Waiting for Superman

Tomorrow I will be going to watch Waiting for Superman with my curriculum class. I am excited to see it because I had originally looked to see if it would be playing anywhere close, and it was not. I was glad to see that it was going to be playing after all. I would be curious to hear what others who have seen it think. I will post again after seeing it.

This is also the last week of the first quarter! I will probably be doing a post toward the end of the week/weekend reflecting on the year so far.

Learning from Personal Narratives

I am down to the last two weeks of the first quarter. Students submitted their Spanish and English personal narratives, and I have been able to give all students feedback on their Spanish narratives via email. I had them email their published copies as a Google Docs attachment. It was so convenient. That coupled with having a web based gradebook this year made the whole process so much more feasible.

Being able to sit and really look at their writing as a group has been beneficial in many ways. First, it is a great feeling to see how my 7th and 8th grade students continually grow, remembering back to where they were as 6th graders. With my 6th graders, I am constantly trying to remind myself to slow down and remember the natural evolving process of where they are now and where they will typically be at the end of the year, next year, and the year after... It is easy to forget how the process evolves at times - almost like watching my own children grow. Since I am with them all the time, the daily changes build continually but since I watch the different steps along the way I sometimes lose sight of the drastic changes they have made over time.

This is my first year having 6th-8th, and it is a great opportunity to really focus and reflect on this process and how to best scaffold student growth. On the flip side, seeing where the 6th graders are at right now reminds me more of how much there is to celebrate about my older students' growth. Certain students across grade levels remind me of each other, so not only do I love to think about their own personal growth, but it also helps me to be mindful of the different components that led to that growth.

Teaching is such a journey.

Vocabulary in Context Focus Lesson

I often feel like the focus lessons that have the most impact are those that weave in personal experiences. One of our focuses this quarter is on vocabulary in context, so I decided to have some post-it notes sticking to the inside front cover of Cruzando al Pacífico while I read it this week. Reading in Spanish gives me even more examples for understanding vocabulary in context since it is my second language. While marking down words that I thought about as I read, I noted the word and page number on my sticky note. Once I completed the book, I went back through and made some notes of different strategies that I used while reading to make meaning of the text. Some of my processes were obvious and that I had thought of frequently before, while others were slightly different and I felt like reflecting on my own process helped better highlight the complexities of what goes on in a reader's mind.

Here are the strategies that I shared with my students, each with examples from the text to link the concept to a text. I know that some ended up straying from the "context" and were other types of strategies to figure out unknown words, not necessarily limited to context.

• Think about what has been happening in the text. 
• Think about the connections you have with the topics discussed in the text.
• If you are unable to imagine exactly what the unknown word is, at least try to figure out which category of word it is, such as: person, food, location, game...
• Notice if an unknown word is mentioned more than once. Test out your developing theories of what the word means. See if your definition fits for the new contexts in which it arises. 
• Think about how the word or a part of the word is similar to other words you know to see if that can help you figure out the meaning. 

While sharing my processes with words I encountered in Cruzando el Pacífico, I emphasized that strategies work together in order to make meaning. After sharing the strategies and my examples, students recorded examples from their own reading during reading workshop and/or while reading at home. 

Being an avid reader and writer has had such an impact on my ability to enjoy teaching reading and writing. While there are many, many areas where I still want to improve, dedicating time outside of class to read and write for pleasure and pay attention to my own processes to convey to my students has helped me to better understand how to be a reading/writing teacher. I can't imagine just following along a teacher's guide and disregarding my own experiences. 

Google Sites Books Read List

Earlier this fall I wrote about my journey to find a platform for my students to share the books that they have been reading and how I ended up going with Google Sites that is available through Google Apps Education Edition. I also did a follow-up post to explain how I envisioned students writing about their books. Yesterday when I wrote a first quarter update post, Tara requested more information about how I set up student Google Sites, so I thought it was a perfect time to share how the process has been going.

Since Google Sites was new to me, I have been experimenting right along with the students, making sure to try out everything that I request they do before hand in order to share an example and walk them through the process. As always with technology, it is so nice to have a classroom set of laptops and a SMART Board where I can walk students through the process of exactly what they should be doing.

Students created their sites, which was super easy since they already had their education edition email accounts, so it was as easy as clicking a few buttons. I had each class categorize their site by the year they will graduate from our school as eighth graders, making it easy for me to skim through sites by class and for them to look for their classmates' sites as well. On the welcome page they wrote a statement about themselves as readers and writers. This gives me as a teacher a lot of insights into them.

Next, each student created a new page, set up as an announcements page (functioning like a blog) titled 2010-2011 Book List. Every time they finish a book, they are supposed to write a post reacting to the book. I have a rubric posted on my site, as well as maintaining my own book list for them to use as examples. This has not been too much work for me because I can often copy and paste responses directly from my book blog, often with just a few adjustments to tailor it to my students as an audience instead of my wider open blog audience.

Each post is supposed to be titled with a number and title. The number reflects the amount of books they have read this year. For example, a title might be: 3. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules, which would mean that it was the third book the student completed since the school year started. Each month I have two deadlines. One is for students to choose one English book response, and the other is for a Spanish book response. I have them write the one that they want me to look at on the bottom of their weekly self-evaluation form. Then I skim through their selected posts.

We just completed our first round, and I was able to make note of areas in which I can scaffold them to improve. Topics range from remembering conventions to adding depth to their reader reaction to hooking their readers with their summaries without giving away too much of the book. Right now I kept the posts simple without adding book cover images or links in order to focus on the content. Later on I will layer in these aspects.

A few students have already begun to visit each other's sites and leave comments for each other, but I have not demonstrated this yet. That will be one of the next steps so that they can start enjoying the benefits of having a community of readers sharing about books they love virtually to complement the ways that they share about their books in person.

I will try to remember to add additional posts throughout the year as I continue reflecting and improving, but please feel free to leave a comment with any suggestions or questions you might have that I can post about in the future.

Researcher Reflexivity #3

The last couple of weeks have been exciting as I have been uncovering more and more what it means to be a qualitative researcher. I realized that coming into the class I still had the vision of the researcher always trying to be an outside observer, but with various class discussions I have come to realize that with qualitative research, the researcher is able to define their role. The concept of qualitative researchers trying to make sure their participants benefit from their studies has really opened my eyes to view the whole process differently.

This week I checked out a copy of Berta Pérez's Becoming Biliterate from the library - the book that made me realize a few years back that I was not ready to leave the classroom in quest of a doctoral degree yet, that I wanted to have the opportunity to teach in a dual immersion school. It was fascinating to reread about her process as a researcher and her methodology now that I have been studying about the topics and better understand those aspects. I started a document to record the ideas that I notice in different research studies. I also revisited a couple of articles that stood out to me and plan to reread Kim Potowski's Language and Identity in a Dual Immersion School sometime soon. I would have looked at it this weekend, but it was at the school.

Once again dissertation ideas are swirling around in my mind, and I am excited about the possibilities but still unsure about all the logistics, which is only natural since it is still early on in the process. I still catch myself wanting to do longer-term studies, so I will have to really make sure to put a limit on what I do for my dissertation. Yet, one of my professors talked about how her dissertation led into a longer study, as she continued to follow her participants. I have been considering how that might work for one of the topics that I have been thinking about the most lately.

For now one of my biggest questions is, out of all of the exciting areas to research, how do researchers decide on their topics? My multiple writer's notebook entries and Word documents with different ideas for research are a testament to the many different directions and angles that I could look at the topics that interest me. It will be a fun journey to see where my research leads me.

First Quarter Update

Once again, the school year is flying by. This week we had parent-teacher conferences, and it was a great feeling to have all of my scheduled families show up, which is typical for my school. We are now officially in October, and by the end of the month, the first quarter will be over. This year my main adjustment has been a nice shift to only teaching reading and writing, but having less class time for the content areas. I have been carefully balancing how to best utilize the time available, and I can tell that I will continue to adjust and readjust, still trying to weave some components in.

I also had a realization in the first few weeks that over the last three school years my content responsibilities have narrowed, as well as the amount of time that I spend with each class. As a result, I inadvertently focused more and more on my content, rather than taking the time to firmly establish a sense of classroom community, so I did some back pedaling after the first couple of weeks to try to compensate for trying to dive into academics too fast, at the expense of getting to know you activities. This was especially essential for my 6th grade class, since my 7th and 8th graders were returning students, so we already had a greater sense of community.

One of the most exciting changes this year is that I have been collaborating with our TOSA for reading support to have her push-in to my classroom instead of pulling out students. So far we have both been very excited about the possibilities and it seems to be going very smoothly. We are both learning together and meeting frequently to discuss how we can best support all of the readers in our classroom in flexible groups. Our first round of book clubs are up and running, something that I always love.

I finally let go of having a reading log, and instead chose to focus on a books completed log with a reading reflection post on a Google Sites page for each student. I am still reflecting on this change, but my initial thoughts are that it has been positive. One initial challenge was that it was a few weeks into the school year before we had our technology parent meeting to get technology agreement forms signed and returned from parents and students. In that span of time some 6th graders had read multiple books and then felt overwhelmed about the prospect of updating their site with every reading reflection. Instead, I made updating the site optional. Instead, they were required to at least list the titles of the books but gave the option to maintain a paper/pencil copy of the response, rather than adding them all on-line. I am assessing one English and one Spanish book response each month. We already have a note to ourselves to have parents fill out technology agreements in our 5th grade spring parent meeting so that we can start the year ready to utilize technology.