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.