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