Learning Showcase!

This semester I have had the awesome opportunity of working one-on-one with a third grade student for my teaching class.  My student and I have met twice each week to work on his reading and writing skills in the context of learning about the deep sea.

Today and last Thursday we had our Learning Showcase, where all the third graders were able to display what they have learned with their mentors this semester!  A lot of other students designed and created posters, games, SmartBoard games, and sorting activities.  My student compiled all his work from the semester into a portfolio that he explained to his classmates during the showcase.  Here is some of his work:

Making Predictions
I compiled a list of deep sea creatures from the National Geographic website.  Then my student had to pick a creature, look at the name of the creature and the picture of the creature and predict why he thought that creature was named what it was named.

New vocabulary words!

Interacting with the Text
My student and I made a graphic organizer to display all the ways we could think of to interact with the text while reading.  Then we read A Director's Deep Dive, by Kelli Plasket of TIME for Kids.
While reading, the student was to underline anything in the text that reminded him of the graphic organizer.  He recorded this in his Interacting with the Text worksheet and made connections.

Summarizing
We also used A Director's Deep Dive to practice writing good summaries!  The goal was to read each paragraph and write a 1- or 2-sentence summary for that paragraph and then we would combine all the summaries at the end to create one big summary of the article.  We only got through two paragraphs but the student loved going back to check his work and proofread!

 We also used books and other resources to create our own book of deep sea creatures.  I created this page template which we each filled out.  My student and I would each separately choose a creature to research in one of the resources available.  We wrote the name of the creature at the top and the reference at the bottom.  Then we read the information from the text and listed 3-4 interesting facts about the creature.  Finally, we traded papers and "graded" each other's work based on grammar, spelling, punctuation, using our own words, and writing complete sentences that showed the most important facts from the text.  By the second day of doing this, we were able to write full paragraph summaries instead of just bullet points!

 Context Chart
The activities and lessons I did with my student this semester were guided by Improving Reading, by Jerry Johns and Susan Lenski.

This Context Chart is adapted from page 375 of their book and it was a great way to record my student's new vocabulary words.

 Vocabulary
This was a cloze vocabulary exercise where I photocopied a chapter in a book about megamouth sharks and whited out every 5th-7th word.  Then the student read the text aloud and filled in what he thought the blank word was.  He did great on this exercise!  Even though he got less than half of the words exactly correct, he was able to fill in words that made sense with the context and meaning!

So this semester we worked on literacy strategies like making predictions, interacting with the text, using a dictionary, and summarizing.

The teaching experiences I have had in this class have been wonderful opportunities for me to grow both as a teacher and as a learner; I am so grateful these opportunities have been available to me.  I learned a great deal about working one-on-one with a student and trying to meet his needs.  While all this was happening, I still had certain requirements I needed to meet, certain guidelines for teaching, in order to pass the class.  I feel that this part was the most genuine aspect of the experience because it reflected the reality of having to teach to meet many students’ needs while also meeting certain standards and other requirements in order to maintain a job as a teacher.

The most effective instructional strategy I learned was simply being excited about the lesson.  At first, the class was overwhelming because I was entirely unsure of what my role was and what my duties were.  I am afraid this may have come off in my tutoring sessions.  Yet soon I became more confident in what was expected of me.  Following this, I became more confident in my own instruction.  I knew that even if I was unable to address the course requirements, I was spending valuable teaching time with my student and that was the most important thing.  From here, I was able to develop more meaningful activities that responded to my student’s greatest needs, I was able to participate in the activities with him, and I was finally able to be genuinely excited about our lessons.  I could tell that my enthusiasm thus led to my student’s success in several academic areas.  I was able to show him that looking up words in dictionaries, discovering new information, and creating a book to track our knowledge is so exciting, and he responded positively to this.

In the future, I would like to improve my instruction by incorporating more modeling into my lessons.  I am currently working to improve my understanding of when is an appropriate time to model and when it is more beneficial to let students figure things out on their own.  I also plan to improve my instruction by setting clearer goals for my student and myself.  I would like to encourage my student to set clearer goals for himself.  I am becoming more and more goal-oriented myself, and it has proven to be successful for me.  I believe that having my student set a personal literacy goal is very meaningful because they are allowing themselves to achieve on a level that is not determined by someone else.  Furthermore, I look forward to improving my instruction in the future by studying other teachers and learning from their successes.  I plan to watch videos online of successful literacy instruction and read books (such as The Book Whisperer, by Donalyn Miller, which I loved) that can inspire me to try new instructional strategies.

Immersion

This semester I am taking a class titled, "Social Foundations of Education."  Each week we focus on another socially controversial topic of education, such as gender, race, economic and political differences among students and families, and schooling theories.  This week we are focusing on language and we were required to watch some interesting videos.  Of course, as a bilingual education major, these videos were particularly relevant to me, but I like that all preservice teachers taking this class, whether bilingual or not, are required to watch the videos for the class.  The reality is that bilingual education is such a hidden concept and we typically are unaware of its existence unless we were involved in a bilingual program or know someone who was.

Here are the videos we watched:
This video discusses a Spanish immersion program in Milwaukee

This video discusses dual immersion in Utah

Both videos are very interesting and paint bilingual education in a positive light.

What I like most about these videos, though, is that they don't just illustrate how bilingual education is beneficial for non-native English speakers in our country.  In fact, they do just the opposite.  They advocate the involvement of native English speakers in the bilingual programs so that they are learning a new language too!  Critics of bilingual education often forget that it's not just for immigrants or people who are non-native English speakers.  They are ignorant of the fact that the most successful models of bilingual education actually benefit native English speakers, as well, by introducing them to a new language and new cultures too.

Spring 2014 Update

This is my last semester on campus!  It's so weird to think that I have been here for 4 years and even though I still have a year of student teaching after this, these are my last few months on campus.

This semester is very demanding and, I'm hoping, very beneficial in the long run.

Perhaps my most challenging class right now is my literacy class.  We meet with a 3rd grader and tutor one-on-one twice a week.  Our lessons are encapsulated within the class's thematic unit of the ocean.  My student is specifically focusing on the deep sea so all of our readings have been about that.  It's been a very interesting experience and honestly I feel that I am learning far more than my student!  This class is really wonderful, though, because it is the first time in my college career we have been required to write lesson plans and use them with real students and reflect on them.  This is a huge component of teaching and I am excited to finally be applying what I have been working on in all my other classes, despite the workload.

I am also taking my last bilingual education class.  We have spent the whole semester thus far talking about dual language and the benefits of it.  We have "created" our own dual language schools a number of times, which is interesting because it gives us an opportunity to look at dual language as a whole school program, instead of just a classroom.  I hope we will work more on using bilingual education in the classroom, though, because I think that will be more useful to us.

In addition to the 16 hours of classes per week, I am volunteering to teach Spanish to a nearby preschool once a week, I volunteer to Skype with a student in the Chicago Public School system to encourage him to go to college, and I am the Activities Director for another nonprofit organization on campus.  I also work 10-20 hours a week, so my days are full!

Language Learning Methods

Today in one of my TESOL classes, the title of which is TESOL Methods and Materials, we were talking about our reading preparation for class. To kick off the semester, we are studying the history of language learning methods all the way from the 1800s. We are using the textbook, Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy by H. Douglas Brown (third edition).

We had a really great discussion today about the first two chapters, which included a brief history of several language teaching and language learning methods over the last two and a half centuries, as well as a play-by-play of an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) class lesson. One question that is still bothering me, though, is when to use the L1 in a lesson. When addressing this question, we started out saying that if the teacher recognizes that students are not understanding instructions (such as for an academic activity) in English (the L2 or target language) the teacher should rephrase the instructions again, or maybe two times more so that the students better understand, but they are still understanding the directions in English. Some of my other colleagues started to argue that there's no reason the teacher shouldn't use the L1 to explain instructions after trying it in English and recognizing a lack of comprehension on the students' parts.

So then, when is it okay to resort back to the L1 in a class where the teacher is aiming for the students to learn a new language? I have come up with a bit of an answer, but I am still hoping for more contributions.

First and foremost, it is important to define the lesson and course/unit objectives. If the objective is to learn a specific grammar skill in English an use it in context, then perhaps explaining an activity in the L1 is appropriate. In this case, it is important that students know what they are doing in order to make the activity most effective for accomplishing the objectives. Therefore, since understanding instructions in English is not the objective, then it shouldn't matter whether the instructions are explained in English or the L1. If the objective is to do the activity so that the students learn the grammar skill, isn't it most important that they fully understand the activity? This way, they know they are doing it right and this makes it much easier to judge whether they learned the grammar skill from the activity.

Additionally, there is a time and a place for using each language. Sometimes it is really necessary to focus on the new language and the new concept at hand. Yet other times, in order to avoid complete silence due to fear of misspeaking or lack of vocabulary, it is appropriate to use the L1 to make a point.

Finally, the goal of all language lessons is to learn the language! Being exposed to a language is the most logical way to learn it, of course. So first explaining instructions in the target language is great because it is further exposure to the language. Perhaps it would be more beneficial if a teacher states the directions in English, then the L1, then English again. Any excuse to use the new language is worth it.

Any other thoughts? This is just what I came up with today, and it's almost midnight so some of my ideas might be off!

Literacy Reading Response

The focus of a chapter in my literacy textbook was four reading models and how they relate to various literacy theories. I am pretty sure a combination of the whole language model under the psycholinguistics/top-down theory and the skills-based model under the behaviorism/bottom-up theory was used in my elementary classes. There were reading groups that were based on reading levels, and there might have been four or five reading levels in the class. Often, we were in a group with the same people for the year, if I recall correctly. The teacher would choose a book for us to read, and we would discuss it at our conferences. I was in one of the higher reading levels; I enjoyed reading at the time and I still enjoy reading today. I do not know that the leveled reading groups had an impact on my positive reading habits, but I could see a student may be led to dislike reading due to a stigma of being in a lower level reading group, and therefore not enjoy reading as much as others. I think it is great to have interest-based reading groups, like in the whole language, reader response, and four resource and Halliday + models, but I think there is some rationale to having specific levels for reading groups. I think students should read at a level that is both comfortable and challenging for them. I wonder if there is a way I could combine the four resource and Halliday + model with the skills-based model in my future classroom. I think this is something I would like to consider in the future.

Fall 2013 Week 1 Almost Complete!

Well, I'm almost done with my first week of my senior year of classes! It's been a very odd week, but I am excited about the upcoming coursework so far. My professors are really knowledgeable, helpful, and enthusiastic, which is such a blessing.

This semester I am taking a literacy class, two TESOL classes, a math class, and a bilingual education class. My bilingual education class is a once-a-week, 3-hour night class that starts tonight, so I am still waiting to see what that holds for me. What I am loving so far is the way everything seems to be coming together at last. In the past, all my classes have been incredibly knowledge-based and theoretical. Now I am getting the opportunity to actually apply what I have learned to real-life clinical experiences and hypothetical classroom experiences. I think I only have one exam this semester--the rest are all projects. This is exciting because although I like studying for tests because I have learned how to "play the game," it means my coursework is more applicable now, not something that can be assessed simply by papers and tests.

One thing that is challenging for me in particular this semester is the reading and responses I have to do. A goal of mine this semester is to really interact with my readings so that I can benefit the most from them. Several of my classes require a weekly "reading response" assignment, which will help me to interact more with the texts. However, some of this stuff is really dry and I am having a lot of trouble relating to it. I am hoping to use this blog as a way for me to discuss my assigned readings and other experiences I encounter along the way. Hopefully, maintaining this blog will further my understanding of and interaction with my classes so I can really gain the most of them.

I am off to my math class now. Syllabus day was on Tuesday, so we are jumping right in to coursework today. Very excited to see where this goes!