Why Teachers Must Become Change Agents

(Page 3) “Mastery involves strong initial teacher education and career-long staff development…There is a ceiling effect to how much we can learn if we keep it to ourselves.”

To me, so much of this article supported Airport’s mission in becoming a professional learning community. As educators, we’ve got to be able to admit that there’s always room for improvement, and we need to continue to learn new things (kudos to all of y’all for already doing so by taking this course!) and work together. Think about how much we’ve learned from each other in this class by having the opportunity to share our successes, concerns, and strategy spotlights. And how much have we accomplished by having time to work with our colleagues during delayed start? I don’t think there ever comes a point to where we don’t need to take another class because we already know it all. How would we feel if our physicians took this stance? Would we want to go to a doctor who was doing things the same way he did 15 or 20 years ago? What if he didn’t use any of the latest practices in his work? We would think such a doctor was outdated and couldn’t possibly serve us appropriately. When my husband and I were having all sorts of medical issues with Ava and she didn’t seem to follow the textbook on a diagnosis, I was thrilled when my pediatrician (who is absolutely wonderful) told me that he spoke with a few of his colleagues about her case to try to see if there was anything he was missing. By using that same method in education, we can become even better teachers and take our students to the next level.

Winter Literacy Conference

I hate I couldn’t be there with you all, but I hope you had a good time at the Winter Literacy Conference. Generally speaking, if you can take away just one thing from a conference to use in your classroom, it was worth your while. Obviously, everyone couldn’t attend all sessions, so with this post, share something you learned in one of the sessions you attended. That way others may be able to pick up something cool to use in their classrooms from a session they weren't able to get to. This post will serve as your exit slip for the conference since you didn’t have to put your name on the one you completed there.

When Kids Can’t Read: Pages 127-137; Subjects Matter: Pages 114-122

For me, the during reading concept often seemed to be the trickiest of the before, during, and after reading options. With before reading, you’re setting up the reading and providing the background information needed to make sense of the text. After reading, you’re checking for what they understood. So what’s up with this during reading stuff? If you stop and have students do something while they’re reading, wouldn’t that technically be considered an after reading activity since they had to stop reading? It all eventually made sense to me…with during reading process, we’re responsible for teaching the students HOW to read the text. On page 137 Beers writes, “Students often don’t know how to do all this thinking. For too long we’ve told them to ‘think carefully’ about what they’ve read without showing them how to do that thinking.” When using during reading strategies, it’s more of a formative assessment, so we can see where student thinking breaks down. If students aren’t using good reading strategies, they’re going to have difficulty understanding what they’ve read. The problem is that many students don’t know what they should be doing as they read, so it’s our responsibility to show them. And of course this goes back to why all content area teachers are teachers of reading—most English teachers would not be very proficient at explaining what thoughts should be going through one’s mind when reading a lab report or a word problem, just as the math or science teacher would probably struggle to analyze a poem or piece of prose.

So…questions, questions, questions. Which of the during reading strategies from Beers and/or Daniels did you try? What material were you using as your anchor text? How did your students do with it? Do you think it was helpful? What would you do differently next time?