Juanita

 A enjoys reading very much and reads regularly at home.  She scored a 91 on reading fluency and was in the partial retelling stage, so we will move down to a third grade level passage next time.

We will have her read the expository piece “Wool: From Sheep to You”.  She needs help with ending sentences at the period, with a pause to make the story easier for the audience to follow.  I would like to see if slowing down her reading with an easier passage would help the flow of her reading. This would also help her comprehension.

Confidence and Learning

It has been enlightening and comforting to learn about how math and emotions are tied together. I have always liked math and done fine with it in school so it is not something I learned about through personal experience. Well, not exactly. Robin said that whenever she tells people she is a math teacher she gets one of two responses every time. I hadn't noticed that before, but once that seed was planted, I started thinking about it and it is totally true. It is the only (almost, and I will get to that later) subject where people always either like it or dislike it.

I see the importance of finding out how students feel about math when you are trying to figure out how you can help them.  Especially students who seem to have given up. If they have negative, hopeless and incompetent feelings about their ability to succeed, they really are doomed. Lack of confidence is absolutely detrimental to learning. I can relate this to my ongoing and worsening feelings about my ability to succeed in the technical part of this program. The lack of confidence has somehow crept in and I almost think that I will never figure it all out. The problem becomes even bigger when students keep slipping further and further behind. It is this level or type of stress that I believe Robin is talking about when she says students need to have some confidence in order to allow their brains work to learn what is necessary to move forward. They need encouragement and help from their classmates, which seems like quite a challenge for teachers to motivate teenagers to do.

We also discussed the "learning tension" that forces students to think in ways that facilitate real learning. It is a disservice to children to not let them struggle at all. This applies to everything, not just math. They need to have some learning tension, but not so much that the stress turns off their brains to new information. Groupworthy tasks can build confidence in learners. They are difficult and time-consuming to plan. They take a lot of time to do well, but I believe the benefits to students are worth it. 

We discussed several ways to plan and execute groupworthy tasks in math, but I still have questions about how to do this successfully on an ongoing basis with all children

Writing Conferences

Writing conferences are an excellent way to teach and assess writing. My dyad teacher loves them and uses them often. Chapter 9 in Routman was helpful in blending my understanding of of this concept, what I have observed so far and how I will apply it for the benefit of students. The more I learn about assessing, the more concerned I become about having the time to do it well. The benefits of using Whole Class Share as a Venue in Which to Teach really caught my attention because it can address so many things at once. The whole-class share, where one student reads what he/she has written and the rest of the class listens for various elements as instructed by the teacher, keeps everyone's attention because they all have roles. The teacher can assess the audience by their contributions, while assessing the reader's writing at the same time. Another advantage is that everyone gets to learn from each others' comments about others' writing. Their input also keeps students involved which is great for classroom management. I think the Whole Class Share for writing should be used in every grade. It relates to the real world where employers want people to collaborate with each other to improve the quality of the end-product. I am sure it also helps with interpersonal relationships. I look forward to trying it.