Inquiry Two: Part A Blog Post

1. My target area for guided lead teaching is Vocabulary Acquisition, Use and Assessment. My school has recently implemented a program that they are trying to get the teachers to use called Robust Vocabulary. This program allows the students to learn words that they would not normally see or hear that are considered to be in a higher-level vocabulary.

2. Around 20 to 30 minutes

3. I will be working my first graders toward R.F. 1.4, SL. 1.2, SL. 1.4 and SL 1.5.

4. A statistic was found by the educators at my school, I am unsure of the exact percent but the majority of students at my schools parents have a lower vocabulary then we did as students. To try and keep the gap from growing they are trying to add some higher level vocabulary words each week. So this lesson directly affects their lives. The words come from books that we read aloud to them, this is an example of learning through literacy. This learning also includes learning literacy because they are learning new vocabulary and attempting to use it within their conversations. An example of how this lesson will include learning about literacy is as follows. When a student learns the word stupendous they will learn that this word means that they are great, amazing, and wonderful all in one. Well they need to know what they words great and amazing and wonderful mean first to really understand what the word stupendous means.

5. The students read a book each week that has their robust vocabulary in it and throughout the rest of the week they go back to that book and do activities that push them to interact with the word so that they become comfortable with it. This classroom talk always starts off teacher-led due to the read aloud and then introduction of the words. I would like to build up a Teacher-Involved type of discussion because I feel that the students would feel more comfortable with the words if they were able to talk about it together and I was just there to help them if they got a bit confused.

6. The Core Practice that I choose to study is strategic selection of words to study. I want to work on improving this practice because I feel that it is important for students to expand their vocabulary. Plus this practice goes right along with the route I am taking with Webster's Robust Vocabulary program. I believe that this will contribute to my own professional learning because it will push me to become more aware of the words that I use around the students. I will start to try to use some different words to introduce them to new language. 

7. I have the teachers within my school community to use as resources. I can also use the school library as a resource to look for the two books that I will be reading for this target area.

8. My principle gave me the book Bringing Words to Life: Robust Vocabulary Instruction by Isabel L. Beck, Margaret G, McKeown, and Linda Kucan to help with writing my unit plan so I will be using that as my additional resource. 

9. Honestly, this is something that I am unsure of because I am not sure how to pre-assess someone's vocabulary. I had the idea of having a discussion where I ask them to tell me the biggest or hardest word that they know the meaning of but I feel that this would be a bit intimidating and that I may only get a few kids raising their hands. So I guess the honest answer to this question is that I do not know but I plan on doing some reading to see if there is a way to answer this question.

10. I will need to find out who is comfortable with language and who is not. I do have an ELL student in my classroom so I also want to figure out a way to help him to understand the vocabulary that I am choosing because he is already struggling to understand, I do not want to overwhelm him and make him feel inadequate. 

11. I need to learn that this is the correct core practice to be using for my unit plan. Having the wrong core practice will cause me to have trouble planning out my teaching strategy. I also want to know if I am utilizing enough core practices or if there are more that I could be using and am not seeing. If this is the case please let me know what other core practices you could see me using within my unit, I will gladly take any input given!

12. My concern is that I am not teaching a big enough unit. While I feel that this is important I am aware that this unit is not about reading or writing. My teacher was very upfront with me and said that she was not comfortable giving me writing because she was on the writing committee for Webster and they are trying something new and she wants to make sure it is being done correctly. I totally understand and am fine with that but I am just worried that I may not be taking over something that is considered big enough to MSU. 

Week 2 Book Club

When reading Regie Routman's Writing Essentials chapters for this week I could not help but feel that there are many things I need to improve my expertise on to help teach my students how to become better writers. One of the things I noticed within my classroom, that I did not think about, was that a student does not need to spell the word perfectly the first time. This seems like something that I should have already known but I have never taught in a first grade classroom and I am still learning from my mentor teacher. The goal right now for my class is to just have them writing the sounds they hear within the word. In chapter 7 Routman talks about how teachers should not focus on the correctness of students writing because it will reduce the quality of their writing by making them feel discouraged. When my teacher asks the students to write and they struggle with a word she has them pull the word out and asks them to tell her the sounds that they hear. With each sound they write down the letter and that is how they make up the spelling of the word. Even though most of the time the word is spelled wrong the students feel excited and good about themselves because they have completed writing. Another thing that I would like to develop some more expertise in is learning how to conference with my students about their writing. I know, from my own experiences, that having conferences about our writing is one of the easiest ways to benefit in writing. After reading Chapter 9 I do feel that I have some better ideas for ways that I can tie conferencing into my own classroom. I really enjoyed the idea of having a whole class conference for a couple reasons. First, the teacher is still able to maintain control of the class. Second, the student who is reading their writing can learn from their peers as well as show them their own strength in writing. While I really love the idea of peer conferencing I do not feel that it is appropriate for a First grade level because my students would not be able to focus on talking about their writing with their peers. That class time would just turn into talk time.

I feel that I also need to develop some expertise in how to organize daily writing after reading these chapters from Writing Essentials. I feel this may at first be a professional dilemma for me as well because there is so much that goes into the writing process that I fear I would get lost. There are so many facets of the writing process that students need to partake in that I would not get through them all in the proper amount of time or in the correct manner. However, I really like the idea of doing a Writer's Workshop for a couple reasons. First, I like that it sets aside a part of the day where the teacher and the students know they will be working on their writing. Second, it gives me as the teacher time to map out which part of the writing process I would be working on with the students that day. In chapter 8 Routman talks about how the layout of writer's workshop starts out with the teacher giving demonstrations on how students should be writing and then gradually releasing the responsibility of writing to the students. I think that this layout is perfect for a first grade class because they are just beginning to learn how to write and they need a lot of modeling still.

An idea I have to hybridize my literacy instruction is by tying in the Social Studies lesson my students are learning about right now. They are learning about rules and why they are important. We, as a class, have been talking a lot about who has power, authority and why certain people deserve power and authority. I believe an excellent way to tie in writing to this lesson would be to ask the students a time in their lives when they utilized their own power and authority. This is a place where they can tell a story of their own, which Routman said pushes the students want to actually write while also having them work on their writing skills. The bonus of tying in the writing assignment to the social studies lesson would be that while it was enriching the social studies lesson the teacher could also take the students through the process of prewriting, drafting, revising, editing and the publishing.

NEW: Blog - week of 9/12

Margaret Rule-Blog 1: Week of 9/12

This internship year is critical in terms of developing my professional identity as a teacher. The internship is an important opportunity to get as close as I can to being a teacher without holding complete responsibility, but I am still anticipating needing to manage school, classroom, and student dilemmas on my own throughout the year. In relation to developing my professional identity, I am concerned about not fully committing my personal goals as a person and teacher in defense to my school's expectations and my mentor teacher's expectations. I understand that sometimes I will have to hold back on instructional strategies and techniques because it is not my classroom, and my ways may not match up with my mentor teacher. I want to avoid discrepancies with students and their parents regarding my actions in the classroom. Therefore, communication with my mentor is important and we should discuss what is expected of us as the teachers and what is expected of the students. This way, we can prevent dilemmas with instruction and student comprehension. 

In relation to constructing relevant curriculum, I anticipate composing common assessments for social studies and science with higher level thinking. What happens if a lesson simply goes all wrong? Either my instruction wasn't clear for the students, the lesson was too difficult, or I loose the attention of my group and the students don't learn the objective of the lesson. And lastly, in relation to assessing students in meaningful and productive ways, I anticipate finding time to do the assessments within the day. I also anticipate lessons that simply go wrong. Either my instruction wasn't clear for the students, the lesson is too difficult, or I loose the attention of my group and the students don't learn the objective of the lesson.  Lastly, completing all the units of study before the end of the year. 

I feel confident in planning and assessing. Although I have not spent a great amount of time inside the classroom, I already know of the resources within the school to properly create unit lesson plans. And before the school year started, the interns and new teachers attended a professional development opportunity about a new reading assessment. We are using the Fountas and Pinnel Assessment System. It is a great program that allows teachers to construct accurate assessments of our students' reading levels and comprehension. I do hope to learn more about teaching. I am nervous about classroom management and behavior, especially working with first graders. It is a challenge to keep students interacted and keep them from talking aloud when ever they want to.

Given what I know so far about my classroom context, there are opportunities for me that will help me learn more. My classroom has great diversity within the students, speaking in culture terms and in their independent levels of learning. So using the new assessment, we will be able to see where all students stand. Depending on those scores, my mentor teacher and I will discuss the idea to 'finesse' or 'hybridize' our literacy practices.