Adapting Curriculum

Standards and Curriculum Video

Minneapolis Public Schools gives schools a curriculum to follow for our literacy instruction. Often times the curriculum that is given feels frustrating when planning because the way the standards are told to be taught don’t take into account student experiences, language needs, and the way my students learn. Therefore, when lesson planning and enacting lessons, I focus on using the curriculum as a skeleton while inputting what I know about my students and skills outside of the standards that need to be worked on. This video shows what students are doing after I have adapted the curriculum to still meet the standards. The standards that students are working on in this video are 5.1.6.6 (describe how a narrator’s or speakers’ point of view influences how events are described) and 5.8.1.1. (engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions). The learning objectives coinciding with these standards was, “With a small group of peers, I can identify examples of memoir characteristics in ‘Reverend Abbott and Those Bloodshot Eyes’ by Walter Dean Meyers” and “I can discuss a short story with a small group of peers”.

The first adaptation that was made was the text that was read. The curriculum instructed teachers to read ‘Reverend Abbott and Those Bloodshot Eyes’. However, taking into account our students developmental age and experiences, that piece of text had more to do with a child’s experience with a Reverend and “Boot Ladies” among other concepts that students did not have relatable experiences with. As can be seen in the video, Ingrid and Carla are discussing another chosen text “Why I Never Ran Away from Home”. This text is more developmentally appropriate and relatable to students’ lives. As shown at 1:25 Carla makes a connection to the text based on something she did over Halloween and at 2:21 Ingrid makes a connection to her cousin. Both these pieces of thinking show me that the text is relatable to personal experiences which makes for productive readings.

According to Wolf, Crosson, and Resnick in “Classroom Talk for Rigorous Reading Comprehension Instruction”, collaborative dialogue between peers is necessary to increase comprehension. Furthermore, close reading strategies, such as annotations, increase that comprehension. The curriculum instructed students to independently annotate the piece of text and then have a discussion with the teacher about the characteristics of a memoir. However, I adapted that to have students annotate together and verbalize their thinking as they annotated. Wolf, Crosson, and Resnick cite a study by Brown et al. (1993) that their “...study reported that use of collaborative dialogue during the reading comprehension lessons was positively associated with the students’ gains in building knowledge and comprehension” (pg. 2). Based on this, I wanted to infuse student led discussion in every component in the lesson. While this is not necessarily a student led questioning of the text as the study likely anticipated, it encourages students to verbalize their annotations together and use accountable talk to justify and show their listening skills when listening to their partner. For example, in the video at 3:16 Carla uses the accountable sentence stem “Can you tell me more?” to encourage Ingrid to justify her answer. Just this piece of justification between students can increase comprehension according to the piece of research by Brown. By adapting the curriculum in this way, I was able to hit the standard of annotating while infusing more collaborative talk.

Third, the theory on reciprocal teaching states that students should become the leaders and teachers in small group reading and the discussions should be student led. Instructional approaches like these, according to Wolf, Crosson, and Resnick, “...acknowledge that reading comprehension is a collaborative process where the teacher and students co-construct meaning from the text” (pg. 3). The curriculum did not provide any room for this while students were doing their annotations and discussing the text. Therefore, I decided to add it in to boost student based discussions and comprehension. As can be seen in the video, I am not present in order to keep the activity student led. At 0:17 you can see Carla and Ingrid deciding on their own who is going to talk and annotate next rather than me telling them who should go first. This gives students more autonomy. The collaboration portion between students and teachers that Wolf, Crosson, and Resnick refer to happens at the end of the lesson where students share their ideas with me.

The curriculum also had students (independently) “annotate the text” without providing any scaffolds for what this could look like. As can be seen in the video, around 0:39 (and other places), Carla and Ingrid have a blue annotation bookmark that is guiding their annotations. They are putting “!” when something surprises them, a star for an important event (key characteristic of a memoir) and underlining and commenting on feelings (another key characteristic of a memoir). This scaffold gives them a place to start with how to record their thinking. Therefore, they are still meeting the curriculum expectations for annotating. This also provides a scaffold for finding important parts of a memoir (learning objective). They are able to use the annotation bookmark and find the important events and feelings and then go back and write about it.

While this video only shows a short piece of this lesson, I hope to improve on self-guided discussions. Carla and Ingrid discussed their annotations well but according to the research cited above, they should be leading own discussion circles with more peers. The video showed only two students interacting. Therefore, when the curriculum has students doing independent work with text or teach led work, I am going to strive to incorporate more student based discussions within the curriculum.

Wolf, Mikyung Kim, Crosson, Amy,  and Resnick, Lauren. “CLassroom Talk for Rigorous Reading

Comprehension Instruction”.  American Educational Research. 2004.

Procedures

Procedures Video

Procedures are a critical component of ensuring students have consistency, understand how our routines work and translate into efficiency within the classroom. According to Harry Wong’s theory of classroom management, “Ineffective teachers begin the first day of school attempting to teach a subject and spend the rest of the school year running after the students. Effective teachers spend most of the first two weeks of the school year teaching students to follow classroom procedures” (The First Days of School). Therefore, I spent a lot of time teaching students effective turn and talk procedures, using agree/disagree signals, calling attention from a count down from 5, and silent signals (for the bathroom, drink of water, tissue, and pencil) the first few weeks of school. This video shows how these procedures have culminated after two months of repetition. According to Harry Wong’s research in effective classroom management, teachers should use a three-step approach for teaching classroom procedures. This includes explaining, rehearsing, and reinforcing (repetition) until students have it be a habit or routine (The First Days of School). Therefore, this video shows this in practice after being on stage three of his approach.

During morning meeting, students have incorporated 4 main procedures. First, students do a turn and talk. When this was first taught, I held students accountable to turning their bodies, facing their partners, looking them in the eye, and talking to them in order to teach social skills. Second, I wanted to ensure students were talking about the topic and not something completely off topic. This was modeled by showing that we can ask questions about the topic that might get us off topic but we cannot talk about anything completely off topic. The video shows that the majority of the class is doing this. At 1:20 you can see the girls in the front turning their bodies and engaging in conversation and the boys in the back turning their bodies and talking. However, three of the boys in the back of the room were not facing each other but still engaging in a conversation. I think for the small percentage of my class who need to work on the actions of the procedure, I will need to work on Wong’s second step of rehearsing under my supervision. The other part of the turn and talk (ensuring students are talking about the topic) is an area I still need to work on. When I am engaging in a turn and talk with students, it is difficult for me to be sure that 100% of students are on topic. Therefore, a strategy I might use for next time during the share is to have students share what their partner said so they are listening to each other and staying on topic.

The second procedure I implemented from the first day is an attention getter. I do a countdown from 5 to get students’ attention. The expectation is that by the time I reach 1, all students have their voices off, their bodies are frozen, and eyes are on me. At 2:45 you can see me doing the countdown. As I start on 5, students are already turning their bodies to face me, their voices are turning off, and their bodies are frozen. As I continue to talk some students are looking elsewhere but may still be engaged in what I am saying. I anticipate this being in Wong’s third step of reinforcing. Keeping eye contact with the speaker even after the countdown from 5 is important to show listening skills. Therefore, it is something I will continue to reteach, rehearse, and practice until it becomes routine. In order to reteach “eyes on me” I can connect a lesson we have already done in Second-Step about what active listening looks like to how students are showing me that they are listening with eye contact. I can have an accountability slip where they check-mark the amount of times a day they are not only keeping their eyes on me, but their eyes on a speaker in general.

The third procedure this video highlighted is using agree/disagree signals. Rather than yelling out that something excited them or they don’t like a certain food, students are encouraged to use silent signals. This also shows that they are actively listening since they have to form opinions based on what someone else said. Around 2:50 you can see me prepping the class to use silent signals when others are sharing. At the beginning, the majority of the students were doing the silent signal. Near the end, nearly no one was doing it anymore. Silent signals is in stage two of Wong’s three step approach for teaching classroom procedures. It is a procedure that needs to be rehearsed and practiced underneath my supervision. Students still need to be reminded to use it (2:50) and 100% of students are not consistently using it. In order to revise this procedure, I will continue to remind students to use silent signals at the beginning of something I want them to be actively listening to. In the beginning, if I don’t see 100% of students showing a silent signal, I will have the class retry the procedure until it becomes innate to doing it. I can also use an accountability buddy system by assigning each student a buddy and that buddy is responsible for making sure their partner is giving a silent signal.

The last procedure that was slightly evident in the video was silent hand signals for important things that might be common throughout the day (bathroom, water, tissue, and pencil). At 1:41 you can see the student is turning and talking to me give a two fingers crossed sign to me even though he is talking to me. He knew to use a silent signal to ask me to go to the bathroom rather than saying it outloud. While this video shows limited evidence of this procedure, it is something I continually work on throughout the day. 60% of my class is able to use the silent signals and patiently wait until I give them a nod yes or no for what they need. There is still 40% of the class that is in stage two of rehearsing and part of stage one of explaining. To reteach this procedure with 40% of those students, I will explain why we use silent signals (provides a flow in the classroom, no interruptions, and efficiency). Once they understand, every time they verbally ask me to do one of those procedures I will not respond until they show me a silent signal. That way, under my supervision (phase two/rehearse) it will eventually become routine.

Analyzing Student Learning

Student Work (ignore the number line on the bottom, that is part of the second question not analyzed with this learning objective and data)

The rubric provides a guideline for categorizing student mastery. If students scored a 4, they were able to correctly order all 5 fractions from least to greatest and show correct reasoning through a strategy that they were comfortable using. If students scored a 3 it could mean two things. Either students misplaced one fraction (but knew how to correctly order all the other fractions from least to greatest) or students correctly ordered 3 fractions but mixed up the other 2 fractions. If students scored a 2 it meant that they could only correctly order two of the fractions but mixed up the other three fractions and could not put them in the correct order in relation to the other three fractions. If students scored a 1 it meant that they could possibly identify the largest or smallest fraction but could not order the rest of the fractions or they could not correctly order any of the fractions.

The data shows that over half the class is correctly able to show a strategy to order all 5 of the fractions from least to greatest. Looking at Andy’s work which is very similar to the other students who scored a 4 on the rubric, they understood three big ideas that helped them place the fractions in correct order. First, looking at Andy’s work, he knows that whenever you have 1 out of a certain number  (such as ¼), it will be less than only having one left (such as ⅞). Therefore, he knew that ¼ and ⅕ had to come before ⅞ and 8/9. Second, he understood that fourths were larger than than fifths so when you eat 1 out of 5 pieces, you are eating a smaller amount. That thinking is shown through his visual representation when he adds dotted lines to the fifths representation to turn it into fourths and writes “smaller” to show that a fifth is smaller than a fourth. Third, he was able to successfully convert the improper fraction into a mixed number and then understand that half is bigger than the fifth and fourth but less than the ⅞ and 8/9. Both the data and student work show that over half of the class is able to do these three items to show their thinking.

When looking at the data, it looks like at first glance 18% of the class is having trouble with ordering one or two fractions. However, when looking closer at student work, there is a consistent misconception. Students did not understand how to convert an improper fraction into a mixed number or didn’t understand what the improper fraction meant. All of the students made the same error and had the same misconception that 39/6 was the largest because of the 39 on the top. This can be seen in Maggie’s work. To clarify this misunderstanding, I will have these students draw out what 39 sixths looks like with pre-drawn bars cut into six pieces to save time. This will translate into understanding that this fraction really represents 6 and 3/6 and is not the largest number when compared to the other drawings.

Last, when looking at the data that shows rubric scores at a 1, it looks like over 20% of students cannot order fractions at all. However, when digging deeper nearly all the students had a conceptual understanding of whether ¼ vs. ⅕ was larger and ⅞ vs. 8/9 using the same reasoning as above. However, when it came to comparing ¼ and ⅕ to ⅞ and 8/9 students did not know which one should go first or last. They did not have an understanding that ⅞ and 8/9 is closer to one whole so it is larger than ¼ and ⅕ which is just one piece out of a whole. They also did not have an understanding what 39/6 represented. Most of them placed this fraction in random spots but nearly all of them consistently put ¼ after ⅕ and 8/9 after ⅞. To address this common error I will have students draw out each of the fractions to visually see the difference between taking only one piece out of a whole vs. only having one piece left. You can see in Irvin’s work that he was not making connections across the fractions but just for the fractions that look similar (¼ and ⅕   ⅞ and 8/9). Another strategy is to use paper strips to have students engage with the fractions in a hands on way to see what each of the fractions look like. I would have these students draw out 39 sixths as well, similar to the group of students scoring a 3 from the rubric. After the visual representations, for the group scoring a 3 on the rubric, I will hand out two student copies of correctly placing a different improper fraction in order and one that incorrectly places it. I will have students work in pairs to justify which paper was correct and which paper was incorrect. I will do the same for the group scoring 1’s on the rubric but orient it more towards misplacing the 1 out of a number and having only one piece left out of a whole.

The last noticing from the data was that 2 of my ESL students who scored a 1 on the rubric scored a 1 due to placing the fractions from greatest to least (in addition to not knowing what to do with the 39/6). These students might need additional support with language of “greatest” and “least” to understand how to order in that direction.

Visuals

Using VIsuals in the Classroom

One important learning objective in reader’s workshop for fifth graders is the ability to make connections to activate background knowledge before reading and during reading a text. There are three main types of connections students should be making in order to garner the highest level of thinking while reading. They should be making text to text, text to self and text to world connections. Last year students would regurgitate the types of connections they should be making but had a difficult time applying it to their own text. This year, I increased the amount of visuals while teaching this strategy in order to give students the optimal amount of support to apply it independently. In order for my visuals to support all learners, I try to have a combination of pictures, text and sentence starters. The goal is to have students identify the correct connection and apply it to a text.

The first set of visuals I used are the visuals on the promethean board alongside hand signals. The text to self visual on the promethean board shows a picture of a book with an arrow pointing to a child. I covered up the text surrounding it and had students turn and talk about their best guess about what a text to self connection might mean based on the words and the visual. My EL learners (and really generally all my learners) explained to me that they knew text to self connections meant that there is something in the book that reminds them of them because the picture was pointing from a book to a person. This informally showed me that the picture assisted them in understanding what this meant. The second visual I used was the text to text connection with a book pointing to another book. I repeated the same process and my students were able to easily make the connection that when the book was pointing to another book, there was something in common between two books. The third visual I used on the promethean board was the text to world visual. Using the same process, students were able to figure out that there was something in the book that related to the globe or world around them. The next step was aiding them in understanding what a connection actually is rather than having them just know the types of connections that can be made.

In order to understand what a connection is, we used hand signals. I showed them making a circle with my index finger and thumb with both hands and connecting them to understand what a connection is. I asked leading questions to help them use this visual to understand what a connection is. “What do you notice about my two hands are doing?” Students responded with “Both hands are coming together. Both hands are connecting together.” This led us to understand that a connection is when two things come together and there might be a relationship between the two (a word we have been working on in class). Doing a physical visual rather than just something on the board made it a little more hands on for students to understand.

Now that students were able to use visuals on the board and physical hand actions to understand what connections are and the different types of connections, I introduced a new visual to help students apply the strategy on their own. The third visual was the “Making Connections” anchor chart. This visual had a combination of images and sentence starters. Something that was really difficult for students last year was understanding how to start sentences to make connections. For example, if they knew that there was something related between their life and the text, they would often just say something like “I ride a bike” rather than “This is like my life because I also like to ride bikes in the summer”. The idea behind this visual was to give students a push on creating complete sentences with a little more complexity to their ideas. In this way, the image supported the sentence starters. As I modeled a read-aloud, I used this anchor chart to show students how to make effective connections. I paused during the reading and made my hand signal to show that I had a connection. I mentioned that there was something connected to the world from the book. I had a student come up and point to the anchor chart to show me where I could look. The student would point to the picture of the world and explain that there since I had a connection to the world around me, I had to use sentence starters from the globe section. Then I modeled using the sentence starter on the visual “This reminds me of when I watched…” to make my connection. This modeling helped students understand how to use and interact with the visual to make connections. Dan Meyers shows how visuals can aid a more inquiry based lesson in math (https://www.edutopia.org/visuals-math-curriculum) and the power of having students analyze pictures to deepen learning. This is the type of strategy I tried using in this reading lesson.

While independent reading, students were making connections in their “Connections Log”. There were three visuals on the top of their connections log to remind them of the connections they could make. They were encouraged to use that as well as the anchor chart posted in the room to make their connections. Looking at the connections log and exit slips, these visuals effectively supported students in making connections. The connection log shows that students were taking sentence starters from the anchor chart visual and applying them to their own connections. For example, the first piece of evidence shows a student using the sentence starter “This is like my own life because…” “This character reminds me of myself because…” “This reminds me of when I read a book…”. She was also successfully able to identify the correct connection she was making which shows me she used the anchor chart pictures to not only identify the connection but also use the sentence starters accompanied by the picture to apply her connection. The same is true for the other two students’ work.

The second piece of evidence that showed me the visuals aided students in making connections is the exit slip. Students were asked to make one connection with the class text we were reading (“Wonder”). Looking at the exit slips students were making a lot of text to text and text to self connections and specifically using sentence starters to aid them. They were also able to identify the correct type of connection (placing them in the correct box). The students’ work states “Auggie (a character in the book) is like Harry Potter in the book Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets because they both get bullied a little.” She clearly used a sentence starter from the visual and the picture on the anchor chart to help her identify a text to text connection. My data tracker shows that 16/20 of my students were able to identify and apply connections.

The visuals supported my EL learners (about 80% of my class) through pictures and sentence stems. Understanding what connections actually are through hand gestures supported my more hands on learners. However, I’m not convinced that the visuals helped push my advanced learners (or all my learners). Next time, I would add examples to the visuals to increase the depth and complexity to the connections. So rather than just “This is like my life because I ride a bike in the summers too” providing an example like “This is like my life because I ride a bike in the summers and it reminds me of the rush I feel when I get exercise, just like how Auggie felt excited when he rode his bike”. I would support this example with a visual of a person plus a sign that showed emotion and action to show that they can combine the two to make a more powerful connection.

Visuals on Flipchart/Smartboard

Visual on anchor chart

Evidence--Connection Log

Conferences

Conferences are coming up this Tuesday and Wednesday for Green students and the theme is goal setting. The first conference will be used to work actively with families to set goals together around math, reading, and language proficiency. Students will be actively involved in the process (as will families).  I plan on beginning conferences welcoming families to the classroom (not diving straight into data). Ultimately, I want to make sure the time together establishes a space to form relationships with families, is informative for where the child is academically and socially, and allows for a collaborative environment to set goals.  My hope is that the two goal setting sheets will advance this process.

The “Grade 5 Goal Setting Conferences-Green Central” artifact shows one strategy for beginning to set goals with families. The first part shows attendance which is important for families to see visually how often their child is attending school. This sets up a good time to discuss the importance of attending school, assess whether there are potential troubles with transportation that I can help support in, and a good space to generally talk about why attending school is important for the student at the conference. I imagine using this part of the sheet as a 5 minute discussion between me, families, and students.

The second part of this sheet shows data for reading, math, and English language proficiency. I would use this time to explain to both students and families what each of the data pieces tell us about the student’s proficiency in the core subjects. The document helps break down the different ways we monitor proficiency and visually shows students and families where we hope to have students in December, February, and end of the year with the goal of having students make 2 years growth. This part can become overwhelming and the explanation of all the tests can be monotonous. In order to decrease teacher talk during this time and not overwhelm families with pure data, I will explain the end of the year test (MCA) and the steps we are taking to reach proficiency through the other tests listed on the form.

The last part of the sheet touches on social/emotional strengths. This part was intentionally created with strengths listed rather than negative aspects (pays attention vs. has trouble focusing). This will allow space to discuss qualitative strengths rather than purely focusing on data. I will also ask students during the conference to self-assess themselves in this area in case I have missed anything.

Once families and students have an understanding of where the student is academically and socially/emotionally, we will collaboratively set goals. At this time we will utilize the other conference planning sheet below. Starting with strengths will help set the discussion in a way where we can utilize the strengths to set goals. This will be done collaboratively, with minimal talk on my part. I will open the space for students and families to list strengths and I will record them. Then we can go on to setting goals in math, literacy, and social/emotional. Again, this will be goals that families and students have so they will be leading most of this part of the conference. The next step is to create student, family, and teacher strategies to reach the goals. I will ask the student to lead the student portion, families to lead the family portion, and I will conclude with my strategies from a teacher perspective. This sheet is created with carbon copies so the families will be able to take a copy home with them to remember the goals we came up with.

These two goal setting sheets will set the foundation for ensuring families are plugged into the work that their students are doing and strategies to meet goals. The conference goal setting sheets provide a bridge between teacher led conferences and student/family led conferences. My goal is to have students ultimately leading their own conferences. This way of introducing families to quantitative and qualitative data will allow for all voices to be heard so that during the next conferences we can utilize these sheets to have students inform families on how they are progressing toward their goals. According to an article from Edutopia, there is evidence that student led conferences provides a sense of empowerment for students. I ultimately hope to lead conferences in this way (http://www.edutopia.org/practice/student-led-conferences-empowerment-and-ownership). The conference setting sheets will serve as a bridge to reach that goal.  I plan on using these sheets as I confer with students about their goals throughout the year ensuring that the two conference sheets have longer impact than just a one-time creation in a structured space.

Strengths
Goals	Math	Literacy/Language	Social/Other
Strategies to Meet Goals
Student Parent Teacher
Student Signature:                                            Parent Signature:                              Teacher Signature:

Grade 5 Goal Setting Conference - Green Central

ATTENDANCE

Days Enrolled	Percent Present	Days Absent	December 2016	February 2017	Attendance Goal
(MM)	(MM)	(MM)			95%

MATH

Assessment	Current Level	Considered Proficient	December 2016 Goal	February 2017 Goal	End of Year Goal Spring 2017	Considered Proficient
MCA	(MM) Spring 2016	350 Meets			(MM)	550 Meets
FAST	(MM) Fall 2016

READING

Assessment	Current Level	Considered Proficient	December 2016 Goal	February 2017 Goal	End of Year Goal Spring 2017	Considered Proficient
MCA	(MM) Spring 2016	450 Meets			(MM)	550 Meets
FAST	(MM) Fall 2016			(MM)	(MM)
F&P	(MM) Fall 2016	S	(MM)	(MM)	(MM)	U/V

ENGLISH LANGUAGE PROFICIENCY

Assessment	Native Language Equivalent	Present Level	End of Year Goal	Current Goal:
WIDA Speaking	6
WIDA Writing	6

Social/Emotional

Attends school every day On time to class Brings all materials Remains seated during class Completes class work Participates appropriately Communicates respectfully Helps others as needed Positive towards learning Pays attention, focus Completes homework Other: _____________________________ Other: _____________________________

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