ended questions. Once they had these questions (the goal was two good questions about an area of interest), we spent roughly two weeks focusing on research in order to answer those questions, and gathering any additional information necessary. (Again, all of these steps were outlined on graphic organizers). After students had finished their research and gathered sufficient information, we discussed what was needed for the "N" or Navigate ideas step of the process. For this step, students listed ways that they could make some sort of positive impact on their community, environment, on others. The second step of the "N" was to choose which of those ideas most aligned with practical needs, like time constraints, what we could do during the school day and with the current weather, etc. My co-teacher and I met with students in smaller groups to help them narrow this down. Finally students worked on the "C" or Create step. This did not have a graphic organizer because by this point, the expectations were clear through all of our planning and preparation. All of the students who chose to focus on Energy in some capacity chose to participate in the Renew Our Schools energy competition, which had many smaller tasks and responsibilities within it focusing on energy savings and learning about energy usage and renewable and nonrenewable sources for energy. Students who chose other areas of focus presented what they learned to younger classes of students, or improved the environment around our school campus in some way. In years past, we have guided students through steps using this same process. However, I think having each step of the process laid out for students on almost a weekly basis helped students to follow along with what was expected of them. This also helped to provide a clear outline of expectations for students that was differentiated, since they chose to work on so many different impact projects. By continuing through each step and thinking through the process in an organized manner, they were creating individualized success criteria for their own interest projects each step of the way. None of the outlines I provided told them what they needed to do or what to choose, but provided a framework for them to move forward. Finally, the last step of our process was "H" - highlight and fix. In the past, our projects have continued right to the end of the year and many times we haven't had enough time to really challenge students to reflect on what they did, what went well, and what they learned. This was the step I enjoyed the most, because I could tell from students' responses that they understood what was expected of them throughout each of their projects and they had a clear grasp on what type of impact they were able to make. Many even commented on what they would change if they went through this process again. Next year, I think I can still work towards introducing the LAUNCH process fully earlier on, rather than introducing one letter at a time, just to get students to think ahead about what would be expected of them. I also think that I could use my findings from this year to implement a more student-driven success criteria model for next year. If they are familiar with the process earlier, then I think students could take a more driving force in deciding what each step should entail. However, I think that my experience this year was a great first iteration of success criteria for impact projects. My goal for this year is to co-create success criteria for real-world learning and inquiry to action projects. In order to work towards that goal, I first implemented the process of co-creating success criteria with my students through writing. I did this for two reasons: we are in the process of immersing fourth graders into real-world content right now, and my goal is to introduce them to all of our science and social studies content for the year before asking them to select a topic for an inquiry project, and writing is something we are constantly working on improving so they can use this success criteria on a weekly (or daily) basis and will be very familiar with the process when we start to discuss our inquiry to action projects.
I selected summary writing for my students to create numbered exemplars and success criteria for each number, because fourth graders constantly work on summaries, all year long. Summarizing nonfiction texts, and specifically articles, is something that is a challenge and feels new to many fourth graders, so everyone needed to become more familiar with it. Still, my students are working at many different levels, so this co-created visual helps everyone to personalize their goals and find ways to improve their own writing. We also work on writing things like narratives, descriptive writing, and persuasive writing in fourth grade, but those topics change throughout the year, while summaries are something that we work on and practice all year long, so that made the most sense for creating this display. We still co-create success criteria for the other writing that we work on, but it looks a bit different with children "signing off" on areas that they master during one-on-one writing conferences. To start this activity, my teammate and I both asked our students to write summaries about the same article. Then, we met together and "swapped" work between our classes before we chose 6-7 exemplars for our students to work with. We chose examples that had clear strengths and weaknesses, and that were at a wide variety of writing skill levels. In my classroom, students worked in groups of 2 or 3 to examine the exemplars that I gave them and put them in order from 1-7, labeling the numbers with sticky notes, in addition to writing a few strengths or weaknesses for each one to explain why they chose the number they did. After they worked on this, we came together as a class to talk about a few of the numbers that they chose - and students were clearly VERY invested, so the activity had the desired effect. After we agreed as a class on which exemplars should be numbers 1 and 2, students were very heated about their own opinions and so I organized the rest of the exemplars in a sort of "polling" manner - assigning numbers based on how most groups had organized them. I still think that when I revisit this process with my students for our inquiry projects, we will be more practiced at having collaborative conversations and more easily able to discuss the topic for longer, but in this case some students had a difficult time compromising on their own ideas about which exemplars should be which numbers. I used students' post-it notes to create lists of success criteria for each level of summary exemplar so it is clear to see what things they need to add or change to move up to the next level of summary-writing, and posted the exemplars on the wall above the criteria lists. We started using our "wall of summaries" right away, as a way for students to guide themselves as they are working on summaries, as well as a way for them to "grade themselves" before they turn in assignments. I think this is going to be a great resource for my students going forward and the process definitely worked in creating buy-in for my students as they work on summaries. They understand the purpose and function of our summary exemplars and success criteria, and know how to use them to help direct their own growth as writers. This is because they were part of the process of creating it. In the past, I have created exemplars in a similar display for writing, but I have typically created it myself and used it with students in writing conferences. Students did not always fully understand its purpose when they were not part of the creation process. However, this year my students are able to independently assign a number "grade" to their own summaries and clearly see what they need to do to improve it. The work they have turned in has improved greatly after implementing this. This is a huge support for student autonomy in my classroom, and I look forward to seeing continued growth in their summaries because of it. To implement this same process for success criteria with our inquiry to action projects, I plan to use the same process: collect a few exemplars of projects, have students work in groups to discuss and analyze them, then put them together based on what the class decides are the most and least important traits of a good project. This writing activity has helped to pave the way for that. I also plan to work specifically on how to have academic conversations with my students prior to co-creating success criteria again so that they are more comfortable with that. Today we implemented the "3-D Persuasion" task from Academic Conversations. Since fourth graders have been working on persuasive writing and using text evidence, my teammate and I thought this activity would fit in perfectly with our writing activity and provide another opportunity for students to practice having good conversations about their opinions.
The prompt students are working on this week is "Should Kids have Limits on Screen Time?". To preface this activity, we had students research both sides of the issue and find quotes supporting each point of view from articles on Newsela. This insured that all students had background knowledge on the subject (in addition to the LOADS of background knowledge they all have about screen time already :) - this is definitely a topic they were passionate about). Students had two days to research, and today they worked together in pairs on the seesaw activity with the goal of having a good conversation about screen time. We still talked about having good conversations and body language and I reminded students to use the sentence frames that we practiced with last week to help support their conversations, then use the seesaw as a supplement to help organize their thoughts. Students loved the seesaw itself, and I do think the visual of having the question (Should kids have screen time limits) in the see saw and then having the reasons on each side to weigh it to either side really helped some of my more visual learners. Students also really enjoyed having a hands-on "building" activity to support their writing, which I think was surprising and unexpected so it definitely grabbed their attention. As I observed my students' discussions, however, I found that most of them were very focused on filling out all of the spaces on the seesaw instead of just having a good conversation or using sentence frames. Last week, when we focused solely on how to talk to each other and that was their one goal, I think that students had much more fruitful discussions and connected more with one another. Today, I had a few groups who resorted to the typical "You take those reason squares and fill them out, I'll do these" method of working together. While this is great organization, it wasn't the outcome I was hoping for, especially after I was so pleased with the progress they made with their discussions last week. When I asked students to reflect on this activity, I took a poll of my class of whether they believed they had better conversations last week without the seesaw, or this week with it. Almost my entire class agreed that their conversations were more productive last week, citing things like peers being distracted or being too focused on just "finishing" the seesaw project to really think about how they were talking and responding to one another. They did enjoy getting to build something as part of the activity and seeing how the reasons weighed down the sides of the issue. If I did this activity again, I think that I would spend more time practicing JUST having a good conversation before introducing any supplementary materials that may take away from that experience. Another option would be to just use this as a pre-writing activity and have students complete it first, then have a discussion separately from this activity. As a visual, it was great, and I think that I will spend time next year training my class to have good conversations from the start of the school year. For this current class, however, I am eager to give them more time to solely practice conversing productively in the classroom. I have enjoyed reading this book so far, and exploring all of the options for real-world application in my classroom. My class really enjoyed our activity today, which was based on the sentence frames included in the "Core Academic Conversation Skills" described in chapter two, and specifically in the area explaining how to introduce conversation skills at the beginning of the school year. I am glad I can implement these skills now and "test-drive" using these methods so that at the beginning of the next school year I can introduce them to students right away. Fourth grade students have been working on persuasive writing and using research to support their opinions. This week, they researched reasons why students should and should not have homework. As a culminating activity before they start writing about their own opinions, we used today as an opportunity to discuss their opinions using their research for support. We discussed what typically happens when we share our work, and that often students take turns reading from their papers, possibly looking up occasionally, and often do not give feedback or respond to what the other person is saying at all. I also role played a few examples of what might happen in conversations that do not use the "Good Conversation Behaviors" described in the book (i.e. going off on a tangent, looking at your watch, watching another group or talking to a friend across the room). This was a great lesson hook, and helped students to share more about what went wrong and what went right. We also talked about correct body language and why it helps to make sure you are responding appropriately. Then, I gave students printouts with sentence frames from the Elaboration and Build on and/or Challenge a Partner's Idea sections of the Core Conversation Skills. I was impressed overall with many of the conversations that I overheard during this activity, and how many of my quieter students found it easier to participate and talked more because of the sentence frames. I also think it helped them to shift the focus from "share your work" to "try to have a good conversation". Students were making more of an effort to listen and understand what their classmates were saying and to come up with meaningful responses. When we got together to reflect on how things went, many students said they thought that the sentence frames helped them. Several students pointed out that this is an opportunity for them to get to know different people. Even though students were discussing an academic topic, many pairs were able to find things they had in common and ended up in deeper conversations about the stress and anxiety that school can cause them. When I asked what things were challenging, everyone seemed to struggle more with responding than with the sentence frames that asked for more information. I think this is expected, because responding in a way that prompts more conversation is a difficult skill and requires a different type of listening. However, my class definitely agreed that if they tried this again it would be easier, so I am eager to keep them practicing and see what kind of improvements they make. Link to Video 1 Link to Video 2 After reading the "Executive Summary of the National Literacy Report on Language Minority Children", I have a few main takeaways about how to help Multilingual Students learn best. I found it very interesting that the report found that "language-minority students rarely approach the same levels of proficiency in text-level skills achieved by native English speakers". This points to the idea that it is extremely important to focus on vocabulary and other aspects of comprehension. I specifically pulled this out because I notice that my students who are Multilingual Learners often perform lower on reading comprehension assessments, and very often that is because of a lower vocabulary score. We always continue to target vocabulary with those students, and I think that is validated based on these findings because the report states that "vocabulary and background knowledge, should be targeted intensively throughout the entire sequence". The second takeaway I found interesting was that the report discussed using students' first languages to support literacy development in English. I had not thought of this previously, but it makes perfect sense. As someone who has taken a TON of Spanish classes in my lifetime, I would have been very overwhelmed if I never used English to help with learning the meanings of words or comprehension skills with Spanish literature. I loved this point of view as a way to use the first language as an additional support for these students and an asset. I think this could also be a challenge for teachers, as most of the time classroom teachers do not speak a native student's language so it can be difficult to figure out how to use that to best support that student.
Another major challenge that teachers face with engaging multilingual learners, I think, is figuring out what that student's Zone of Proximal Development is and what prior knowledge that student specifically has and needs to acquire. This can be more difficult depending on the severity of the language barrier. I think that we do a great job of addressing this challenge at LTE with our approach to personalized learning for all students, so we are constantly collecting data about our students to assess and reassess how we can best support them in all subject areas. One of the visual learning strategies that I already employ that helps multilingual learners while also supporting personalized learning is my integration of writing exemplars in the classroom. When students have a constant visual of writing expectations with examples from their classmates, it is easier to understand the expectations and simpler to set personalized goals. Another visible learning strategy in my classroom that supports multilingual learners is the mindmaps that we create together, encompassing our areas of study for science and social studies. Mindmaps help students to connect ideas together, which can help multilingual learners make meaning from more complex topics. This is also a very low-stakes activity that includes everyone, because the goal is not to evaluate our ideas right away, but just to put as many connections as we can down on paper and to work as a class to think about what we have learned. I am looking forward to reading this book. Conversations are so important in the classroom, not just for multilingual learners, but also for other students. Giving students opportunities to work together and discuss their learning helps to broaden their understanding and to see things from a different perspective. These skills are essential to building critical thinking and problem solving for all areas of life. Specifically for multilingual learners, conversations in the classroom allow students to practice oral language patterns, auditory comprehension and conversational skills, and using academic vocabulary. All of these things were discussed in the report (mentioned above) as being essential to supporting multilingual learners. I look forward to reading about different ways to integrate these conversations into my classroom. It is so interesting for me to read this book, because while I definitely can reflect on connections to my current job, I have LOTS of connections to my prior one. My past position was completely different from where I am at now. As a first-year teacher, I was hired to teach 27 second graders at a Title I school on the West Side of Chicago. Honestly, I was so excited just to teach that I took the job without fully considering all of the personal growth I would need to do to be successful. I was challenged every minute of every day, and I learned firsthand about the social inequities in our country's education system and their effects. Once I was established in the position as one of the few white people at a nearly 100 percent African American school, I quickly noticed the cultural changes, and how much things were different from my own upper middle-class upbringing. The author Zaretta Hammond discusses that to become culturally responsive, teachers need to first consider their own cultural backgrounds, or "reference points", and then consider how their past experiences affect how they interpret things that happen in the classroom or how they need to communicate to be successful. I remember learning one example of this very quickly, when a fellow teacher in my grade level overheard me asking students to do things like take their seats, line up, stop talking, etc. She told me, "Stop asking them to do things and TELL them to do it!". In the book, Hammond provided an anecdote about a student who was sent to the principal's office because his teacher asked him "would you like to take your seat?" and he said "no". In my own upbringing, teachers always communicated this way with their students. There were boundaries, but students were trained to self-advocate and become independent thinkers, so that teachers more or less trusted us to make the right decisions. At my school, however, nearly all of my students were dependent learners, and I had to adjust how I communicated with them to be much more direct and specific. Especially at the beginning of the school year, they needed to ask permission to leave their seats because if I wasn't explicit about every movement certain students would pick fights with others, which meant that I would spend a large portion of the day breaking up physical altercations between 7 year olds. When I would hear their parents communicating with them, however, this all made sense. Most of their parents were very strict, authoritative and very adamant that their children would listen to them explicitly over everyone else. My students were only motivated by fear of their parents, grandparents, or whoever was taking care of them, or by extrinsic rewards. Almost every teacher at my school had some sort of treasure box filled with items from the Target Dollar Spot or found on Oriental Trading. Again, this was how most parents motivated their children to do things, so we adjusted.
Academically, I loved that Hammond pointed out the importance of connecting learning to songs, chants, dance, and movements because of their strong cultural roots. Every procedure in our school was accompanied by some form of chanting or poem. We used a poem to line up, a poem to go into the hallway, and we recited math facts or practiced phonics with Heggerty during bathroom breaks. We took advantage of every moment to fill it with a song or verse that students would remember. One of the first things that my principal in Chicago did was send me to a three day training for a program called Reading in Motion - a remediation program that was based on repetition, chants, and songs. I loved the program and saw TONS of growth in my students from it, because of how it allowed me to teach students to read in an incredibly structured way while also differentiating. The program also provided me with a teaching coach who came into my classroom every other week to help me. One of the most helpful things that she did for my own culturally responsive teaching was sit in the back of my room and take notes on everything that happened in my room for 30 minutes. After this, she sent me the transcript so that I could look over it and reflect. I was reminded of this specific experience when Hammond talked about the "description, interpretation, and evaluation" protocol. It was incredibly helpful for me to just read through an objective description of everything that was happening in my room. When I was more removed from the situation, I was able to reflect on which behaviors I was perceiving differently because of my own cultural background, and which behaviors I was addressing appropriately. This helped immensely with my classroom management early on. Overall, I find many of Hammond's ideas so far easy to connect to and relatable because of my prior experiences. In my current job, I can definitely think of several students who are "dependent" learners and I think that this book will help me to better identify them and find ways to help them connect with content. I also feel validated that at my current school we have so many teaching practices that are setting students up to be independent learners and thinkers, and that we do not "teach to the test" like Hammond talks so much about in her book. This definitely happens in low-income areas when funding is tied to standardized tests, which results in children never really gaining the depth of knowledge that they need to be successful. While I would not trade my experiences because of everything I learned very quickly, I am so thankful for the position I have now and all of the good things that we are doing at Lone Tree. I look forward to reading the rest of Hammond's book and finding some more specific ways to help the dependent learners in my current classroom. I loved having the opportunity to walk through our building today and see the many wonderful things people at Lone Tree are doing to create visible learning. I was proud of the many strategies I have visible in my room, from my writing success criteria to the concept mapping done by students to describe aspects of our conceptual curriculum. I think that I have done a nice job this year of establishing our three main areas of focus within our conceptual curriculum umbrella, so that my students have been exposed to our social studies and science curriculum in many different ways and understand the vocabulary. This will support us going forward because students will have many examples and experiences to draw from when they develop their yearlong impact projects. In other classrooms, I enjoyed seeing how many different grades have some type of student accountability organizers or personalized learning planners. In our case, fourth grade uses a workshop planner that students use to keep track of their "Must-Dos" on a weekly basis. For most of my students, this is a successful tool to track what they need to work on and what they have finished already during independent work times or when I am meeting with small groups of students. Some of the other examples of this that I saw today were very similar, but had more teacher input and less student ownership. I like that our workshop planner has more space for students to fill out their own "to do" list, and many spaces for them to make choices about what they will work on at each point of the day. Still, I loved seeing many different versions of this type of accountability as other options for students who may not benefit as much from the workshop planner we are currently using. One new example of inspiration that I got from my walk-through today was that I saw several examples of classroom data walls to support conceptual curriculum. We have discussed creating a fourth grade data wall to monitor LTE's energy usage, but previously we had discussed making that an interest project for students who were passionate about it. After seeing a few examples of people creating one data wall for their classroom, I think that we could begin a data wall of the school's energy usage at a classroom level using data that we have gathered on each month's energy usage. This could be a powerful visual for students to observe how energy levels change and how we might impact them. Our next steps will be following up with the person who provides us with energy reports to hopefully continue receiving this monthly data, and then using a wall in the classroom to display it.
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AuthorCourtney Hayes is currently a teacher at Lone Tree Elementary Magnet School in Colorado. She has teaching experience in both primary and intermediate grades, and is passionate about personalizing her instruction to meet the needs of all students. Archives
April 2021
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