Inquiry 2 - Target Area

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During my guided lead teaching, I will be working within the fourth grade fantasy genre unit with the novel Poppy by Avi. Throughout my lesson, I will place a heavy emphasis on practices to facilitate comprehension instruction.  Students will be given to opportunity to brainstorm, draft, revise, proofread, and edit their work.  Additionally, a stress will be placed on Read Alouds, Shared Reading, Guided Reading, and Independent Reading.  During the school day, approximately 45 minutes to one hour is allotted per day for instruction in this area.

This unit lesson will cover a number of Common Core Standards. They include the following:

·       RL.4.1-4, RL.4.10, RL.4.5, RL.4.1-3

·       SL.4.1.a-d, SL.4.2, L.4.4a, c, SL.4.1a-d, SL.4.6, SL.3.3

·       L.4.5a-c, L.4.6, L.4.4a-c

·       RI.4.1-4, RI.4.8, RI.4.10, RL.4.9, RI.4.7, RI.4.5, RI.4.9, RI.4.6

·       W.4.2a-e, W.4.4, W.4.10, W.4.2a-d, W.4.9a, W.4.3a-e, W.4.10, W.4.9b

Teaching in this target area will provide students opportunities to learn different skills that relate to their lives.  Students will become accustomed to reading and comprehending text independently, a skill that is vital for real life.  Students will also learn how to vocalize what they infer from a text as well as listen to others’ opinions and conclusions.  Taking others’ views and deductions into consideration and learning from one another is definitely a skill that will stay with these students and will relate to their lives outside of the classroom.  Students will be learning literacy through the new vocabulary words and techniques that the author incorporates in the story.  Students will be learning about literacy when they think deeper about the author’s purpose and why the author chose to include certain things and techniques in the story.  Finally, students will learn through literacy by using reading as a tool to gain information.  For example, in Poppy, students will be exposed to certain themes such as social hierarchy, deception, and blinding following authority and perhaps not believing everything you hear.

My goal for this target area is to place an emphasis on student-led discussions.  While reading Berne and Clark’s article, “Focusing Literature Discussion Groups on Comprehension Strategies,” I really took an interest to what the article had to say.  So for in my classroom, students have only participated in teacher-led discussions while I have taught Making Meaning.  We have utilized the “turn to your partner” strategy where students are given the opportunity to have brief discussions with a partner and to report back to the group what their partner had to say.  Opening such discussion to a large group setting in which the students take the lead is something that I am very interested in.  In order to implement this, I think that we would need to cover topics such as talk stems and appropriate questions that encourage higher-level thinking.  While teacher-led discussion is important and will be used for this target area, I would really like to make an effort to teach students the techniques for successful student-led discussions.

In order to work with this target area, I will mainly be utilizing resources from my classroom.  These resources include the classroom set of Poppy by Avi, sticky notes provided by my MT that she has accumulated over time, technology in the classroom including the Promethean Board, the Elmo, and our classroom set of Expressions, and most importantly, my MT.  I feel as though my MT will be the most helpful resource while planning and teaching my unit lesson.  She has many years of experience and I believe that I truly do learn from her everyday.  She has already offered me guidance, suggestions, and advice and has assured me that she will support me in any that I may need.

Throughout this unit lesson, I will focus on responding to reading. I will do this by incorporating the use of sticky notes in order to allow students an opportunity to respond to their reading as well as to practice facilitation comprehension instruction.  By focusing on this core practice, I will contribute to my own professional learning in many ways.  First, it will allow me to see students’ thoughts and reactions to certain parts of the story.  I will be able to see which parts stood out to them and may have connected with.  While during a discussion lesson smaller details may go un-discussed, sticky notes will allow me to see what my students find to be important or interesting.  In addition, sticky notes will allow me to also leave messages for my students.  Instead of only responding to lengthier pieces of writing, responding to the students’ sticky notes will allow for quick pieces of advice, questioning to get students thinking deeper, or words of encouragement.

There are a few things that I would need to know, and that I will most likely learn from experience, about the use of sticky notes to support my planning and teaching.  To start with, I wonder if students will see the sticky notes as a distraction.  Having being able to get to know my students for the past month, I have seen that they do in fact become easily distracted.  Whether it is a visitor in the room, a phone call from the office or another teacher, or a change-up in our daily schedule, my students have a tendency to get off task and need to be pulled back in.  For this reason, I wonder if students will be able to use the sticky notes appropriately or if they will become an issue.  Next, I wonder how many sticky notes will be enough for students to use to be effective.  I predict that some students will ask, “Miss Buscemi, how many sticky notes should we use?”  I want to tell them however many are enough for you personally, but I wonder if I will have students that use a multitude of sticky notes while others just a couple.  I am interested to see how things play out the first few times that we use our sticky notes.

Pre-assessing my students in regards to my target area has already begun.  For the past few weeks, practice for the upcoming MEAP test has been our number one priority in our classroom.  While prepping for the MEAP test, we have been practicing skills that will be necessary for my unit plan.  These skills include reading fluently, grammar, silent sustained reading and silent sustained writing to build stamina, and discussions.  I am able to observe which students are more advanced in a given area and which students may need more practice.  This will be helpful when it comes to creating groups for group work or guided reading groups.

One thing that does concern me about planning and teaching my unit is the timing in which it falls.  It just so happens that the dates of the guided lead teaching falls within the genre unit that we are going to be covering.  Because it is so easy to become slightly behind schedule, I am a little concerned that this will happen and my unit lesson will be pushed back.  I do not mind if it needs to be pushed back a couple of days in the lesson, I just hope that it is not pushed back so much that it will change the topic of what I plan on teaching.