Tiana Wallace says that before, “everything was bucketed.”
“In writers workshop, you might be focused on animals. In read aloud, you might be focused on family.”
@ELeducation, which is designed for deep study in content areas, is supporting stronger vocab acquisition for Ss.
Wallace teaches ESL, and vocabulary development is esp. critical for English Learners!
We also heard about this lack of coherence from 1st grade teacher Alexa Reynolds.
Writers workshop was not connected to the read aloud, which was not connected to the reading tip.
Reynolds’s observation that students are all working towards building content knowledge in @ELeducation is echoed by 3rd grade teacher Sarah Birney.
She noticed that F&P was not focused on helping students to become content experts.
The contrast between the two is very clear.
“Teachers, especially in lower grades, were modifying lessons or writing lessons themselves instead of using an evidence based curriculum,” leading to a lack of coherence and consistency across the school.
Laura Copeland-Clarke, a Special Education Teacher, explains the downsides of grouping kids by reading level.
“A student could be level L for fluency and decoding and another is there for comprehension.”
This did not facilitate differentiation by skill needs.
Fourth grade teacher Alix Leeser felt like 90% of her teacher energy was going to small group work… and she wasn’t seeing the growth she wanted to see.
It was frustrating to put in so much effort – and not know why it wasn’t working for many kids.
The practices didn’t all make sense.
“I know these students are working on their letter sounds, but for some reason I’m pulling them every day to practice reading this four word sentence over and over again.”
“We would continue to sit down with these pre-alphabetic kids and get them to read the four-sentence book.”
– First grade teacher Alexa Reynolds
Sarah Birney explains the relative precision of @ELeducation’s foundational skills approach.
“There’s a big difference between saying ‘chunk the word’… what does that even mean??… versus saying, ‘This is a double-vowel syllable. Let’s read words with double-vowel syllables.”
‘This approach is “more specific for teachers and students than saying, “chunk that word into the parts you know.”’
Tiana Williams explains the engagement of students with the knowledge-rich units, as she describes her students’ work with the @ELeducation module on Birds.
When our #KnowledgeMatters Tour visited @SalemSchoolsk12, we heard about the district’s shift from Teachers College Reading Workshop to stronger curriculum.
Teachers @staceyvail523, Erica Cabral, and Samantha Lear shared their experiences.
There was so much cross checking between making sure that we were covering things that Lucy might not spell out so easily,” like teaching nouns and verbs.
@staceyvail523, a seventeen year veteran teacher in grades K and 2
“It meant a lot of Teachers Pay Teachers, which is not the best stuff.”
The time and $ cost driven by the need to supplement Reading Workshop was a theme across our conversations in @SalemSchoolsk12.