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?

Week 5

Wondering: How will my decision on an inquiry impact my class?

   This week we started talking about our inquiries. After thinking about what I could do, I decided to do my inquiry on a student in my class. We will call her student S. I have mentioned student S before. This student's native language is chinese and second language is english, however, she does not speak in class. In any social setting, she will make gestures to certain students in the class as a form of communication. When student S is with her younger sister, you can see her chatting away in chinese and she is so outgoing. If she is pulled a side to do a running record or for a personal interview, she will speak very quietly where you need to put your ear close to hear. According to my mentor teacher, student S has been like this all through her schooling.
    All of the students in the class know that she doesn't speak in class and they like to make it known to me and everyone in the class who is involved with the classroom environment that she doesn't speak. The student is very bright and always does her work. She is one of the top students in the class with her work ethics even though she doesn't speak. This is where my problem and my wondering comes in. How long can her silence last in the classroom environment. I would like to see what would happens if we talked to her and made her speak during one subject. I was thinking that math is most sensible subject since she would only have to communicate with one word. Then I started thinking about how the class will react to student S speaking. After speaking with Angie, we decided on my official wondering for my inquiry.

Wondering: How can I create a safe environment for student S to speak during one subject?

Wondering: How do you motivate to students who are being lazy with their work?

   Throughout my pre-internship so far I have noticed that there is one student that is very fidgety and lacks motivation. K is what we will call her. K becomes very lazy with her work. For example, if she does not want to do the writing assignment she will make three word sentences and write in her worst handwriting. Even if it is a coloring assignment she will color like a pre-schooler rather then coloring like a second grader with a goal of working hard. In addition, her performance while the teacher is teaching is noticeable. She is constantly rocking her chair back and forth, playing in her desk, looking at another book, or just basically doing anything to avoid the actual assignment at hand.
   On Tuesday, I came in and my mentor teacher had shown us K's work. She had colored an assignment completely like a two-year old. According to Tomlinson and Imbeau, "teachers need to let students know that they will often hear you ask, Is this the best you can do---the most you can give to this task?" My mentor teacher did pull her aside in the beginning of class and asked her, "Is this your best work?" Throughout that day, we walked by her desk to remind her to keep up with working to her full potential. That day she was writing in her neatest hand writing and working to her best.
   The next day, however, she was back to her fidgety self. I want to challenge this student to work to her full potential everyday. The outcome will be remarkable. However, I am stuck on how to do this, which leads me to my revised wondering.

Revised Wondering: How do you motivate students to work to their full-potential all the time?

Week 3

Wondering: How does the actual planning of the lesson help with teaching rather than teaching from an already planned lesson affect teaching?

    This week my co-teaching partner and I planned and taught our first Pathwise Lesson. The lesson was on summarizing a story. We first sat down with our mentor teacher as she gave us ideas for the lesson and it took off from there. We decided on using a graphic organizer from Pinterest that involved the activity of "Someone, Wanted, But, So, Then". My co-teaching partner and I took the time to plan out the lesson together. This helped us visualize what the lesson would actually look like. We decided to use the book Pierre the Penguin. 
   Today was the day we actually taught the lesson. Since we wrote down the steps that we were going to go through during the teaching process, we felt confident in the outcome of the lesson. The students seemed engaged in the book and were able to answer the questions about what the most import details of the story were. Once we finished the "we do" part of the gradual release and responsibility model we sent the students off to the "I do" part. Most students did this step amazingly, however there were a few students we did have to assist. One student even point out that the graphic organizer practically laid out the summary for you. We had her read her summary to the class and point out/teach this observation she came across to the rest of the class. This is what I would consider "high quality assessments" according to Tomlinson and Imbeau. They say that "high quality assessments should guide students in understanding essential learning outcomes, their status relative to those outcomes, and ways in which they can work effectively to maximize their growth toward and beyond those outcomes." That student understood the whole idea of the organizer and how to apply it to a book, as well as teaching the class about what she had observed. Overall, I think our lesson went even better than expected and I felt well prepared with us actually doing the planning of the lesson. Wondering: Can the students tell the difference in teaching style when a teacher has not actually planned the lesson (It is planned by someone else) he/she is teaching?

Link to the Graphic Organizer for Summarizing: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bz_lKYUlDu4TOTVjNDhiMDAtNWY1Mi00ODg0LWE3YzEtZGIxZmEzNzdhZTdm/edit?hl=en_US

Week 2

    Over that past few days in the classroom, my co-teaching partner and I taught a few lessons. Today specifically, we did a science experiment with the students. Before the experiment, I was wondering how lack of some content knowledge was going to effect my experiment? The experiment was to help the students understand what sunlight can do and why the sun is important to us on Earth. The day before this experiment the teacher taught the students about some of the things the sun can do. To start off our lesson, we asked questions to tap into their prior knowledge. For example, we asked "What are some things the sun does?" The students were quick to respond with answers relating to, "the sun heats the air, water, and land" or "the sun makes things grow." These answers were all on track. Once we finished with questioning, we explained that we are going to observe two water cups. One water cup will be placed in the sun and other will be placed in the shade. Both cups had equal amounts of water and started at the same temperature. Before the lesson started, we placed these cups in the associated locations outside. To allow for time to pass while the cups went through the experiment phase, our mentor teacher and the class was lead to where the solar panels were on the schools campus. The teacher questioned and then explained that these solar panels collect sunlight which turns into energy that creates some of the electricity the school uses. We talked about how they can be on top on houses or buildings because they are closer to the sun and can attract the most heat. 

   Eventually, we made our way back to the class, where Colleen and I split the class into two groups and took them outside. According to the Fisher and Frey, "a significant body of research indicates that the use of visual and graphic displays facilitates understanding." By allowing the students to visually observe the thermometers, they were able to explain to their other groups of classmates the temperature of the water.  Overall, I felt a bit weak in preparation for this lesson. Going into the lesson, I thought I was prepared to teach the experiment and go over it with the class and co-teacher. However, I think the lack of seeing the introduction of the lesson hindered my teaching. I wasn't exactly sure of what to ask. I now wonder if this is something that would affect any subject I teach or just when doing a science experiment?

   

Week 1

  After being in my classroom as an observer the first week, I was able to grasp the classroom management and other information that would help me work in this environment. I was able to catch on the class structure and even had the chance to get to know the children. Immediately, our mentor teacher told us about S, who is a student who doesn't talk aloud. My wondering from that instance was,  What are the reasons that this child doesn't speak?
   One of our class assignments for the first two weeks was a Learning Community Assignment. This assignment had us create a group of questions that we had to ask each child in hopes of getting to know them better. The Dana Reflective Educators Guide says, "Through engaging in action research, teachers can generate valuable knowledge about their learners' readiness, interest, learning styles, and more! With this knowledge, teachers make adaptations to instruction, increasing the probability that the needs of all learners will be met within one single class period or lesson."By getting to know my students through these means of research, I am able to get to know each student in the class in ways that can help me with instruction. I have found out that if you have S in an environment where she is alone with just you she will whisper her answers. I tried to ask her more questions about her home life at home and the language spoken in her house. She told me that at home she speaks Chinese with her family. During class, S is completely silent however, does all her schoolwork nearly perfect and has great listening skills. I want to make her experience in school as great as possible. The article says, "Action research is a wonderful tool teachers can utilize to differentiate instruction, ultimately making schools a better place for all students, regardless of their interests, abilities, background, and learning styles." This leads me to the next wondering. "What is the reasons behind S not speaking?"