ADAPTATIONS

According to the Wikipedia site, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation, “the definition of an adaptation in biology is a trait with a current functional role in the life history of an organism that is maintained and evolved by means of natural selection.   All adaptations help organisms survive in their ecological niches.  These adaptive traits may be structural, behavioral or physiological.”  Adaptations can be easily understood in biology; yet, there are other areas in life that the same conceptual understandings can be applied to better acknowledge the evolutionary process.  The cycle of a teacher (organism) as learner (evolving) brings about enlightenment that transcends the classroom into communities (ecological niches).   This enlightenment has been brought about by the exploration of theory, concepts, strategies, reflections, and collaboration.  The adaptive traits that have been impacted include structural (the foundation of enquiry and discovery), behavioral (what can be seen or manipulated in teaching and learning), and physiological (how learning is carried out in the living system).  

The first trait that has been impacted in my educational evolution is structural.  How I think about learning is being completely transformed.  Prior to my quest for higher education, I thought about teaching in a simple way.  I am the teacher, you are the learner, and I will impart my knowledge onto you.  You will learn facts and tell it back to me either through a worksheet or test.  My evolution started when I walked through the doors of higher education.  I started by reading and reflecting on the Principles of Learning and the Lasallian Mission.  I was opened up to the world of learning for myself rather than for an outside force; gone was performing tasks in order to get a grade.  Finally I was free to read, reflect, practice, and question.   I continue to find my own thirst for knowledge influencing my pace of discovery.   The next trait that has been evolving is behavioral.  How I see and manipulate my learning is undergoing a transformation.   Changing my language to more of a constructivist approach, writing a review of literature which promotes research, pondering praise vs. encouragement, and analyzing action research data are all the actions behind my transformation.   Learning cannot stop with just reflecting, the process must include the act of changing in order to evolve into something deeper.  Others must witness the change in behavior.  For example, moving from “Good Job” to “tell me about it” is a transformation that can be witnessed.   The last adaptive trait that is being impacted is physiological.  How a range of actions impact my learning in my classroom has been evolving.  By implementing best practices in reading, by integrating “high yield” instructional strategies, and by using the backward design approach to planning I have found my students growing and developing deeper connections.  Different from my past, now I am looking for ways to facilitate student learning by exploring concepts in order to build essential understanding.  I think about where the students are at and start there rather than using standards as the starting point.  Also, by having a newfound global understanding of units that we have been studying for years, I have transformed my reading groups from reciting facts to higher level thinking.  

Clearly, the cycle of adaptation in teaching is enlightening.  The cycle starts with discovering new theories of learning, moves to seeing and manipulating learning, and ends by impacting the learning cycle of others.  This evolutionary process is happing to me as I journey through higher education.  The process has and will continue to allow me to bring adaptations to my own teaching and learning.

Best Pracitices in Reading

After reading the chapter, Best Practices in Reading, I connected with five main ideas that either do or could play a role not only in my reading classes but our school community.  The first idea that I naturally found the most interesting was about phonics.  The best practice for teaching phonics is to include the skills in a balanced literacy reading program in kindergarten through second grade.  The suggested practice is to complete the explicit teaching of phonics by the end of second grade and to provide continued instruction only in cases where students are struggling readers behind in their learning.  Once the students have cracked the “code” to reading, they will naturally grow and learn rules just by being exposed to print.  The second idea is that children need to be exposed to read-alouds continuously throughout their schooling.  Just because a child can read for themselves doesn’t mean they won’t enjoy or benefit from someone reading to them. The reader helps them develop by modeling both how to pick out books by exposing them to different genres and authors, and by using the think aloud strategy.  They help students see that reading is a tool for learning.  Another idea to develop and implement for more fluent readers is literature circles.  Literature circles are set up where students pick books that are interesting to them.  They do not all read the same books at the same time.  Small groups are temporarily formed and the students direct the discussions.  The teacher turns into a quiet facilitator who observes and documents the student’s work quietly.  In the beginning of the year the teacher can support and model how to build thinking before, during, and after reading.  Then, as students practice and understand the process, they can begin to break away and lead lit. circles on their own.  Still another area of interest is the six key ingredients for a first grade reading program.  Of the six, I focus on four in my small groups regularly and they include:  shared reading, independent reading at a child’s fluency level, comprehension instruction, and phonics and word study.  Due to time constraints, not much time is spent on read alouds and writing projects.  These areas are left up to the classroom teacher.  Lastly, the strategy that is the most important and fundamental to every school building is creating a literacy-rich environment.  Buildings should be immersed in literacy.  By providing school wide literacy spaces for sharing and displaying written work, developing programs and themes revolving around literacy, and engaging teachers in professional development centered on literacy, students and families are sure to recognize that communities are made stronger through literacy-rich environments.

Backward Designing out of my rut!

Planning with the standards at the forefront and working backwards was really eye opening.  I loved the process.  I have taught these stories for nine years now and this last theme was so much more enjoyable.  Backward design was just what I needed to breath new life into the last month of school.  Though it took a large chuck of planning, I really had a global view of the concepts to be investigated and how they would impact the enduring understanding.  I had such a better idea of where I was headed during my group.  I was able to stay on track with my questioning and had higher level questions embedded into the learning rather than sticking to easy factual questions.  I actually had the standards written down and knew why and how our learning would impact enduring understanding.  Usually when I teach each theme, each story stands alone and I don't tie them together.  This time I could tie all the stories together clearly scaffolding the learning from week to week.  Next year I would like to take each theme and put together a backward design in the same way.  Every story, discussion, assessment, and creative activity would have a reason and clear direction.  The students seemed really engaged also.  Even though they come to my group already having their reading lessons in the classroom, we could investigate different ideas and go into more depth.  One example of this was when we were reading the first story. They knew coming into my group that the mole had to move to a new home and had new mouse friends.  We developed their previous discussion what it would be like to move and how the mouse was accepted even though he was different.  Our discussion set us up perfectly to grow into the idea of oppression.  They could identify with groups who broke free from the constraints of oppression.  Now, that's much more enduring that just identifying forms of and reasons for travel.  All in all, moving out of the the rut I obviously had gotten myself into after teaching for many years is a welcome move I look forward to continuing to make.

(My assignment was to put into practice a small strategy from the constructivist approach.  Most of my groups have come to an end so I chose to reflect on my understanding of constructivism instead.)

In order to begin to make little changes in my classroom to reflect a constructivist approach, I must first come to understand more of the theory.  In my previous reflection, one practice I wrote about in the beginning was how districts promote high standards and align curriculum to the standards.  I was really uncomfortable to write against this linear process as described below.  Every practice out district puts into place is designed around high standards.  The bar is set on high standards for our students, staff, and administration. To say we don't strive for high standards and we don't align our curriculum is so counter cultural. I'm not sure how the constructivist theory of learning would look differently.  Below is some information off of a slide from a power point "In Search of Understanding." 
  
Learning is not a linear process: 
 
Current Practice:
*high standards
*align curriculum
*construct assessments to standard
*reward schools or punish schools based on student performance
 
Constructivist Approach:
*what students “know” is a construct
*new learning – transforms old beliefs or doesn't
*students create their own meaning
*spitting out info does not equal real knowing

I believe in some of the approaches:  spitting out info does not equal real knowing and students create their own meaning.  I also am against rewarding or punishing schools based on student performance.  Having a student with a learning disability helps me see that not one teacher would want him in their class if they are rewarded on growth.  This approach just sets up competition amongst teachers and puts the under performing students at even more of a disadvantage.  Clearly, this practice doesn't promote what's best for kids.

If anyone has comments that would help me better understand my comments above, I am open to your input.  Learning and growing from where I am at really is student(me) centered and takes me where I'm at. Now that is a constructivist approach!

 

CLOZE strategy

Another new instructional strategy that I am trying this week is called the cloze procedure. Here is a direct link that offers what it is, how to use it, and why it is important. http://olc.spsd.sk.ca/de/pd/instr/strats/cloze/index.html

Over and over and year after year I have been told that progress monitoring the students with a curriculum based measure is not helpful because it only show fluency and not comprehension. For the most part, tracking fluency is sufficient due to an 80% correlation between fluency and comprehension. In order to provide more conclusive data, using a CLOZE procedure would be one researched based option. The cloze procedure is a technique where words are omitted from a passage. The passage is then read with the goal being to insert the proper word to complete the passage and construct meaning from the text.

My 1^st graders were given a maze passage from AIMSweb.  This is similar to a CLOZE passage.  As the students read the grade level passage, each sentence had one correct word pared with two other incorrect words. After reading through the sentence, the kids circled the proper word that completed the sentence.  The goal was for them to construct meaning from the text.  After looking through their completed work, it was clear to me that they each comprehend reading at different levels.  Obviously it is difficult to make meaning from text when they need to decode several words per sentence which in turn hinders fluency.  Limited vocabulary also plays a role in knowing which word makes most sense in the sentence.

I am going to continue having the students complete this learning experience in each grade level.  I may look at adding this strategy to build comprehension next year in my groups.  At his point in the year, during my last week of service, it is hard to tell if I’m going to get “high yield” learning from this strategy.

“The Quest of Essence”

Aligning curriculum to state standards, dolling out rewards or punishments based on student performance, focusing on high standards, and answering factual based questions are all examples of common teaching practices that are seen every day in schools across the country.  Putting students first, putting learning in the hands of the learner, teacher’s facilitating learning by being the provider of experiences, and students creating their own meaning are all examples of the learning theory known as constructivism.  This theory has been seen in bits and pieces throughout classrooms across the country but is gaining ground.  Teachers have been heard to say clearly that they are looking to move away from “teaching to the test”, they are tired of watching their kids motivation for learning diminish, and they want to bring back the connections and meaning they use to have when there was less to cover in the classroom and more time to devote to the process of learning.  Thus, moving to a constructivist classroom is an obvious natural step.

Constructivism is an inquiry-based learning theory that offers a student-centered learning community where students work collaboratively together to solve real world problems.  Four areas that can encompass constructivism include backward design, assessment, effective instructional strategies, and action research.  The focus of backward design is a quest for essence.   Essence is the individual, real or ultimate nature of a thing.  In order for a student to become the ultimate nature of learner, the process of learning must begin with an essential question.  This question takes the learner where they are at, in all of their understanding, and brings them to new heights of understanding.   The teacher fits into this journey by guiding, focusing, suggesting, and continuing to evaluate the progress of the learner.  Effective instructional strategies focus on “high yield” results for the learner.  Making meaningful connections is the key to growing learners.  Marzano wrote about nine principles highly effective schools use to engage students in the learning process.  Marzano found all yield high results.  #9 especially works to promote the deeper learning that constructivism is rooted in.  The focus of assessment is to bring about this kind of deeper learning.  Students create their own meaning rather than the teacher making them learn facts simply to spit them back out on a formal or informal assessment.  Essential learning does not come about in this way.  Lastly, action research can be practiced by using high impact assessments that put the focus on the learner and what meaning they are making rather than on factual outcomes.  Through action research, teachers know how to guide learners into making meaningful connections after analyzing the results of their observations and ongoing monitoring. 

Learning has definitely been observed as growing lower level thinkers who are encouraged and often rewarded for spitting out fact-based material.  In these classrooms, the teacher knows all and “gives” that knowledge to their students.  Constructivism is a learning theory that is student centered and teacher facilitated with the ultimate goal to bring about essential learning.  This learning can be seen through backward design that starts with the essential question and works back, instructional strategies that yield high results, assessments that focus on student understanding, and action research that looks to intervene where learners are at.  When these areas are integrated into the classroom, with the learner at the center, only then can the constructivism learning theory be seen at its best.

Another New Instructional Strategy

Talking Chips

-Response management technique to encourage students who do not often contribute, and limit students who contribute too much to discussions.

 

This week I am going to implement a new strategy that I have never used before.  I am going to use this with my 3rd grade Title 1 groups.  What struck me about this strategy is that it answers the questions that I consistently have with all of my groups.  What do you do when one or two students do all of the talking/answering and the others don't say or get to anything?  Well, this appears to be the perfect "high yield" strategy.  I get several benefits from it including giving everyone a chance to answer a question or tell a story, it also helps to keep track of who has and has not had a chance to share, everyone needs to share something, and it lets the student be in control of when they want to use there chips.  

 

I have been using the talking chips with each of my small groups this week.  I explain to them they can use it to answer any question they want or tell a story about the topic we are exploring.  The strategy is seems to be fun for the kids.  They are excited to get there chips.  Having the chips gives them something to fidget with which has been OK so far.  The children differ in that some use theirs up right away answering questions and story telling and others wait to use them to the end.  They are thinking more about the questions rather than just spitting out just anything that comes to their mind.  The discussion seems to be more thoughtful.  It really is helping curb some of the students who talk all the time and share a story abut everything.  The strategy is forcing them to think and listen more than talk.  I can see another way to use the chips as well.  I want to try and have different students facilitate the discussion by being the questioner and chip taker.  More modeling needs to happen first though.  Overall, this strategy has been fun and is producing more thoughtful discussions with all students sharing.

 

 

New insructional strategy with "high yield"

Year after year, teachers find themselves teaching the same curriculum in the same way to different kids.  Falling into a "slump" by using the same teaching strategies is very easy to do.  Often times the strategies are not effective and don't produce a "high yield" of learning.  Looking at over 1,000 new teaching strategies and aligning some of them with Marzano's 9 principles of learning has led me to a new tool for summarizing strories.  The "Exit Out" strategy is one I tried with my 3rd graders this week.  Instead of verbally summarizing the story we were reading together, 1/2 of the students wrote a big idea summary on a note card and the other 1/2 wrote the detail summary on their card.  Then, each 1/2 shared with the other 1/2 what they wrote before they could leave the group.  Not only is this a jigsaw sharing strategy, they also have to come up with an answer rather than waiting for someone else to summarize the big ideas and details.  This encourages whole group participation and learning from one another.  The students were highly engaged in the reading of the story knowing that they would be responsible for their "exit out" summary.

Three effective teaching strategies

Three teaching strategies that I use every week in my classroom are:

1.       Reading goal setting and progress monitoring:  Every week I check my 3^rd and 4^th grade student’s AR points and to see if and how much they have read the past week.  I meet with each student and we discuss how they did and set a goal for the upcoming week.  I follow up the discussion with progress monitoring, the student reads a passage for one minute and we look at their progress/decline.  We then have a discussion about how they did. 

·        Principle:  This instructional strategy falls under Marzano’s 3rd principle: reinforcing effort and providing recognition.   Following their reading I “Pause, Prompt, Praise” as needed or earned.

·        Effectiveness:  One piece of criteria our learning group came up with was meaningful systems of feedback – this strategy I practice is highly effective with the students as it clearly aligns with both Marzano’s principles as well as our group criteria.  My students regularly see the correlation between how much they read in a week to how they read during their weekly monitoring.  They understand when they read, their fluency goes up and when they slack off reading, their reading fluency declines.  My hopes or goal is that they internalize this learning and continue to read over the summer months.

 

2.      Soar to Success program – Small group around kidney table previewing story and summarizing at end of each daily lesson:  My 3^rd and 4^th grade intervention program is called Soar to Success.  Built into the program are strategies of predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing in a small group. 

·        Principle:  The strategy uses Marzano’s 2^nd and 6^th principle:  Summarizing and note taking and Cooperative Learning.  The kids are face to face predicting, reading, and summarizing.  This type of setting has group accountability naturally built in. 

·        Effectiveness:  The kids work together on the story and finish the lesson by summarizing the “big idea” from the text every day.  They share the big idea with a whisper partner and the partner shares what they heard their partner say.  This encourages active listening and higher level thinking.   They are not just summarizing “little details” but the overall theme or idea.   By working together in cooperative groups they learn at higher levels by scaffolding off of ideas that are shared.  This strategy aligns with Marzano’s principles as well as our group criteria of group work and cooperative learning, meaningful systems of feedback, and making predictions.

3.      Phonemic Awareness – Small groups around kidney table using chips and sound boxes to symbolize letters by only using the sound of the letter.  The Kindergarten students use 2-4 sound boxes copied on colored paper.  This is a Barton Intervention program tweaked for small groups rather than individual tutoring.

·        Principle:  The strategy uses Marzano’s 5^th principle:  Nonlinguistic representation. The chips are symbols representing letters and pulling them down provides movement and active engagement.  This type of setting provides active movement by using manipulative chips along with arm movements.

·        Effectiveness:  The kids work individually but side by side using arm movement and manipulative chips as symbols of letters.  This is a highly effective intervention as it is has been used across the country with students struggling with reading.  Students in the groups have gone from showing little phonemic awareness skills to mastering the benchmark in as little as 2 weeks.  This strategy aligns with Marzano’s principles as well as our group criteria of multiple intelligence including spatial and bodily-kinesthetic intelligences.

Change

This week has been one that has got me thinking about the action associated with the word CHANGE. Often I have been heard spouting comments about how others need to change, "The world is changing, get on board or get left behind!" or "Get over it! What's the big deal, we all have to do it!" At the Maple Grove Hospital they have a beautiful wall hanging of a fall tree with the inspirational message,

"Act Like A Tree: Except Change"



I had no choice but to except change as my father was dying from cancer and he only lived one week past my seeing the picture. The image of the tree has stayed with me throughout these past two years along with the enduring understanding: life is always changing.

This past week I have been asked to change. I was blind-sided by the simple request and I spent a sleepless night literally fighting in my mind and heart with what I was being asked to do. I found it's not so easy when you're the one being asked to do the changing. What has been screaming in my mind like a two year old tantrum is" NO, I WON'T! I DON'T WANT TO AND YOU CAN'T MAKE ME!" I had to take a deep breath and come to the realization that I either need to get on board or get left behind.

 

Being asked to make changes myself, like I have asked others to do often, has given me the opportunity to "walk a mile" in someone else's shoes.