Inquiry 3 Part A Step 3

To what extent were you were expected to follow a scripted curriculum, or add your own

ideas to a curriculum that already exists, or create a unit that is entirely new?

My unit fits in with the writing workshop curriculum for second grade. However, my core practice allowed me quite a bit of freedom when it came to creating what I was going to have the students do and how. For instance, my literacy unit revolved around writing through a meaningful task. I got to create and design this meaningful task (write a friendly letter to a book author) and decide what each lesson should include in order to adequately achieve success with the meaningful task. Therefore, there was no scripted curriculum to follow; everything was my own creation. However, because of the nature of my meaningful task, I had to make sure I incorporated a few elements from the curriculum revolving around the actual writing process, including lessons on punctuation and grammar (although I was able to teach them in a manner of my own choosing).

What was unproblematic and/or challenging about planning a unit in this context?

This free-format was unproblematic in the initial general planning of the unit, but proved to be challenging later on, during the teaching overview, when I had to decide what I spend each day doing. For instance, I was unsure of the progression of the order of the events with which I should teach my unit in order to reach my end goal. I had to decide on my own what topics should precede others in order for my students to not only grasp the concepts, but to get the most clear, and meaningful interpretation of the tasks that were working toward the overarching unit goals. Therefore, without a structure to fall back on, the planning of the unit in relation to sequence of events was challenging. I sought advice from my Mentor Teacher about the appropriate sequencing and also looking at the progression of writing lessons from the Reading Street curriculum.

What obstacles did you face? How did you overcome them?

I faced the obstacle of getting all of my students on the same page at the same time. I did not anticipate that this would be as big of an issue as it turned out to be. I had students who were understanding the main themes of the lessons, and others who were not. This was specific to my editing and revising lessons. Some students understood these lessons very well and were able to transfer it to their own practice, while a large number continued to show a disregard for it. This forced some changes in my previously planned unit and I had to move some lessons back in order to incorporate others that would target this issue. Also, some students were getting pulled for special intervention during many of my lessons and so it was hard to get them on the same level with the other students once they came back in the classroom. I addressed this last obstacle by moving the times I taught my lessons around to times when students weren’t being pulled from class.

 

How did working on developing your ‘core practice’ influence the types of learning

opportunities you were able to offer your students?

Developing my core practice influenced the types of learning opportunities I was able to offer my students by allowing me to a format through which students could use writing as a way to voice their knowledge, opinions, feelings, and thoughts about various subjects. By creating and designing my authentic meaningful task of having students write to a book author, students saw that the importance of my target area of writing and were granted opportunities to voice their feelings and opinions about a book to a meaningful audience. This task used as my core practice allowed students the opportunity to see the relevance in writing to their own lives and granted them new outlets with which to express themselves. An authentic, meaningful task was therefore used to showcase my target area of writing and to afford students the experience of learning about the writing process through a number of fun, creative, relevant, and meaningful lessons.

What dilemmas (if any) did you face and how did you manage them?

 Dilemmas I faced revolved around getting students to care about editing and revising and to transfer their newly gained editing/revising skills to their own practice. I found that even after explicit instruction about editing and revising written work, students were still not relaying this knowledge and practicing it in their own writing. I targeted this by showing the importance of editing/revising through demonstrations requiring students to read and understand a poorly edited piece of written work. I also had to pull individual students for conferencing that were still showing no regard for editing/revising. Also, I had issues with some students grasping the skill/content and then others not and so I was kind of torn at times about moving on from that point. I found that I needed to revisit some key ideas more than once, which worked as a refresher for the students that mostly understood the concepts and helped clarify ideas for those who were struggling. I also had to try to incorporate a lot more individual conferencing.

 

What enabled you to be successful?

I was able to be successful in managing these dilemmas by seeking out advice from other sources. I used readings from Routman that helped me to remember that editing for grammar, punctuation, etc. is not the most important part of writing. Having students get their ideas out on paper and compose meaningful writing is the most important aspect I need to place an emphasis on. This helped me to recognize that I can do as much as I can with lessons on editing and revising and then I need to conference with explicit instruction and modeling for those students who are still struggling. I realized I needed to help these students to see the relevance in editing and revising and to give them the confidence that they can do so themselves in their own writing practices.

 

Did the unit proceed as you expected? Why or why not?

Some of the unit proceeded as expected, but most of it did not. Lessons changed based on what I thought students needed more practice with as we went along in the unit. Students struggled in areas that I did not anticipate and some aspects of the unit, such as the emailing portion at the end (where students send their letters to the author via email) turned out to not be feasible without many more lessons on typing and logging in an email address, so this portion was completely eliminated from my unit.

What surprises or “aha moments” did you experience?

An “aha moment” I had was when I became aware that I was wrongly thinking that some of the struggling students weren’t interested in the task or that they did not like writing. They simply need extra support and were feeling discouraged by their struggles. By having struggling students verbally express their ideas while I wrote them down, students were able to copy this writing and have correct spelling and wording, while still maintaining ownership over the ideas and creativity in it.

 

What do you still need to learn about teaching in this target area, about your developing

your ‘core practice’ and about teaching literacy in general?

 I would like to learn more about reaching all of my different literacy learners. I feel like I still need to learn about different ways to approach the teaching of writing in a realistic way that is not so rountine and structured by the process that writing usually takes, but is unconventional and more engaging for the students. I feel like my core practice of using an authentic, meaningful task was helpful to a great degree in making the writing process more engaging for my students, but we still had those days when it felt structured work. I would also like to learn how to get my students more interested in editing and revising since this is the area that seemed to be the most dull for them. I would like to use my students’ strengths in literacy to teach and would like to keep learning about ways to reach them through these strengths.