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As a member of the eight-person 2016-17 Calderwood Writing Fellowship cohort, I worked with teachers across the state for one year to develop my own writing-based inquiry. This experience provided the space for me to approach teaching as a researcher and writer; I incorporated research in the field into my lessons to test my inquiry question: How can I utilize a teacher’s sense of urgency to build students’ writing stamina and overall academic resilience? I worked with my students that year in a different way than I had any other year: I began to view my teaching as a collaborative and reciprocal process with my students. Through the teaching of writing, I began to unpack my students’ writing resistance and rebuild their relationship to writing from a strengths-based perspective.

By focusing on my students’ assets, I re-designed the way I taught writing to incorporate partner and group writing (I was excited to find research that pointed to the strong connection between orality and literacy and talk with writing development).

A group essay planning and strategy workshop to build skills in evidence-based reasoning.

I also focused on the impact of my role as a writing teacher, thinking very carefully about how to scaffold and differentiate writing for students of varying learning and language backgrounds. I utilized feedback loops, probing questions, and 1:1 conferences, practicing ways in which I provided descriptive feedback. I engaged in dialogue with my students about writing to encourage their identity as writers in 1:1 conferences, group writing workshops, and written feedback via Google Doc comments. I also utilized tried-and-true pen and paper comments as a tangible document of my feedback.

Continue reading “Teaching Writing from a Strengths-based Perspective to Build Stamina”

This summer I participated in the district’s Social Emotional Academic Integration curriculum development cohort. I served as Point of Contact for the ELA/ESL cohort, facilitating meetings with colleagues across the district to develop strategies for integrating social emotional learning into the academic curriculum through both explicit lessons and lessons where social emotional skills are embedded seamlessly into the curriculum. As part of this curriculum development cohort, my job was to design a curriculum map for the year (Curriculum Map for ELA 12 (College English 12) SY2018-2019) as well as four lessons that incorporated social emotional learning standards aligned to state standards. While I have always approached lesson planning as facilitating events and experiences for students, the district’s “Learning Experience” lesson plan format helped me to think intentionally about the “Why” of my lessons as well as the “So What” and “What’s Next”–the lesson impact on student learning outcomes and trajectory towards student growth. Continue reading “Lesson Plans as Learning Experiences”

I developed this ELA 12 curriculum map (Curriculum Mapping) with the aim of aligning Social Emotional Learning standards to the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks and objectives based in Webb’s Depth of Knowledge. As I built this curriculum map, I cross-walked SEL standards with MA Standards in order to plan unit goals by skill and content. If do not know what each student will know and do by the end of each lesson before the lesson and before the unit, then I know I need to revisit my curriculum map. Curriculum mapping for my practice is much more than a pacing guide; it is an evolving process of envisioning the big picture against the details of unit essential questions and daily agendas to create alignment and ensure clarity. Although I start the year with a clearly defined curriculum map for each prep, I also know how important it is to maintain an open mind towards adjustments and flexibility of practice. As I get to know my students through formative assessment and other data points, I refine my curriculum map as a way to be intentional about differentiation.

Continue reading “Curriculum Mapping”

An outstanding teacher is empathetic, reflective, and approaches instruction as a continuously evolving practice from an inquiry stance. Outstanding teaching is a journey based on taking risks out of one’s comfort zone, trying new approaches and strategies, and revising to learn from what didn’t work the first time to make it better the next time. An outstanding teacher believes in equity within each lesson for each student with the deep commitment to work from where each student is at in order to maintain a commitment to each student’s individual growth.

An outstanding teacher understands how to cultivate student engagement and bridge content and skills gaps through high expectations and cognitive demanding tasks. Similarly, an outstanding teacher understands how to connect content to objectives and standards in order to develop clear learning targets to help students understand how to reach success every day. Data becomes an outstanding teacher’s friend, and rather than being feared, data is a tool for understanding student achievement against what is currently in practice and where practice can grow to serve students. Finally, an outstanding teacher simply does not give up on kids, and specifically, the expectation that each child can be successful in college and career, and making this commitment to each student becomes this teacher’s top priority.

 

“An outstanding teacher believes in equity within each lesson for each student…”