Notes
Tim was taking the day off from school to get caught up on coursework. I posed a number of questions for conversation:
Tell me a bit about your students’ IEP goals. Do any of them have a literacy goals? He indicated that none of them had listeracty goals. In gifted the goals are around Critical and Creative Thinking.
Are you seeing literacy needs that show up repeatedly? Tim identified that he has been working with his third graders on writing stories. They are currently working on writing good beginnings. He sees a lot of beginnings like: Hi my name is ___ and I____.
I then asked Tim to walk me through the writing that his students do during the pre-algebra time, the book study time, and the passion project time. He indicated they really didn’t do much writing in those areas.
I asked if pre-algebra might be a natural place to build in some writing around explaining mathematical reasoning. Tim thought that could be a valid option.
In asking Tim, of all the things we discussed what was one thing he could realiztically cahnge in his classroom that would give students meaningful opportunities to use writing and he was able to identify a focus for professional learning that surrounded an area that he is working on with his 3rd grade gifted students.
We talked about some possible focus statements and then previewed the DREAM resource. We felt that this topic would fit beautifully and he was excited and thought his students would be as well.
We discussed collecting a baseline writing sample using a prompt that we could then analyze with a rubric the next time we are together.