Week 12

     This week in small groups during reading (in the classroom), Sammy and Katie had finished their must-do. They decided to partner read Cat in the Hat. Katie was reading to her mostly, so I walked over and said, "Sammy can you read this page to Katie?" Sammy read super quiet but was reading more pages at a time than I had expected. She reads so fluently! They started actually partner reading now.
     When I walked walked away Katie was reading a page and when it was Sammy's turn I saw Katie say, "Will you read this to me?" Sammy shook her head yes and read to her. My inquiry has been so great and I am so excited to present it.

Week 11

    This week I started the positive reward system with Sammy. This system is not like a behavior management plan because it is only here to reward her not to punish her. I explained to Sammy that every time she participates with her thought in our small groups she will receive a sticker. She can also receive stickers if she communicates in any other small group or in any other way verbally. When she has received 3 stickers in one day she can move up to blue on the chart. That way she will feel proud of her self for talking during class. I explained that I love her voice and want to hear her thoughts verbally.    
    On the first day of the new system she kind of spoke during our reading small group where she is in the safe zone. But one the second day, Sammy minimally spoke on three different occasions which is a huge accomplishment. On this day I allowed her to move to blue because I was so proud of her. She has come so far, from not speaking at all.

Week 10

   According to the Holly Article, when journaling it can be helpful to go back to your past entries and analyze them. When going through my blog from this semester I have found some interesting similarities. I find myself talking about specific parts of a day or focusing close on something I have done. It seems that my entries here are taking form of my thoughts into a situation that happened in class. I deeply analyze the way I may have taught a lesson or the actions of a specific student on one day. This helps me dig into deeper feelings and try to make a better understanding of what he/she was thinking when they were doing that specific action.
    For instance, on week 4 when I talked about the student with behavior problems and her coloring, I may have needed to take a different perspective. This student may not have been misbehaving on purpose. She might have had something going on at home or something happened that morning that she was upset about. We still notice this student get off-task during whole group instruction and constantly needs specific praise. There are things that we as teachers can do to help or even avoid this off-task behavior. It just takes the teacher to do a little extra work to help his or her students.

Week 9

   During this week, I had the chance to continue research on my Inquiry. My mentor teacher switched up the seating arrangements. We tried to put Sammy into a seating group where it was a safe environment. We felt by putting her into a group where she felt comfortable, like in her new reading group, she would start warming up to the idea of sharing her ideas.
    During the the running records I was conducting on tuesday, I made a small accomplishment. I sit out in the common area of our building to conduct the running record for each student in my class. This area is normally pretty empty with zero to about 5 people at a time working on various things. When Normally when Sammy comes out she will read her passage to me VERY quietly. So quiet, that I have to put my ear right next to her head and focus on what she is saying. This day I decided to start out our passage, by saying, "Sammy today, I need to you read with a loud voice so I can hear you." She nodded her head, which actually shocked me. She hasn't been this forth coming about speaking before. When she started the passage she did read with a louder voice than she has ever before. I was very proud of her and I decided I was going to start a reward system with her when she accomplishes this scary tasks.

My wondering: Will this reward system hinder the actual purpose of my inquiry?

Week 8

      This was my first week back since Spring Break. Even though this week was a week of catching up and getting back into the gear of teaching. This week was actually great. I got the chance to really dive into my inquiry and start testing out my thoughts. My teacher accepted my co-teaching partner and my input on the seating arrangements. We to her that Sammy needs to be put in a table where the students make her feel comfortable. She was going to place Sammy at a table where there was student who makes comments about Sammy. The comments are not meant to mean anything, he will just say things like, "Sammy won't speak to you" or "Did she just talk to you?" I can tell that these comments make Sammy feel uncomfortable. So she switched that student out of the group in hopes of making her table a comfortable environment.
      Also this week, we had the chance to switch up the reading groups. We decided to change Sammy into a reading group with two girls she seems to be the most comfortable with. This was a way for us to try and see how putting Sammy in a safe environment with the small groups will affect her choice to speak. During the group time we went over vocabulary and I was having the three girls go around and repeat the words with me. Sammy started repeating the words with the girls. This was great! However, when we went to talk about the story they had just read Sammy refused to answer.
      Most of my methods are going to be done through trial and error by recording my observations. I started keeping daily journals of anything that happens with Sammy that could help me out with my Inquiry. "In a journal, the writer can carry on a dialogue between and among various dimensions of experience" the Holly article stated. I believe through my journal I will be able to go back and find out what worked and what didn't. After this week, I am now wondering if a form of positive reinforcement will help Sammy start and continue verbal communication in her small group.

Week 7

      This week my co-teaching partner had the opportunity to implement our Social Studies Unit for Black History Month. We planned three lessons about Duke Ellington, Langston Hughes, and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. We tried to engage the students with videos in each lesson. Along with each lesson we also read a story about the person associated with the lesson. All of the students displayed their knowledge through a writing activity. For the lesson about Bojangles, the students had to write a letter to a friend telling them about Bojangles and then had to tell their friend what they would do to entertain people. For Langston Hughes, they had to write about the important facts in his life and they had the opportunity to share them with their peers. The last lesson about Duke Ellington, the students filled out a biography about Duke Ellington. They had to share his main accomplishments and some facts about him. All the students demonstrated great understanding of the lessons and they all surprised me.

Week 6

Wondering: How can you incorporate a lesson study more often?

     These past two weeks the second grade team has been working hard with our lesson study. We developed a lesson about making predictions and having the students use evidence from the text or schema to develop a prediction, rather than a random guess. My co-teaching partner and I taught the first lesson and it went well. The students were engaged and the lesson was filled with great information for them to use. Going into the debriefing I never expected to change much of the lesson. An observer, noted that the lesson was great and was taught well, however, that the students seemed to already understand the concept of prediction. We ended up completely changing our lesson activities and only altered the objective. Our objective was to teach student how to find the evidence in any type of text or situation to make a predication. I never thought we could make such a change to our lesson from the first time we taught. When the second lesson was taught, it went extremely well. The class we were in was a more difficult group of personalities. The lesson planned well enough that the classroom management was under control.
      According to Tomilson and Imbeau, "it's important that both students and teachers understand the goals of a differentiated classroom and how a particular routine or procedure helps achieve those goals." Even though the students we have taught for the past two weeks for the lesson study were not our own, differentiation played a role. It was evident that the some students were not understanding the individual task. This is when the teacher came by and gave one-on-one help by reteaching the parts of the lesson the student didn't understand. I never thought that this lesson study would be so helpful.

I am still wondering: How can teachers use a form of lesson study to reflect on the daily lessons they teach?