2010 Wrap Up

2010 has been an eventful year professionally, and it has provided ample time to reflect on my teaching career. I'm now in my 6th year of teaching and enjoying my students as much as ever. I have been with my 8th graders for three years, my 7th graders for two, and enjoying the fresh personalities of my 6th grade class. Each unique class pushes me in my teaching, and it has been fulfilling to better understand the 6th-8th grade range of readers and writers this year.

While doing some winter break organizing I have also been thinking about students from the other two (four counting student teaching) schools where I have taught. Each placement has been unique, but the one uniting theme has been the joy that students bring.

Aside from the everyday moments in my classroom that I often mention in my slices of life, here are some professional highlights from 2010:

• Being able to attend the Boothbay Literacy Retreat will be a highlight for years to come. I hope that someday I will be able to financially afford to go back. So many inspirational people in one place...
• I started my Ed.D. in Curriculum and Instruction this year; I have been growing as a professional because of it. I love spending time with my classmates talking about education, reflecting on my experiences, and further strengthening my own personal philosophies. 
• Implementing Push-In reading support with one of my colleagues, aligned with both of our literacy philosophies. 

I have a lot to look forward to in 2011 with my students and in my Ed.D. program. 

Day by Day Update

I had eagerly been awaiting the release of Ruth Ayers' and Stacey Shubitz's Day by Day: Refining Writing Workshop Through 180 Days of Reflective Practice. I imagined dropping everything and reading it cover to cover as soon as I got it. Then when it arrived, I finally got the full significance of the title. I realized that it would be better to read in smaller chunks, leaving ample time to ponder and reflect. I am not sure how long it will take me to read it, but I wanted to at least do an updated post to mention some of my first impressions.

First, I was surprised at the size of the book. It is pretty thick at a little over 300 and regular textbook size compared to the size of most typical Stenhouse books that I have read. When I skimmed the table of contents, I realized that the size was a good thing - allowing for a comprehensive resource. I immediately thought of the 4/5 teacher at my school who has mentioned wanting to learn more about writing workshop. The day after it arrived, I excitedly showed it to the instructional coach at my school who was also impressed with her initial impression and wrote down the title to order her own copy.

As I was able to read more, I realized that it is not an ideal introductory text to writer's workshop for my colleague. It is perfect for people who are more at my stage who already have a foundation in workshop teaching but are looking to reflect and refine. This is exciting for me as I am able to think through different categories of workshop resources - introductory overviews, those focusing on one component, and now books like Day by Day that help teachers zoom back out to the big picture in order to continually improve.

The same voice that I have loved on the Two Writing Teachers blog is consistent with the tone of the book. Overall, I am thrilled with the resource and am savoring each page. I am enjoying slowing down in order to fully absorb and reflect on their ideas. For the same reasons, I think it would be perfect for a school-wide or department book club/book study. Depending on how I progress through the book, I may do multiple posts at various points, rather than waiting until the end of the book.

Push In Support 5: Present Goals

As with any venture in teaching, a co-worker and I have been excited to do push in reading support this year as opposed to the pull out model that we did last year, but we know that it will be a continual process. We have been pleased with our progress but constantly have present areas of focus in order to improve, especially in this first year.

Right now we are still focusing on documentation. Since we recently refined our anecdotal records process, we are monitoring to see how the new system is working and to make any adjustments as needed. One huge advantage has been that my co-worker is very organized. I have always considered myself as being organized, but she sets a whole new standard for organization. That has been instrumental in our discussions about how we wanted to organize certain components.

Thus far, my co-worker has not been teaching focus lessons which was our original intent. It ended up working better to layer in different components though, and I think that we will be able to add in having her teach some of the lessons soon. Nonetheless, she has been doing an excellent job weaving in teaching points to book club discussions and conferring sessions. It is one more example, where we are able to talk about current goals for the classroom and collaborate to have multiple layers of support for students.

I am excited to see where our collaborations and discussions will take us in the rest of the school year. I feel so fortunate to work with a colleague whose literacy vision is so closely aligned to my own. I can tell how we push each other's thinking and keep each other grounded on our highest priorities for the literacy environment that we want to create for our students.

¡Sí Se Puede! Learning from a High School That Beat the Odds

This weekend I read Úrsula Casanova's ¡Sí Se Puede! Learning from a High School that Beat the Odds. The title caught my attention because coincidentally I had just titled my pilot study with ¡Sí Se Puede! as well. One reason why I wanted to buy it was because classmates in my doctoral program have talked about wanting to see more resources about what works in regular public schools, after seeing an overemphasis on charter schools in Waiting for Superman. I was also intrigued because it shares the story of a school with a high level of success throughout the school's history (a little over 20 years).

Casanova shares the story of Cebola High School, discussing its inception, as well as how it has evolved over the years. It was interesting to read about what the district did in order to provide the first leaders of the school with a foundation of success, such as talking to the first principal, Jon Walk, close to two years before opening the school, allowing for careful planning. Casanova detailed Walk's process of planning and leading the school in its first years. She also discussed the integral role the guidance office played, lead by the first director of guidance, James Sullivan. The high level of thought that went into the initial stages of the school, set the school up for long-term success with a strong foundational vision and core values. Though the leadership and staff recognized the need for change with time in order to improve, they stuck to their original vision and core values.

Though the book was repetitive with some phrases/sentences throughout the book, it is a valuable contribution to the body of school reform literature, especially at the high school level.

Push In Support - Post 4: Mid-Year Update

With the last week before the break, I got behind on my intended schedule for my push in support series of posts. Today I will pick back up by discussing how the year has been going since the TOSA at my school and I realized we had a shared vision about ideal reading support for students. One aspect that has been highly beneficial in making our push-in model be more successful is being able to meet together to debrief and plan. It works out in our schedules to meet two times per week during my prep period for about 45 minutes. We still meet on my Spanish weeks when needed to get ready for the next English week. We use the planning time to talk about whichever area of growth is most necessary at the time or to prepare. Topics have included:

• Conferring
• Book clubs
• A system for anecdotal records
• Discussing what we notice about students to collaborate on what we think would be the next best step
• Talking about data from multiple sources to determine which students are ready for the earlier rounds of state testing in reading

The year started off a little bit slow, as it typically does because I needed to do running records/QRIs in Spanish and English. However, it was so nice to have the TOSA in my classroom because she was able to begin conferring. Through her notes, I felt like I was able to get to know my incoming 6th graders' reading habits to a deeper level than I typically am able to during the time where I am mainly administering the start of the year assessments. Having access to her anecdotal records, along with my observations in class and during assessments and based on standardized test data was very beneficial. For returning students, I was able to tell the TOSA some background information about students based on what she was noticing as well. This was my TOSA's first year conferring, so the start of the year was also supporting her with conferring. I loaned her my copy of Patrick Allen's Conferring, and she quickly bought her own copy. She is a natural at conferring, and it has been a smooth transition.

Aside from being able to get a jump start on conferring because of the push-in model, she was also able to get started on book clubs with some students. We met to talk about different ways to group and select books, as well as the routines in place for selecting book club meetings and due dates for sections of the book. I shared my evolving philosophy of book clubs, and last year I had shared Kelly Gallagher's Readicide with her. This quarter, we have been able to have each student meet in a book club.

Our most recent meetings have centered around refining our anecdotal records process. We began with a Google Doc so that we could both access it at the same time and so that we would have access to it from home. The accessibility was ideal, but there were glitches with Google Docs that I had not noticed since I started using it last year. At times we would be typing and there was a big delay in the words showing up, and we could not move on to another column in our table until the words caught up. In addition, it was cumbersome at times because the area on the screen where it showed the cursor was not really where the words would start typing. At times this would be solved with a refresh, but other times it was not. 

Thus, we revisited and reflected many times how we could be effective with our anecdotal records. We recently prioritized our students into three groups: those who need the most scaffolding, those who still need support to be highly engaged readers, and those who are voracious readers with a variety of genres. We also recreated some forms for anecdotal records, going back to a paper/pencil version and keeping them in a binder with a conferring tracking chart in the front (students sorted in alphabetical order and by our priority levels). For now, we are only going to keep conferring anecdotal records on the two groups of students who need comparatively more support. For the students who are highly engaged and proficient readers, we will continue to confer with them on a less frequent basis without anecdotal records unless we observe something that we really want to record. These students often initiate informal conversations about the books they are reading as well. Much of the interactions with these students will occur in book clubs. For book clubs we created a rubric, as well as an anecdotal record form to store in our binder. 

Overall, it has been a smooth transition into having push in support, rather than pull out support of previous years. We still have areas in which we want to improve, but are both satisfied with the way the year is going. 

Research, Research, Research

Last week was the last class meeting for my fall semester courses. As I mentioned before, one class was a qualitative research course, and it inspired many different directions in which I could go for my eventual dissertation. Today is my first official day of winter break, and I have so many books to choose from for my two week break...

Among the books are some to continue thinking about research, looking at others' research and thoughts about research as mentor texts in building my own identity as a researcher. Here are some books that I have been revisiting recently, as well as others that that I just received and will be reading for the first time:

Revisiting

Literacy and Bilingualism: A Handbook for ALL Teachers by María Estela Brisk and Margaret M. Harrington, 2nd Edition

Language and Identity in a Dual Immersion School by Kim Potowski

Becoming Biliterate by Berta Pérez

New Books - Just Arrived in My Mail Box this Month

¡Sí Se Puede! Learning from a High School That Beat the Odds by Úrsula Casanova

Learning and not Learning English: Latino Students in American Schools by Guadalupe Valdés

We ARE Americans: Undocumented Students Pursuing the American Dream by William Perez

Senate Live Feed & Senate Vote Update

Eagerly anticipating the outcome of the DREAM Act vote, I was just looking on the Internet and realized that CNN has a Senate live feed from their Politics page. Today is the long-awaited day to find out what will happen!

UPDATED:
The Senate did not have enough votes to bring the DREAM Act to a vote. Nonetheless, I am grateful for the hard work of all those advocating for the DREAM Act. Though it appears it will be more difficult in the coming year with the newly elected Senators that will take office in January, I am still hopeful that eventually it will pass.

The Time is Now - The DREAM Act 4

The time is now. I have mentioned in posts since last weekend that right now is a critical time for the DREAM Act. I talked about why I believe in the Act, as well as including links from Administration Officials' blog posts on the White House blog. The three most recent are from Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture, Eric Holder, Attorney General, and Chris Lu, Assistant to the President and Cabinet Secretary.

Tomorrow the Senate will be voting on the DREAM Act. You can make a difference now by calling 1-866-587-6101 to be connected with a senator still wavering on the DREAM Act. I am crossing my fingers for good news tomorrow!

DREAM Act 3

The White House blog now has two new posts advocating for the DREAM Act, one from Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano and the other from the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, Dr. Clifford L. Stanley.

Push In Support - Post 3: Shared Vision

As I mentioned on Sunday, it did not take the TOSA and I long to realize that we were on the same page about push-in vs. pull-out support, so our conversations shifted to the ideal scenario, as well as a rationale. The following is some of our main discussion points that reflect our literacy beliefs.

• The TOSA would provide push-in support in a team teaching scenario. It was essential that if we were going to be doing push-in, it could not be that she was simply teaching the "pull-out" students in an isolated fashion within my classroom. Rather than having a separate curriculum for students who needed additional support, we would work together to differentiate teaching points based on our state standards. 
• It was essential to work as a team. Students needed to view us as both being their teachers, not that I was the teacher for all students, while she was only the teacher for those who had not met their reading benchmarks. She could lead some of the focus lessons/whole class instruction, and it would also be important that she interacted with all students. 
• If she was going to provide English instruction on Spanish weeks to target students, it would negate the hard work we were doing to intentionally blur the lines between "met" and "exceed" students from those who had not yet met. We decided to advocate that by close collaboration on English weeks, we would be doing more good than we had last year every week with pull-out. 
• Just because students have met standardized reading assessments does not mean that they would not benefit from additional scaffolding/support in order to continually develop a higher level of engagement and analysis with texts. Having a push-in model would give us the flexibility to truly consider the full picture rather than an arbitrary single data source. We can use our professional judgement to balance the level of support that each student needs as well as working towards goals for each student.
• The groups would need to be flexible. Just because students have not met their reading assessment does not mean that they have the same needs in order to improve as readers. Therefore, at times students would be grouped by need, while at others, they would be grouped by interest. It was up to us to do a lot of intentional planning behind the scenes to make sure that we were providing sufficient support to students without drawing attention to groups of students.

Now we are three school weeks away from the half way point in the year. We have continued to try, reflect, and refine. We have goals in place for continual improvement. Thursday I will give an update on how it has been going and what we have been learning. 

The DREAM Act 2

Saturday I posted about the DREAM Act and why I think it is essential and could have a positive impact for many students. I have been pleased to see the support for the Act coming from the White House blog, which is currently doing a series on the Act. If you would like to hear more why the it would be beneficial, I recommend you seeing the posts from Secretary of Education - Arne Duncan, Secretary of Labor - Hilda Solis, and Secretary of Commerce - Gary Locke.

I am also impressed with the students who have been working hard to raise awareness for the cause through marches and hunger strikes. It takes a lot of courage to draw attention to oneself knowing others will criticize you. Yet, these students are working not only for their own futures, but also for others who would benefit from the Act.

Here's to hoping for a good outcome in the Senate this week!

Push-In vs. Pull-Out

For this first post in my push-in support series, I will talk about how one of my colleagues and I ended up trying push-in support this year.

Over the summer I talked to various people for advice on how to best set up the time anticipated that I would have alloted for language arts this year. One of my main concerns was how to best accommodate that some students would inevitably be pulled out for additional reading support. Time and again, people said one powerful word - why? As I was explaining about our failed attempt at push in last year, as well as the challenges of alternating between English and Spanish each week when the push-in support was English only, I had a nagging feeling that it was not good enough to just accept that pull-out was the way it had to be.

Throughout the summer I was thinking through what would work since the year before we had a failed attempt at push-in, as well as why it was important to fight for it and make it work. Before I even got a chance to approach my director and the TOSA who provides additional support, the TOSA contacted me. She was taking courses for her Master's in literacy over the summer and was doing some reflecting of her own and wanted to meet with me.

Our philosophies aligned. We reflected over successes, as well as areas where we could improve in order to provide our students with the best possible literacy opportunities. While she created some excellent learning opportunities for students in previous years, we worried about the negative impact of the stigma of pull-out instruction, as well as the message that some of the policies/procedures with pull-out instruction sent to students. Most importantly, we worried about the over-emphasis on meeting state reading assessments over a genuine love of reading. Albeit unintentional and against the literacy philosophy at the school, it was apparent that many students perceived it this way. We were also worried about the disconnect between mainstream and pull-out.

Tomorrow I will share our vision that came out of our meeting in order to make positive changes in the new school year, walking out the door of the coffee shop with a bounce in our step knowing that we were moving in a direction that would closely align to our literacy beliefs.

The DREAM Act

I have been hearing about The DREAM Act since I was an undergraduate, and I always get excited about it potentially passing. Now, more than ever, it seems like it might finally become reality. Last week the House of Representatives passed the DREAM Act, and now it is up to the Senate. From what I have heard, this is a crucial time because if it does not pass now, it is unlikely to pass anytime in the near future. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wrote a post on the White House blog emphasizing the importance of the Act, and there have also been press releases about it (here and here).

As a teacher I am inspired by students every day - their drive, their dedication, and their dreams. Yet, I know that for some students all over the United States, their opportunities will be limited upon graduation because of their status as undocumented immigrants. Many who find themselves in this scenario were too young to be able to make the decision to come to the United States, yet as adults they have to deal with the consequences.

After dedicating my career to helping all of my students realize their potential and set high goals for themselves and watching students give their best effort, it is frustrating and disheartening to see them having eventual obstacles to becoming productive, contributing members of society. As a professional, I have also seen the injustice first hand with a classmates in college whose family poured all of their energy  into supporting their child through college without any federal help, only to realize that she would not be able to utilize her degree upon graduation. She had so much to offer, and sadly, she is not alone...

Secretary Duncan explained the situation well at the end of his post:

The students of the DREAM Act are some of the country’s best and brightest.  They were raised and educated in America.  They are valedictorians, star athletes, community leaders, and are active in their faith.  They text and go to the mall.  They are Americans in every sense of the word.  They have deep roots here and are loyal to the country that has been the only home they’ve known.  They are our future pediatricians, teachers, and engineers — if we give them a chance.  They are exactly the type of young people America should be embracing.

But, unlike their classmates, DREAM Act students are in a bind.  It goes against the basic American sense of fairness to punish children for the choices of their parents.  But thousands of young people find themselves in that position.  We can’t let them continue to live unfulfilled lives of fear and squandered hopes.  We need to act before we lose this generation.  It’s who we are as Americans, at our best.  The time is now.

President Obama's comment in one of the press releases also describes the importance:

The DREAM Act corrects one of the most egregious flaws of a badly broken immigration system. A flaw that forces children who have grown up in America, who speak English, who have excelled in our communities as academics, athletes, or volunteers to put their lives and talent on hold at a great cost to themselves and our nation.

I also congratulate the House for moving past the tired sound bites and false debates that have pushed immigration rhetoric into the extremes for far too long. The DREAM Act is not amnesty; it’s about accountability, and about tapping into a pool of talent we’ve already invested in. The DREAM Act is a piece of a larger debate that is needed to restore responsibility and accountability to our broken immigration system broadly.  My administration will continue to do everything we can to move forward on immigration reform; today’s House vote is an important step in this vital effort.

I urge those who are in favor of the DREAM Act to take the time to contact senators in this crucial time for the Act. For those who have not heard much about it, you have the opportunity to make a big difference for numerous students by seeking out information about the Act and taking action to support it if you find it aligns with your philosophy as an educator and sense of social justice.

Push-In Support Series

Last Monday was my official last meeting of fall semester for my Ed.D. classes. Now I will have a little bit of extra time for about a month. With the break approaching it is a great time to relax, reflect, and post about some topics that have been on my mind this fall.

This week I will be doing a series of posts about push in support. Here is what I have planned:

Sunday - Introduction to push-in vs. pull-out

Tuesday - Shared Vision

Thursday - Progress

Saturday - Short Term Goals

Classroom Blog Post Link

Lately I have not been able to read all of the notifications of EC Ning links that show up in my email inbox, but I could not resist the one titled, Three Reasons I Love Class Blogs. It ended up being a link to a blog post. I recommend it to others who are interested in weaving blogs into the classroom.