Andrea Tomaszewski EDR 628 Spring 2011 Course Reflection Course Reflection 1.

) Please share your thoughts/reflections to the following questions:

As a literacy leader in your school, how will you use your new understanding of designing and implementing an integrated, comprehensive, and balanced curriculum to improve student learning in your school/community? I have already discussed using Understanding by Design to create curriculum that is cohesive from grades 6-12. Our school has been working to connect the learning from one grade to the next, this year. My fellow English teachers and I are planning on using UbD to design a curriculum that covers our standards, is cohesive, and interests and engages our students while helping them to reach deeper understandings about learning and life. I also hope to help my co-workers to integrate literacy into their curricula. The Common Core Standards include literacy requirements for all subjects. I would like to help my coworkers to feel supported and to succeed in teaching literacy in the context of their classes. I believe that explaining the difference between knowledge and understandings and introducing them to the 6 facets of learning as well as the design template for UbD may help them to succeed in teaching literacy within their classrooms. As a literacy leader in your school/community, how can you promote appropriate and varied instructional approaches, including those that develop word recognition, language comprehension, strategic knowledge, and readingwriting connections? One thing that I have talked to my boss about for next year is some professional development time to work with my coworkers on bringing literacy into their classrooms. Ive heard a lot of grumbling from teachers outside of language arts who are frustrated and feel like they are doing my job for me thanks to the new literacy standards that Common Core has created. I want to show them how they can use things like magnet summaries, graffiti boards, and post-it notes within their own classes in order to both check for understanding of ideas and bring more literacy into their classrooms. I also think it is important to share with them multiple options so that their students do not become bored. We need many tools to keep our students engaged. I also intend on being a model for my fellow teachers in my own classroom. I hope to make sure that my coworkers know they can come to me for advice and help, or even just to watch how I bring literacy into my own classroom.

As a literacy leader in your school/community, how can you promote the use of a wide range of texts (e.g., narrative, expository, and poetry) from traditional print, digital, and online resources, moving students to see beyond the single story? One thing that I plan to do to promote the use of a wide range of texts is talk to my coworkers about the importance of bringing outside material into our classrooms. I really want to share the video on the Dangers of a Single Story with my co-workers. I think its important that teachers recognize that the textbooks we use are written by a publishing company that has ulterior motives in choosing what to include in their texts. Because of this, its important to show students there are multiple sides to any story, and they need to learn to think critically about their sources. Bringing in outside newspaper articles, YouTube videos, and pictures will help our students to create a diverse picture of what reality is. At a professional development meeting this year, I was also introduced to the fact that by their senior year, 70% of what students read should be non-fiction (according to the new Common Core Standards). In order to help this, I need to supplement my textbook. I also believe that in order to teach literacy within other classes, my co-workers should be introduced to the idea of bringing fictional literature and/or childrens literature into their classrooms along with nonfictional literature and other forms of media. How will your new understandings of assessments and their purposes, strengths, and limitations help you as a literacy leader in your school/community? Thinking about assessment as a form of evidence for understandings will allow me to make sure that my students truly comprehend the understandings that I am attempting to teach them. Creating assessments to look for specific characteristics will allow me to focus my assessments and to make sure that my students are on track for learning. This will help me to make adjustments to my teaching when necessary in order to make sure my students truly understand. It will also hopefully help me to create meaningful assessments that are interesting to my students but also prove their understanding. I am also going to change the way I format my assessments in order to better serve my students. In the past, I have waited until the end of a unit to tell my students about their final assessments and sometimes Ive shared a grading rubric, but sometimes I have not. After reading Understanding by Design, I will be introducing my students to the essential questions and understandings that we are working toward and I will also introduce them to their performance tasks much earlier. The biggest change that I am planning on making in my assessments is to make sure that they are authentic. I have heard about the importance of creating authentic assessments previous to this class; however, I do not think I fully understood what authentic assessment meant. It has finally clicked. I feel like my students will participate and engage themselves within my class more if they feel that what they are doing has meaning and is realistic.

As far as how this will relate to my position as a literacy leader in my school, I plan to share this information with my colleagues. I hope that by modeling the work, and hopefully being successful, it will help me to share these techniques with my coworkers. I intend on helping my coworkers to also adopt the UbD design in their own classroom planning.

2.) Then, share 1-2 of your own learning points from this semester, answering the following questions: (1) Why is this learning significant?; (2) How did you learn this learning point?; and (3) How will you use this learning in your future classroom?

The learning point that had the largest impact on me was the video of the speech The Dangers of the Single Story. I had been introduced to bringing outside material in to my classroom before, and Id had discussions in class about how textbooks are written with a slant; however, I have never really seen the picture put together so clearly. This piece has really had an impact on how I think about the material I present to my students. In fact, Im hoping to use the idea of breaking the single story as a theme for my senior English class next year. Its a world lit course, but thus far Ive been disappointed by the textbooks and their representations of certain cultures. Because of this, I plan on bringing much more outside material into my classroom. I want my students to explore different cultures to make up their minds about the validity of our textbooks representation. I want to encourage them to think critically about information presented to them. Thanks to this video, I have a starting point to introduce them to the idea and I have now come up with this theme for my class. Although I found Understanding by Design to be interesting and helpful, since Ive already written so much about that, the other learning point I would like to discuss is from Choice Words. I never put much thought into how my students reacted to the way I questioned them or led them in discussions. After reading Choice Words, I have become much more aware of what I say and how I say it. At first I really didnt like the book. I thought that some of these ideas seemed over-the-top, but the more we discussed them in class and shared experiences, the more I realized that there was merit to the idea. I started to wonder how my words were affecting my classes. I found myself picking words more carefully with my students after reading Choice Words. I also realized just how much my attitude affects my students attitudes in class. When Im not excited about a topic, they wont be either. For example, when I teach them about To Kill a Mockingbird, Im excited about it. I love the book, the lessons, and the characters. I teasingly tell them how I would love to marry a man like Atticus and share stories about my own childhood as a tomboy. Even though they dont all love reading, by the end of the novel, most of them will admit it was worth reading. My attitude toward the book affects theirs. This is something that I will think about now. I am going to work to plan what I say to my students better next year. Im also going to work on my attitude to make sure I present a positive and energetic front to my students. This may even cause me to make some changes in how I teach my students so that we are all engaged. After all, if Im bored, they probably are too.