Writing Lessons in the Classroom

I have been thinking about what to write for this last blog post for a while now.  Finally, today at practicum, I noticed that my teacher had a writing lesson in the schedule for the day.  Unfortunately, when it became time to teach the lesson, my cooperating teacher switched to a history lesson.  I was very surprised that this lesson was skipped because since I have been in this classroom, I have never seen a writing lesson.  Around the classroom, I do see some writing samples from the students, but I feel like more should be done.

According to the weekly calendar, my class has a writing lesson 2-3 times per week.  Since I am only in the classroom 2 times per week, writing lessons become difficult to observe.  Writing is done everyday in some shape or form.  Another thing I noticed today was that if students finished their centers early, they had the option to free write.  Although this is good exercise, I think that formal writing lessons should be done more often.

Reflecting on Vocabulary Instruction in My Practicum Classroom

For this week's blog post, I decided to focus on vocabulary instruction in my practicum classroom.  A couple of weeks ago, I was writing a reading response focused on vocabulary instruction for my Teaching Reading in Elementary Education class.  I wrote about how I love all of these different strategies and how I would implement them in my classroom.  I then began to reflect on how the strategies I described are taught in my classroom, and then I realize that they really are not.  This really made me think.

I think that my practicum teacher is great and the students are learning a lot, but vocabulary instruction is missing.  The only time I have experienced a lesson focused specifically on studying words was when I taught a lesson on adverbs.  Reflecting on this made me realize the lack of instruction that occurs in my practicum classroom.  I realize that the curriculum is very tight and there is not a ton of wiggle room, but some elements of language, like vocabulary are essential for students to know and learn.

I became even more concerned when that professor made a comment on that assignment saying that not teaching vocabulary seems to be a pattern in a few other classrooms at my school that have practicum students.  This shocked me because I feel like if a problem like this is just for a class, it can be easily fixed, by simply meeting with the specific teacher.  However, if the problem is school wide, that is a much larger issue to address.  Vocabulary is very important in any grade and I believe should be taught on a weekly basis.

Reflecting on Grades and Improvement

This week, I decided to focus on students and grades on Language Arts related assignments.  When reading the article “Fostering Lifelong Spellers Through Meaningful Experiences”, I liked how the authors reflected on students reactions to grades and how they compare themselves to others in the class.  Alderman and Green mention that some students are very grade oriented, meaning that they are only focused on their grade (numeric or letter) and how they did in comparison to the rest of the class.  I actually observed a student becoming very grade and performance oriented the other day in my practicum classroom.  My cooperating teacher was meeting with students to discuss their writing thus far in the marking period, which has not been a lot.  When she called one student up, she explained what his strengths were and what he needed to work on.  He then witnessed her writing his grade in the grade book as 2 out of 3.  She then explained to the student that a “2” was a great grade and that the student still needed to work on some minor things.  She also explained that the majority of the class was in the same boat.  She later told me that she saw a sad look came over the student’s face and which is why she gave the student a confidence boost.

It is interesting to reflect on this because as a teacher I want to promote improvement and not necessarily grades.  I however, have found myself at times being very GPA and grade driven.  I remember when I was growing up, my father would ask me what I got wrong when I brought back an assignment that was anything less than 100%.  I understand why he was asking me these questions, but also a part of me thought he should lighten up.  What if I worked extremely hard on an assignment and only got a B or B+ and I thought, for that assignment, that the grade was excellent?  My father did not seem to recognize that.  I also find that now in college, when I do not get a perfect score on an assignment, I come down very hard on myself.  It is interesting to compare the standards that I hold myself to and those which I will hold my students to.

Unpacking Standards and Translating into Rubrics

This week, we have been focusing on standards and rubrics.  I enjoyed the class where we unpacked the standards and really got to dive into what the standard actually meant.  This helped me make sense of my rubric that I created and what it meant.  It hit me that the rubric was picking apart the standards and that was one thing.  The next step is to unpack the standard to determine the order in which a teacher should teach concepts, which would then outline the path to developing a unit.  I used to think that developing yearly plans and units was extremely stressful, which it still can be, but I know now that it is really just a matter of unpacking standards.
With this in mind, I skimmed over the writing samples that my cooperating teacher gave me to get a rough idea of where the students in my class fell on my rubric.  I knew before this, that my class is the low flyers out of the entire second grade, but I honestly did not realize how low they were.  My cooperating teacher suggested a few students who would be great for me to work with, so I glanced at their work especially close.  Working with the students that were suggested will definitely be interesting, but I am up for the challenge and it will be a great learning experience.

Reflecting on Writing Checklists

            The class we had two weeks ago, focusing on writers’ checklists, I thought was very interesting and eye opening.  I have really only experienced children writing, from a teacher’s perspective, in fourth grade and third grade.  Therefore, seeing the different expectations of writing based on the common core standards for all grades was fascinating.  It was really fascinating to see the standards for first grade next to the standards for second grade, and then being able to compare them.  It was also interesting to see all of the checklists together and then noticing the progression from first grade all the way to third grade.

            I am placed in a second grade classroom for my practicum and since I have been at the school there has been very little free writing.  I also only come in two days a week, which might have something to do with it, but the only writing I have seen is the students writing little personal narratives for Back to School Night.  The students do, however, read stories and then are asked to write in response to the story.  Although this exercises their mind in thinking about what they read, it also does not allow for free writing.