Monday, June 30, 2008

PST - 5

Greetings: I hope your summer is going well. I apologize for posting a day late. A few Hiring updates. We are completed for now... We will have a number of new teachers in the building the building next year and some should be joining us during our PST. Steven Udolff - 8th Language Arts, Kelly Shipley and Robyn Sloan - Science, Jenny Petit - Social Studies, and Jill Fischaber - Orchestra. If you are able, complete Part 2 by this Thursday's meeting. Kathleen brought up a great point about SSR by reading ability. Unfortunately it is just not feasible given our current resources. SSR+ is really about geography and lockers for the foreseeable future. Adding a few sections of Advanced Science was tricky enough.

See you Thursday... comment away.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

PST-4

This week we begin reading I Read It, But I Don't Get It by Chris Tovani. For some of you this is a repeat and for others new. But... Literacy is the cornerstone of closing the achievement gap! At-risk kids tend to have first and foremost a reading gap, rather than an achievement gap.

Read through the first 4 chapters.

Post Away!

Saturday, June 14, 2008

PST -3

Wow. The Montano training concerning academic competence across the curriculum was fantastic. Altona's team included myself, Laurie, MaryEllen, Jenay, Jake (our new AP), Victor, and Josh. A great part of the week was learning new classroom instructional strategies (well, some new, some not so new). In short, the course was devoted to understanding and working with students that do not have Academic Language Skills. Those students may be ELLs, but they are also a large number of students that have moved through they system without learning that their Public Voice and Private Voice are different modalities of linguistics. We can argue about why students do not have either Academic Language or a Public Voice, or concentrate on what we are going to do about it. This PST is one part of the solution - identifying strategies that you will use on a routine basis to close the achievement gap, and how will Academic Labs function. In short - Academic Labs must be about ensuring Academic Competence. Think about that and we'll discuss on Tuesday's meeting. By the end of the week, you should have completed Instruction that Works for English Language Learners.

Comment away. For those of you that attended the Montano training, you may want to reflect during this round of posting as well.

Saturday, June 7, 2008

PST 2

Great meeting last week! There will be two posts before our next meeting. By our next meeting we will complete Classroom Instruction that works with English Language Learners. This week's reading and posting will cover chapters 4 - 9! We are into specific strategies. A few of my own aha moments thus far:

1. We need to identify students that are literate in their primary language versus those that are illiterate, or woefully behind. The degree of a student's literacy in their primary language drive the tactics required to work with an ELL student.
2. I just keep returning to the things we are doing well, particularly having specific objectives for each period of instruction.

This week a team from Altona is attending Dr. Montano's class. I will have a separate post on this next week as it will clarify our Academic Labs.

See you in a few, comment away!