Becoming a Writing Teacher

 

I want the focus of my ICDP this year to be on becoming a Writing teacher.  The school decided that I am no longer teaching first-period Reading, but instead teaching first-period Writing.  Obviously, this is supporting an initiative in the Middle School to improve Reading and Writing scores.  This will take a lot of effort and planning so I would like my ICDP to be centered around that process. 

The school purchased a Reading and Writing curriculum for us to use this year.  The main data that will be used to determine how successful this implementation is going will be FAST and ISASP scores.  

RESEARCH AND FINDINGS - Most of the research was already done for me in a sense.  Our 5th Grade Reading and Writing ISASP scores weren't great last year so we invested in a new curriculum this year for Reading and Writing.  Most of our "research and findings" is becoming more familiar with the new curriculum, what resources are available, how to best use them, and what we want to change and/or supplement with the given lessons.  

We started out the year focusing on letter writing.  We've moved into the grammar portion of the curriculum.  Eventually we will work with the Writing portion of the curriculum, but we aren't ready yet.  Today as a team, we looked at the curriculum for writing and tried to get a better sense of what the writing lessons will be like.  We also did some short term and long term lesson planning.  

• PLAN OF IMPLEMENTATION - My plan of implementation is to teach writing and our new writing curriculum during first-period Writing class.  We started out the year working on some other things so that the Reading curriculum could catch up and align with the Writing curriculum.  So we have started working through and teaching the prepared lessons from the curriculum.  I think everything is going well, though I still lean on my team a lot.  But we plan together so it's very convenient.

  I also find myself connecting our Writing lessons into Social Studies which is good.  The cross-curricular connections benefit both me and the students.

-MS Teacher

SEL in the Classroom

This year I focused my ICDP on becoming better at explicitly implementing SEL within my classroom. I chose to focus on my opening and closing of the day this year. I had hoped to get further in my journey, but I had a student teacher which did not allow me to implement for as long as I would have hoped. Throughout the process this year I found authentic tools to use as the opening and good things within my classroom to build relationships with students. I also used some tools from Jeffrey Benson in helping with my closing of the day or my launch. Benson's book provides many good prompts for closures to lessons. I chose what to implement based on what the lesson is for the day. For my good things I started to use some questions that I found through a teacher on Tik Tok. Doing the different questions each day and still continuing to do Bop or Flop has helped me to better build relationships with students this year. I have also started to use different launches. One that I probably use the most is with the last 30 second of class having students look around their seats and making sure they have everything and everything is picked up. I have also used launches such as find a partner and share the most important take away you had from the lesson, discuss something from the lesson you need a little more help with and questions along those lines to have students reflect over the learning. I feel overall that I still have more work to do on my ICDP because I want to continue to be intentional with SEL but in ways that are authentic to me. I would like to start off next year having a focus each day and being intentional with linking them to the SEL competencies. I also would like to have some SEL integrated with my formative assessments. This is going to be a continual goal whether I use it as my ICDP next year or not because it is important work.

In this video I talk through what I have implemented this year as well as provide video examples of how I start my class each day and different launches that you can use.

Summative and Formative Assessments

My journey this year was to alter my summative and formative assessments.  I have leveled my summative assessments for all my classes and incorporated many primary sources to challenge students in their thinking.  But as I challenge them more in their thinking, I also want to give them choices when answering certain questions. While I have included more formal and informal assessments in my teaching I have realized that I may need to restructure what I'm really asking students to do and give them the appropriate feedback that will help them succeed.

Animal Adaptations - PBL Style

Independent Literacy Stations

 

Formative Assessments in Ag Classes

 

Formative Assessment

 One key piece that I will continue to work on and refine is being even more consistent with making sure that my formative assessments and feedback are timely and done often enough.  Once in awhile, I struggle a little bit with the timing of some standards.  For instance, the balance between making sure content is being covered thoroughly enough without overwhelming students.  One of the hallmark things that is on all of the social contracts in my room is being understanding of time, so I try to balance giving students a break to either get caught up or not be overwhelmed with making sure we continue making forward progress while also allowing enough time for feedback.