Sarah Uglum, target area

1.      Describe your target area for guided lead teaching.

·         ·         My target area for this unit is Practices to facilitate comprehension. The students will read the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Eleanor Coerr. Students will be reading the book and are expected to think and write critically about the book. In this unit students will be learning about and implementing the reading and writing processes. For reading the book students will participate in whole class instruction with teacher guided literature circles, read alouds, shared reading, modified guided reading, modeled lessons, focused skill and strategy lessons, and genre study. For small group instruction there will be guided reading, independent reading, genre study, and focused strategy and skill instruction. In writing the students will be working in whole class modeled lessons, shared/ interactive writing, focused strategy and skill instruction and author sharing. In small groups conferencing will be added to the list. Then during their daily independent writing students will be writing in notebooks and journals. During this unit I need to clearly teach comprehension strategies, such as: making connections, asking questions, determining importance, inferring, synthesizing, visualizing, and repairing comprehension. Fluent oral reading will be important because I will walk around to students and ask them to read aloud therefore I can hear how they are doing with the book.

2.      Approximately how much time per day is allotted for your instruction in this area?

·         About 60  minutes a day is allotted for my instruction. But, this is something that is in the curriculum the time frame for this unit can be flexible if need be.

3.      Which Common Core State Standard(s) will you work toward?

·         RL.4.1-4, RL.4.10, SL.4.1.a-d, SL.4.2, L.4.4a, c, L.4.5a-c, L.4.6, RI.4.1-4, RI.4.8, RI.4.10, RL.4.9, L.4.4a-c, RL.4.5, SL.4.1a-d, SL.4.6, SL.3.3, RL.4.1-3, W.4.2a-e, W.4.4, W.4.10, W.4.2a-d, W.4.9a, W.4.3a-e, W.4.10, RI.4.7, RI.4.5, RI.4.9, RI.4.6, W.4.9b,

4.      How will teaching in this target area provide opportunities for students to learn important content and/or skills that relate to their lives?  In what ways does this learning include learning literacy: learning content, vocab, genres and other literary terms. learning about literacy: about the reading and writing process  and/or learning through literacy: will learn about topics by reading about them using reading as a tool

·         By having the students work in small groups and in whole class discussions they will become familiarized in working with others. Students as they get older will have to work more and more with others and it is a skill they need to learn now to be successful in the future. In my opinion this book is about hope and love, a girl diagnosed with leukemia attempts to make one thousand cranes because it is a myth that anyone who does will be granted a wish, and hers is to survive. Love because even after the girl dies before she accomplishes her goal others finish it for her and bury the cranes with her. There are good meanings and themes that the students can take away from this book and see/ experience in their own lives.

·         By reading this book students will learn literacy by being exposed to more vocabulary. Through reading this book students will learn about different genres by reading them and see what requirements a book needs to be considered a certain genre, in this case it is non-fiction. Students will learn about literacy by being active participants in the reading and writing process. Students will learn the different steps of each process by doing the activities in the unit. Students will learn through literacy because they will learn about topics by reading and writing about them. For this literacy becomes a tool that the students will then use to learn about the different themes in the book and learn about what life was like for the people in Japan in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing.

5.      What types of classroom talk take place within this target area? To what extent is the talk teacher-led, student-led, or focused on higher-level thinking? What norms for interaction would you like to build within your classroom as you teach in this target area (e.g., see ideas in Chapter 6 of Strategies that Work, the Berne & Clark 2008 article, or draw from some of the readings done in TE 402 on classroom talk)?

·         There is a good mix of teacher ked talk and student led talks in this unit. There will be think- pair- share, which the students have learned a little about this and have practiced it as well. Read alouds, retelling/ summarizing oral presentations, and collaborative discussion. For most of these I will simply provide a prompt or question and students will then in charge of working together to complete a task.

·         The classroom talks that will take place are teacher talks, where it is the teacher that instructs and the students listen and answer questions. There will also be student discussions, the teacher gives the students a prompt to talk about and in their groups they talk amongst themselves. The talks will be higher- level thinking when the discussion is student based because questions will not be answered with a yes or no and the students will have more opportunity to talk when working in small groups. There will also be whole class discussions when the groups all come together to talk about what was discussed in their small groups.  One of the norms that I want to students to work on is really listening to each other and coming up with genuine comments and questions about what someone just said. A second norm my students need to work on is not interrupting other students and to wait for their turn to speak.

6.      Which ‘core practice’ do you want to work on developing/improving as you teach in this target area (refer to document “Resources for Developing Core Practices”)? How will focusing on this core practice contribute to your own professional learning?

·          The core practice for this unit will be explicit instruction with an emphasis in Thinking aloud, reading aloud, interactive reading aloud, and guided interactive discussions. Focusing on explicit instruction will help me learn the ways that I want to implement these practices. During these two weeks I will be able to see what strategies work in what situations and which ones do not. By using think alouds I will see what kind of thinking the students relate and respond to and that is the type of wording that I will try and use. Using explicit instruction will allow me to practice directly teaching students the techniques and procedures to use when they are reading.

7.      What resources within the community, neighborhood, school district, school or classroom do you have to work with in this target area?

·     The school has on record the reading level of all the students and that will be helpful because then I can group students by reading level for in class activities. The school provides the books for the class, so that all the students have their own copy. Paper to make cranes will also be needed for an in class activity.

8.      What additional resources do you need to obtain?

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9.      How will you pre-assess your students in your target area?

·         I will give them a writing prompt about the bombings at Hiroshima to see what the students know. I am not sure if I will structure each part by giving them the topics I want them to write about or leave it open ended. The structuring of the pre-assessment would look like this: Who bombed Hiroshima? What were the affects of the bombing? What country and year did the bombing take place? Under each question would be room for the students to write their answers.

10.  What else will you need to find out about all students in your class to help you develop lesson plans for your Guided Lead Teaching?

• I need to see how well the students work in groups and make a product for an assignment. I also need to know where the students are in their comprehension level, that way I can make the different groups based on this so that I can use differentiated instruction effectively.

11.  What else do you need/want to learn about the ‘core practice’ to support your planning and teaching?

·         I need to learn when using each of the explicit types of instruction in appropriate based on the material, so that I can make it as effective as possible.

12.  What concerns, if any, do you have about planning and teaching your unit?

•       I am concerned that my students will have a  difficult time getting their work done in groups. I am extremely concerned that teaching these lessons will be overshadowed by classroom management.
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