7 Areas to Increase Best Practice

As I continued my research on current classroom best practices utilizing chapter 8 of Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde's Best Practice book Seven Structures of Best Practice teaching, I was able to gain strategies from each of the seven areas. Below each are strategies that could be used in my future Action Research and classroom activities.

Small-Group Activities-“Students of all grade levels show significant achievement gains across the curriculum when they are organized into collaborative groupings and projects. It works.”

• Partner/Buddy Reading-this is a strategy I used during my current action research as my students practiced their script parts. After listening to their partner each student was expected to provide verbal and written feedback.
• Literature Circles/Book Clubs-this is an area I’d like to expand on next year with my 3^rd graders. After explicitly modeling what a book group looks like, and each role within that group, I’d like my students to be able to choose their own book and lead the group without my monitoring.

Reading as Thinking

• Into-I feel as though I was intentional in preparing my students before reading during my action research cycle. I’d model and define what fluency strategy they were to practice and then check to be sure they were utilizing this through their reading as well. However, next year I want to be more intentional about doing this for all students, all the time.
• Through-to encourage thinking into, through, and beyond reading I plan to have a “readers are thinkers” bulletin board. Each time a new “reading as thinking” strategy (such as inferring or questioning) is introduced create a visual and definition and add it to the board.\
•  I’d also like to devote a section of this board to “’Insert’ Text codes” which will model how to take notes as they read.
• Beyond-to ensure that I’m encouraging thinking beyond the text I’d like to use a wider variety of KWL’s which will all my students to come back to their original thinking as they answer questions they had and add any new learning.

Representing-to-Learn-“Drawing, sketching, jotting, mapping,…are equally valuable-and when combined with words, in strategies like clustering, sematic mapping, or cartooning, they can powerfully leverage students’ thinking about the curriculum.”

• I love the idea of having students keep a log simply for their thoughts and responses. These logs can be utilized cross-curriculum and, with the use of prompts, it allows the student to take ownership and have choice over what they’re writing. Also, because it’s not graded they worry less about conventions of their writing can more easily represent their thoughts and learning. They’re also more likely to share their thoughts than if it were in a group discussion.
• I could easily see using this concept in my action research next year as I’m hoping to connect reading fluency to writing fluency.

Classroom Workshop-“Probably the single most important strategy in literacy education is the reading-writing workshop…It recognizes that kids need less telling and more showing, that they need more time doing literacy and less time hearing what reading and writing might be life if you ever did them.” 

• Individual conferences-I’d like to strive to include more one-on-one conference time next year. Many teachers says that a one-minute conversation with a student that is solely directed around their individual needs is much more powerful than hours of heterogeneous whole-group lessons.

Authentic Experiences-“To begin with, school itself isn’t ‘real,’ in the sent that schools are purposely separated from the rest of life…If we want to make education “real,” we have to somehow overcome that segregation, either by bringing bits of the world into schools or bringing the kids out into the world.”

• The text provides an example in which a unit of study about the habitat of earthworms is derived from the teacher’s observation of her student’s interest in them. This is something I’d love to be able to do next year. It is a 3^rd grade standard that the students understand the cycle of life, both for plants and animals. Typically 3^rd graders at Talahi get a crawfish to study and learn about. However, I’d like to gather some information about what the students are interested in and then try and create a unit of study around that plant or animal…it make be a stretch, but I feel it’d make their learning more motivated.

Reflective Assessment

• In conjunction with the one-to-one conferences as noted above, I’d like to become more of a “kid-watcher.” In the past, I’ve kept anecdotal records of what my students were doing and saying during Daily 5 read-to-self time. However, I’d like to come up a with system to do this more intentionally during various times throughout the day. I think these notes would speak volumes about my student’s academic, and social, abilities and would be a great support to a rubric grade.
•  I began dabbling in having my students reflect on their own work and progress during my action research project. I was very impressed with how seriously they took it and how it helped with their growth as they reflected on strengths and weaknesses. This is an area I’d like to continue to improve in next year.

Integrative Units

•  I’d be very interested in including more thematic units into my teaching next year. I see the many benefits in having the cohesion from one content area to the next but am also a little apprehensive as it seems very time-consuming to recreate entire units in multiple content areas. I think it’d be helpful to gather a team of teachers who work on the thematic unit together, making it seem less daunting.

Overall, it was clear to me that each of these structures has some commonalities: student choice, authenticity, accountability and leadership. All of these qualities represent that of a constructivist classroom in which the students are “taking control” of their own learning. I believe each of these best practices has a spot in my future teaching and I look forward to implementing them, in baby steps, this next school year!