Reflective Practice
I believe that truly effective teachers center their curriculum around reflective practices to ensure they are making the most of their instruction. As a student teacher, I have found that small adjustments to the delivery of my instruction or to the classroom procedures that govern my classroom can radically change how my students function in the educational environment.
When planning instruction, I reflect on past lessons and events in the classroom to make sure that I am setting up my students for success. I utilize an overview of my weekly lesson plans to determine if there is a balance of activities that are written, hands-on, and technology-based to increase student engagement. I also heavily rely on reflection to anticipate students’ behavioral and academic needs to create quality lessons that successfully teach learning standards and assist students in achieving their IEP goals.
As I continue into the field, I plan to use reflective practices in conjunction with my growing repertoire of instructional strategies to create dynamic lessons that help my students access the general education curriculum.
Lesson Plan
This lesson plan is a Leveled Literacy Intervention lesson that I adapted in response to my students' progress monitoring data. Both of the students in this reading group showed significant regression in their implicit and explicit reading comprehension, so I supplemented the scripted LLI Lesson by including a specific learning strategy for retelling. Using the Somebody, Wanted, But So strategy my students were able given a framework for identifying important information in the text and using it to retell the story in an efficient manner.
Artifacts
Lesson Plan Reflections
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Upon completing a lesson, I use this lesson plan reflection template to review the lesson as a whole. I make note of specific language, teacher models and instructional learning formats that could be beneficial to students. I also evaluate aspects of the lesson that could be improved upon, such as providing more or less scaffolding through prompts and visual aids.
By utilizing this reflection template, I am able to determine how I am currently meeting the needs of my students and how I could strive to do better. I also use this template as a section for anecdotal records where I can remark on interesting trends I notice as my student's complete activities. From this foundation, I am able to adjust instruction in relation to a specific learning objective or I can track long-term trends in my student's interests and academic habits that can inform which interventions would be most helpful to their success.
Weekly LLI Lesson Planning
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When my upper elementary students began using lessons from the Red Leveled Literacy Intervention Kid, I designed this weekly breakdown to develop a purposeful scaffolding of the balanced literacy diet. Several weeks after my students began to engage in these new lessons, their running records showed a regression in their reading comprehension. After observing how time was allotted during our reading block, I saw how the additional element of vocabulary instruction left less time to engage in implicit and explicit analysis of text.
As a result, I divided the LLI lessons that were meant to take place over a single 45-minute block into three different 30-minute blocks. This allowed for an ample amount of time for the students to engage in reading comprehension every day. It also better supported opportunities to blend LLI instruction with general reading instruction such as personal goal setting, fluency, and building text-to-self connections. As this weekly breakdown has been used in the resource room, my students have demonstrated a stronger sense of reading comprehension in their running records and their discussion of text in general.
Sight Word Inventory
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This sight word inventory is an assessment that I gave to a student who was not making progress toward his IEP goal. For several weeks he showed no progress in mastering the sight words being taught to him through flashcards and sight word games. After analyzing this sight word inventory, I noticed that the words this student had internalized were words that he would often write during writing exercises.
Words that he would write on a daily basis such as ‘is’ and ‘can’ were consistently read while other words like ‘away’ were not. Based on this analysis, I modified his sight word instruction to include writing sight words so that he was able to use letter formation to internalize the sight words. After engaging him in several writing-based activities in addition to reading activities this student began to gain momentum in his sight-word knowledge once again.