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By: Peter Carlisle Green Valley Elementary. 2014-15 Great Habits Great Readers Professional Development Unit. During the course of this PDU, what three instructional strategies did I implement? What strategy worked best? Why?.
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By: Peter Carlisle Green Valley Elementary 2014-15Great Habits Great ReadersProfessional Development Unit
During the course of this PDU, what three instructional strategies did I implement? What strategy worked best? Why? During the Great Habits Great Readers PDU, I focused on three strategies. • The first strategy I implemented was flexible grouping based on good assessment data. I also believe this was the most effective strategy. I started out with ‘quantity’ of data over ‘quality’ of data, but found my system too cumbersome to give me useful feedback. I refined the system and ended up with weekly assessments that I would grade on the weekends and would inform my flexible grouping for the next week. • The second strategy I implemented was to increase independent practice time in my daily lessons. I found that I was constantly running out of time for independent practice. I would spend too much time on the “I do” part of lessons, and I did not want to skip the “We do”, which is where I had students practice with shoulder partners. The result was that I often ran out of time before students had time for independent practice. • My third strategy was to make my small group instruction more consistent and effective by using a new template for planning. I was initially kind of ‘winging’ it with my small group instruction, so this seemed like a good way to make my small groups more consistent and effective. The template my school used was specific to reading and writing, so I needed to adapt it to math. The results were as expected. The extra time spent planning was not wasted.
How did I apply the PDU strategies in my classroom/practice? (examples) Who did I collaborate with during the PDU? Discuss the ways you collaborated while implementing the PDU strategies. • I collaborated with my mentor and planning partner Aileen Giardina in figuring out a better system for collecting data to inform flexible grouping. We built the new system together based on the kind of data we wanted to collect. We had both found the first system too much to keep up with and as it wasn’t always clear what standards grades were related to, it was of limited use in guiding instruction. The system we devised together addressed these problems. • In my focus on increasing independent practice time, I collaborated with my teammates Ana Frias and Grant Alderman. I explained my issue to them, and they gave me the ideas to set clear time goals in my lesson plans and set alarms to keep me on schedule. • In my small group planning, I again collaborated with my mentor Aileen Giardina. It seemed she had a much more effective system in place for small group instruction. She shared with me how she planned her small group lessons, and that is the system I adopted.
What did I learn to do differently as a result of the PDU and strategy implementation in my classroom or in my practice? • I learned to pace my lessons more effectively so as to maximize the time students had for independent practice. • I learned to design and use more effective, focused data collection systems. • I learned to use a template to plan a more effective small group lessons.
Why is this PDU action research process important to my students learning and to my growth as a professional? • In any field, it is inadvisable to ‘settle’ for ‘good enough’. As a professional we owe it to ourselves and our colleagues to always strive for more, to always try to grow and do better. This is especially the case for teachers, because it is not just us and our colleagues depending on this drive to do better, but the future success and achievement of our students. We carry a great social obligation, a duty to help our students reach their greatest potentials and be successful in their lives. Not only do we teach them, but we also must be examples to them. They should see us striving to do better for them.
PDU Data AnalysisReflecting on the data you have collected, how did this experience impact instruction, progress monitoring, student performance, and your own practice? • As a former math fellow, I came from a back ground of implementing daily exit tickets, regular assessments, and constantly analyzing this data to improve instruction, move kids to more appropriate groups, and so on. But this year, I was able to refine this practice to be more appropriate to the whole-group classroom setting. For example, I found daily exit tickets to be too much to maintain, and even when I did, I wasn’t tying the exit tickets to specific standard, so the data was not very useful. I became more intentional, giving weekly quizzes tied to specific standards. I would grade these on weekends and immediately note trends in misunderstandings that I saw, and used these to form my flexible groups each week. The new systems of data collection I devised were enormously helpful and definitely helped make me a more effective teacher.
How will I apply my new learning in the future to further my practice? What are my next steps? First, and most obviously, I will have my refined systems already in place at the start of next year. I won’t have to be starting from scratch, though I will still be constantly looking for ways to improve my practice. Secondly, I found Great Habits Great Readers to be a tremendous resource, even though I am a math teacher. As a school, we established the ‘habits of good discussion’ throughout the school, and it proved to be a valuable tool in instruction and class discussions. As with all the teaching books I have been using and found effective, I will no doubt be revisiting GHGR in the future to further refine my strategies, or just remind myself of strategies that were effective but that I fell out of the habit of using.
GHGR Artifact #1DATA! Peter Carlisle
4 Components of Effective Data Assessment – You must have well designed assessments aligned to standards. Analysis – You must have an effective means of analysis in place that provides good, deep data that can be used to group students. Action – Meaningful action must follow analysis of the data. Systems – Efficient systems in place help the cycle of assessment, analysis, and action run smoothly.
My First Systems • Inefficient (more work) • daily exit tickets • lost instruction time • Poor data • no specific data on misunderstandings • useless for making small groups • of no use to students • basically just told me how effective I was each day
New and Improved System • Weekly quizzes based on standards • Good Data! • tied to specific standards • Good System • I grade on the weekend and note trends in misunderstandings • I build Monday’s small groups around misunderstandings (benefits students) • quality over quantity
GHGR PDU ARTIFACT #2 By Peter Carlisle
Whole Group Focus • For my whole group focus, I chose increasing independent practice time within each whole-group lesson. • Need: While I was getting through lessons and always incorporating shoulder-partner work, I realized I was usually running out of time before students had the opportunity to practice the new skills independently.
Strategy Rather than just include “I do”, “We do”, and “You do” sections in my lesson plans, I included specific timeframes with each section. To ensure that I adhered to the time frames, I set alarms to signal the end of each section on a classroom timer. Excerpts below: I DO (10 minutes @ 9:45): I demonstrate multiplying using a splitting table. WE DO: (10 minutes @ 9:55) We do two sample problems together. YOU DO: (10 minutes @ 10:05) Students have independent practice time.
Conclusion While initially I had trouble sticking to the times, the regularity of the alarms helped me adapt to the new system. I was successful in giving my students independent practice time with every lesson, and have even reached the point where I do not need the alarms anymore. Students now reliably have at least 5 and as much as 10 minutes of independent practice time in every lesson.
PDU ARTIFACT 3: Small Group Lesson Plan For my third artifact, I started with a standardized small group lesson plan used by my school. It was designed for a reading lesson, so I had to adapt it to mathematics. The implementation helped make my small group lessons more consistent and effective. GHGR influenced my lesson plan by the inclusion of many discussion questions. For each lesson, I put considerable thought into the discussion that I want to take place. How can I ask the questions to spur the discussion I hope to see?
PDU Artifact #3: Small Group Plan Small Group Math Objective: Students will create ‘fraction strips’ by cutting equal length strips of different colors into halves (red), fourths (light blue), and eighths (purple) that they can use to compare to the whole (dark blue). Students will know how to use their fraction strips to find basic equivalent fractions. Hook: We’ve been talking a lot about fractions, but what are they really? What is a fraction? How can we understand this on a deeper level?
Exit Ticket • What support(s) do you need to further your professional growth in future PDUs? • I hope to see PDUS offered that can provided immediately useful strategies that can be taken into the classroom and are highly effective. • 2 things that you took away from the PDU this year • The importance of effective discussion to instruction. • The importance of effective data systems • 1 piece of constructive criticism • None occurs to me at this time. I found this to be an effective and useful PDU!
