Notes
V Step:
Mary and I shared information about our backgrounds and philosophy of teaching. We agreed that middle school teachers have a special interest in supporting the developmental characteristics of their students; Mary loves working at this age level and works hard to support the diverse learners in her school.
Mary provides EL services to students in grades 6, 7 and 8 at two schools each day. She meets with her student five days each work to provide services. Mary has extensive background knowledge and experience in literacy instruction. Formerly, she taught elementary grades, was a reading interventionist, and consulted for the Topeka district during Covid.
The coursework serves as a review for her, and she appreciates the depth of course content. She is concerned that some application assignments may be difficult to address in her role and context; we agreed to discuss and troubleshoot if needed through module completion.
E Step –
Mary uses Vista Bridges as a curriculum and primary resources to support her students’ language acquisition. We addressed her problem of practice. Mary would like to work on writing skill development to support more authentic syntax and vocabulary connections to the grade level curriculum.
We discussed several options in developing a goal and in selecting baseline data. We agreed that she would pretest seven students who are moderately proficient in English; we will go over the data to determine sentence completion and syntax baselines. Mary will send me student copies so that I can also score them prior to our next meeting.
We also discussed possible instructional tools as her current program is not sufficient. We explored her potential sue of sentence frames, cognate instruction and SIM Fundamentals of Sentence Writing. I will send her information on the SIM strategy this week. We will decide on the approach at our next meeting.
Mary lives on a family compound. Her mother is 91 and lives in the house next door… we shared our parent stories about caretaking.