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Professional development activities that have proven effective will be included in Develop Your Staff. Your contributions are welcome. Send them to principal@osu.edu. Please indicate if we may use your name in the “contributor” credits.
Professional Excellence: Leave No Teacher Behind
In Mansfield City Schools, staff development is not an event. It’s a way of life. Nowhere is this more apparent than the Literacy Collaborative, which places Literacy Coordinators directly in the elementary schools as teachers and coaches.
Hedges Elementary School, a pioneer of Mansfield’s Literacy Collaborative, serves as home base for Pat Gordon, Literacy Collaborative District Trainer. For specific workshops, teachers gather in Hedges’ Staff Development Center as part of an ongoing learning community.
Currently, Literacy Coordinators are helping teachers increase capacity to look at student performance in reading and writing. The goal is to determine, on a continuum from dependence to independence, how much teacher support students need.
According to Pat Gordon, one way Coordinators use this information is to help teachers understand individual student performance levels as they plan lessons.
To give students appropriate teacher support, attention to individual levels is stressed for group as well as individual reading and writing activities. At Hedges, teachers learn about and see model teaching in four levels of support:
- High Teacher Support. Reading aloud, shared writing
- Lower Teacher Support. Shared reading, interactive writing
- Still Lower Teacher Support. Grouped guided reading, guided writing
- Lowest Teacher Support. Independent reading and writing
From Systems for Change in Literacy Education, a favorite resource for teaching adult learners, comes a coaching guide for Interactive Writing lessons:
Scale for Analysis of Interactive Writing
Is the teacher helping the students
- Establish a purpose for writing, and plan the text?
- Decide on the precise text appropriate to meaning, audience, and purpose?
- Write the text, giving attention to how print works?
- Write the words of the text, giving attention to strategies for spelling?
- Make connections between reading and writing?
Headed by these questions, a coaching rubric looks at the five main components of Interactive Writing:
- Identifying a Text: Grows out of children’s real experiences, and presents opportunities to connect purpose, audience, and layout.
- Preparing to Write: Teacher helps students generate possible language from which children can draw during composition, and organize ideas into a plan to guide the composition.
- Composing the Text: Teacher helps students think about content and language; and selecting words for meaning that conveys the message, will be readable, and will connect to other books and writing with which children are familiar.
- Writing (Encoding) the Text: Teacher helps students generate and negotiate alternative words, phrases, and sentences, consider layout and punctuation, and shift continuously back to message.
- Extending the Text: Teacher helps students reread to reflect on audience and purpose; evaluate choice of words, layout, and organization; locate familiar words, letter-sound relationships and visual (spelling) patterns.
Helping every teacher succeed translates into gains for students. Gains are made even in Kindergarten, where in the first 9 weeks students demonstrate major progress in learning letters, shared reading, and interactive writing. As one teacher noted, “Gains in the first 9 weeks make the whole year look different.”
From Systems for Change in Literacy Education, Lyons and Pinnell, pp. 126-128.
