During
the process of earning my National Board Certification I deepened my
understanding of effective student learning.
Upon completion of my first whole
group video, I brought it to my mentor who watched it and took copious notes. The video showed me reading pieces of text
with my students and asking reading comprehension and analysis questions. It was
entertaining, it was fun, and it was completely wrong. After
watching it, my mentor turned to me and asked a question that shifted the way I
looked at teaching.
“You’re working really hard,” she said. “What
are your students doing?”
The
answer was obvious. They were listening. They
were being entertained, and, while they may have been learning, it could have
been much more efficient and effective. It
was this moment that I shifted my focus away from what I was teaching to what
students were learning. Now, I reflect
on this moment frequently when lesson planning and even while instructing. I rely on this experience to focus my vision
of the effective school as a place where students do the hard work (the
learning).
This was a defining moment that has shaped
my vision of the effective school which now focuses on the following: implementing a school wide literacy program,
everyone reads and everyone writes.
Implementation of a rigorous,
developmentally appropriate literacy program improves a school’s
effectiveness. Every instructional staff
member is responsible for developing the literacy of students and using direct
instruction of sequenced lessons, especially important during a child’s
formative years when it plays a critical role in his/her intellectual development
(Carnine 2000). Serving on the state literacy team, I
developed an understanding of the primacy of early literacy instruction. Although literacy skills can be acquired later
in education, there is no surer way to improve literacy than by beginning early
through direct instruction and close reading.
The second critical element to an
effective literacy plan is writing.
There is a quantitative impact on learning improvement when students
write on a regular basis. Writing to
learn strategies, effectively employed, not only provide regular feedback to
teachers, but also deepen understanding.
If students write about it, they remember it.
As a teacher consultant with Puget Sound
Writing Project, I was fortunate to collaborate with a literacy team opening a
new elementary school whose core value is - everybody
writes. They dedicate forty
instructional minutes every day to writing instruction, even their
kindergarteners write. Using effective
strategies such as mentor texts lessons, writing to learn, and reflection the
school has established consistently high performance on state assessments. A comprehensive literacy plan, which includes
writing and the reading/writing connection, improves learning and should not be
easily dismissed.
Even Doug Lemov (2010) in his book Champion Teacher discusses writing as a
critical learning strategy. He explains
forty-nine techniques that impact effective teaching and learning, among them
writing. Additionally University of Washington
Tacoma, Education Administration professor, Patti Banks (2012), stressed
students do not know that they think until they see what they say. Writing regularly solidifies knowledge. I
have seen the impact in my classroom. I
used writing regularly as a strategy not only in my language arts classes, but
also in my speech and drama classes. My
speech and drama students wrote in abundance, and not once did they complain or
question the purpose. They wrote about
their learning, to demonstrate and explain their understanding. Thus, the key to effective writing
implementation is that the teacher does it so regularly that it is habit and so
specifically that it seems natural. The
impact of implementing writing as part of a comprehensive literacy plan
improves student learning in all core subjects.
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