Building Collaborative Classrooms

The day has started rather inauspiciously as we are in the midst of a Southern snow storm….the best kind.  Warwick delayed by two hours and there were no delays at the IU so I came over arriving about 7:50 for 8 am registration.  An hour later there are about 20 people here and most of the schools in Lancaster County including Warwick are closed.  The coaches are having an emergency regroup meeting since many of them are not going to make it.

I am curious to see what happens here.  I could work on American Literature, poetry, grammar, vocabulary, or writing.

The wikispace that we will use today is http://cffexplore.wikispaces.com

Cindy Anderson:  from the IU Alphabet soup:  How does it connect?

Cindy Anderson gave an overview of how all the initiatives that we are living with in education fit together.  The following acronyms were covered.

CFF:  Classrooms for the Future

SAS: Standards Aligned Systems

Student Achievement requires the following characteristics:

• Clear standards
  • Clear, high standards that establish what all students should know and be able to do by specific grade levels
  • Now have standards for grades 9-12
• Fair Assessments aligned to standards
  • Summative
  • Formative
  • Benchmark
  • Diagnostic
  • Beginning with the “end in mind” (UbD)
  • Assessment Anchors
• Curriculum framework
  • a framework specifying Big Ideas, Concepts, and Competencies in each subject area/at each grade level.
  • LFS a curriculum planning model;  TOOLBOX=the LFS web-based curriculum managements solution
• Instruction
  • Aligning instruction with standards involves identifying strategies that are best suited to help students achieve the expected performance
    • Differentiating Instruction
    • Using 21st Century Instructional Technologies (CFF)
    • LFS–a planning model;  strategies for high levels of student engagement
• Materials & Resources
  • Materials that aligne to the standards
    • units and lesson plans
    • instructional Resources (Media
    • Technology
• Intervention
  • A safety net/intervention system that insures all students meet standards
    • DI
    • Web-based intervention

GCA

DI:  Differentiated Instruction

EdHub:  http://www.edportal.ed.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt

house the SAS and other PDE Tools

UbD: Understanding by Design

AE & EC

LFS: Learning Focused School Toolbox

• • SAS connections to LFS
  • Student Assessment and culminating Activity Tabs
  • Know, Understand & Do in LFS Toolbox

My “breakout” session was with the writing group.  There were four of us led by Jeff Rothenberger and after getting everyone “joined” to the wiki and setting up a Google Doc (Click here), we decided to create a lesson to teach narrative writing.  We brainstormed, shared, and finally came up with a lesson. (Click here).  Although this lesson is simplistic for my 10th grade students, I will adapt it and use some of it to differentiate for the students who need more support when creating their Research Narratives during 4th marking period.

Jill Dougherty, winner of the National Milken Educator Award, shared some of the activities that she uses to teach strategic reading to 9th graders in her reading classes at Springfield High School.

Jill talked about the success she is having using “wonder journals,” a long-term writing journal in which students write short, one to two paragraphs, research activities on self-selected topics. These journals are kept on a forum in Moodle.

Jill’s students become “investigators” and develop the following skills:

1. Questioning
2. Reading with a purpose
3. Drawing conclusions
4. Making inferences
5. Paraphrasing [students learn about plagiarism, Turnitin.com]
6. Critical reading
7. Evaluate author’s purpose [http://www.venganza.org/]
8. Analyze author’s bias

The wonder journal is an activity that can be carried out in all content areas (thus helping kids to see the connection between good questions and understanding the text.

Jill modeled the following strategies:

Read and Respond with Questions: Types of questions (Big Mac v. Cheeseburger)

Cheeseburger questions: who, what, where, when

Big Mac questions: classify, analyze, define, evaluate, compare

This is one activity: Interview a neighbor

1. In pairs, one student writes six Cheeseburger questions, one writes three Big Mac
2. Students interview each other
3. After interview, reflect on which now knows more about the person they interviewed.

These are the expectations for the “Wonder Journal” exercises.

Reading and responding with questions:

1. Read and write 3 thick (Big Mac) questions
2. Reflect on how the information will change you
3. Answer or change questions in journal
4. Be ready to discuss how the information

Write a complete response (RACE)

1. Restate the question
2. Answer all parts of the question
3. Cite evidence from the text
4. Edit for clarity and mechanics

Citing source www.citationmachine.net

This strategy will help me to clarify or extend the reading journals that I do with my students. Specifically, it will help me to help my students understand the “Q” in SDQR that I am using during their independent reading of a non-fiction book during the third marking period. The more I study reading and writing and thinking, the more I see that the three must be taught in conjunction with each other.