Notes
I started the session by asking her how things were going with her class. She said she was feeling defeated when it comes to teaching writing to her students. We took some time to discuss how much automony she has with what she is teaching and what was making her feel that way. She shared that their writing materials are part of the Benchmark Advance ELA program and that it doesn’t give much direction for teaching writing. She also shared that her two other teammates are braind new to teaching fifth grade. She is just in her 2nd year of teaching and is the one with them ost experience at that grade.
The bulk of our time was spent nailing down her goal. She has chosen to do vocabulary as her goal. We had been emailing about what that could look like over the last couple weeks. She is used to standards based grading and using scales. As we communicated, I struggled to wrap my head around how she was going to quantify the data. After she showed me how she assesses, we were able to talk about what that might look like with a cumulative final assessment. She is going to create a pretest and then use it as a post test. For the in between times, she will just use weekly check-ins to see if they are applying what they are using and also using context clues to help them. I encouraged her to peek ahead to the vocabulary module. She also shared about what she had learned in class with the “Kid Talk” lesson the teachers shared. We discussed the acronym POSS’M and the importance of Lexical Quality for learning words that deserve to have that much attention given to them (tier 2).
The next time we meet, we will be discussing if she met her 1/4 goal.