Candidates recognize the importance of, demonstrate, and facilitate professional learning and leadership as a career-long effort and responsibility.
- 6.1 Candidates demonstrate foundational knowledge of adult learning theories and related research about organizational change, professional development, and school culture.
- Leadership project: Book room
- Leadership project: Reading assessment handbook for teachers
- Leadership project: Reading assessment handbook for teachers background
- 6.2 Candidates display positive dispositions related to their own reading and writing and the teaching of reading and writing, and pursue the development of individual professional knowledge and behaviors.
- Please see my reflections in the IRA standards reflections. Additionally, I have created a website for teachers to continue to develop my own skills.
- 6.3 Candidates participate in, design, facilitate, lead, and evaluate effective and differentiated professional development programs.
- Differentiated instruction staff K-9 staff presentation: Click here for the PowerPoint and click here for sample handouts.
- Reading is Thinking mini-workshop handout
- 6.4 Candidates understand and influence local, state, or national policy decisions.
- Assignment 5: Analyzing assessment information
- School Reading Programs course: Curriculum analysis and response:
- What framework/s guide your reading and language arts instruction, district, state, federal or your own creation? Please post your response on or before Saturday, October 17.As a private American school abroad, our school falls under different requirements than the public schools I worked with prior to Taiwan. We are not mandated to follow a state’s particular set of benchmarks/standards (nor are we required to do standardized testing), but our school system has invested intense amounts of time over the last ten years developing their own set of benchmarks/standards for all subject areas. This has played a crucial role in giving ownership to the teachers given that teachers are selected to serve on a committee over a year as they research and compile a set of benchmarks per grade level.
In-house benchmark writing has resulted in two framework/guide outcomes in language arts for regular classroom teachers, like me, who were not on the committee. First, the developed benchmarks have been taken by each grade level and organized into units to be a part of a large-scale curriculum mapping project throughout our school system. (Our system on the elementary/middle school side consists of three major schools of about 170-250 students per campus K-9 and one minor school of 12 students K-6). The results are not perfect and many groups spend time revising their unit plans to better fit with what makes sense and what works in the classroom. The units in language arts are organized in a variety of ways across the grade levels, depending on the teachers’ experiences and preferences. In my third grade team, the original three teachers who developed our units based them on the themes in our reading anthologies (Houghlin Mifflin series). Thus, we have unit titles such as “Off to Adventure” or “Celebrating Traditions.” This ties into the second outcome of in-house benchmark writing. In assessing the needs of students at teachers, the committee decided to use a commercial book series for the elementary grades primarily because schools abroad traditionally have a high amount of turnover and it helped provide some stability year to year. Prior to this series, it’s my understanding that they relied only/primarily on core books for each grade level. At this time, our curriculum mapping units also utilize two of the previously selected core books.
Recently, our third grade team (which has myself and another teacher who are newer to the school, in addition to one veteran teacher) revised the organization of the benchmarks under each unit. Though we retained the previous units’ headings, we opened up the units to have more flexibility in resources used. For example, I like to use a Reader’s Workshop format to work through the benchmarks in each unit because I believe that students need to read materials at a level successful for them and they need to know how to self-select appropriate books. We still focus intensely on the benchmarks (such as summarizing information orally, in written form, or with graphic organizers), but don’t necessarily use the stories in our reading anthology. Another teacher on my team prefers using the anthology’s stories to teach the benchmarks. In the end, we each felt like we had taught the benchmarks well to our students, but had done it in a way in which we were comfortable.
