Eliciting Change through Our Voices
In order to illicit change in the district's writing instruction concerning reading comprehension to better support our students needs, we need to take the step toward empowering our students. As discussed in the introduction, a big area of concern we have, especially in First Grade, is the written comprehension that goes with the TRC portion of mCLASS. To better help my students grow in demonstrating their understanding of text, my team and I have taken the initiative to incorporate our own strategy we developed to help our students.
Many of our students can read on grade level, or above, but have a difficult time understanding what the question is asking and then writing the answer that correctly correlates with the question. We have incorporated into our weekly lesson plans mCLASS stem questions to help our students become familiar with the questions, understand what the question is asking them to do, and correctly answer the questions. The questions are used in both whole and small group. They are used on several different text and, if possible, on both fiction and nonfiction text. |
To advocate change for written comprehension instruction, I will continue to work with my team and other grade level teachers who need assistance. I plan on presenting this strategy at the monthly Beginning Teacher meeting to assist those teachers not yet familiar with struggle.
Future Plans
One goal I have for next year is to present a new "cool tool" to the staff monthly and teach them how to use it. Then encourage them to practice using it for one month seeing how and if it can be incorporated into their classrooms. I'd like to document different ways they used the tool in their classroom and their likes and dislikes about it. We are given so much to digest at one time, yet when we teach are students we scaffold their learning. It's time to change the mindset of administration and take one step at a time to become proficient at a few things rather than some understanding of many.
Professional Development
For the first time, this year I was able to attend the National Reading Conference to grow as a professional. There were many workshops to attend and sometimes hard to choose which one to go to. I had many opportunities to learn more about ways to help with my compelling question. The workshops included strategies for teaching summarizing within different genre, using writing as a window into the mind, using technology for publishing students writing, and creating a culture of fearless writers. I took this information back to my team and we have begun incorporating some of the tools and strategies into our instruction.