For this week's final post, I chose to read and discuss Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey's article entitled, "Implementing a Schoolwide Literacy Framework; Improving Achievement in an Urban Elementary School." Because the assigned reading for the class this semester has primarily focused on teaching at the high school level, I thought it would be interesting to delve into something somewhat different, i.e. an article regarding urban elementary schools. I was surprised, however, while I was reading the article, to discover that much of the teaching and learning techniques being implemented at the secondary level are not completely foreign at the elementary level, and that just because the students may not be engaged in as advance learning, the teachers and administrators still value student success in the classroom as extremely significant. I also found it interesting that the authors noted how despite the fact that innovations are everywhere, few are actually being implemented consistently across grades and teachers, and that we do not need more prescriptive, scripted curriculum or instruction, but instead, that we need more precision in our teaching. This stood out to me as a key point because all semester long we have read articles about various innovative theories, and it is difficult for me to comprehend the reasons behind the lack of connection between an idea and its actuality. For this reason, Fisher and Frey's article was extremely fascinating for me to read.
It was truly incredible to learn more about how Rosa Parks Community School developed a literacy framework that was implemented school-wide and provided teachers with an opportunity to focus their teaching, rather than script it, and that this resulted in students who read, write, and think at impressive levels. I thought that the committee's four core beliefs about literacy--learning is social, conversations are critical for learning, reading, writing, and oral instruction must be integrated, and learners require gradual release in responsibility--were not only accurate, but also informative to a new teacher such as myself. I especially found the section on how learners require a gradual increase in responsibility to be illustrative of some of the teaching principles I picked up during the course of the semester. The teachers in our Secondary English sub-group would regularly reference the notion of "gradual release" for their students, a term I had really never heard before joint this class. As time went on, however, I began to understand this concept more and more, including why it is important in the first place and how to accomplish this task effectively. By the time we were writing our final lesson plan as a group, I was comfortable with the ways in which we could incorporate this process into our lesson and presentation.
It was truly incredible to learn more about how Rosa Parks Community School developed a literacy framework that was implemented school-wide and provided teachers with an opportunity to focus their teaching, rather than script it, and that this resulted in students who read, write, and think at impressive levels. I thought that the committee's four core beliefs about literacy--learning is social, conversations are critical for learning, reading, writing, and oral instruction must be integrated, and learners require gradual release in responsibility--were not only accurate, but also informative to a new teacher such as myself. I especially found the section on how learners require a gradual increase in responsibility to be illustrative of some of the teaching principles I picked up during the course of the semester. The teachers in our Secondary English sub-group would regularly reference the notion of "gradual release" for their students, a term I had really never heard before joint this class. As time went on, however, I began to understand this concept more and more, including why it is important in the first place and how to accomplish this task effectively. By the time we were writing our final lesson plan as a group, I was comfortable with the ways in which we could incorporate this process into our lesson and presentation.
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