Our first semester of two-way immersion is almost over. Since my last post we've had two more visits from Dr. Mercuri. She spent a half day with each grade level. Some big "illuminations" resulting from the meeting with each grade level:
1st grade: We really began to think long and hard about language objectives and how to craft them. We came to realize that it doesn't necessarily have to be a separate "self-contained" language objective for every daily class period. Instead, we learned that language objectives within a given content area can be longer-term (ie: weekly), but from this objective we should "unpack" daily, scaffolded, "bite-sized" daily objectives. For example, in a science unit on rocks, we might craft the sequence of language objectives something like this:
- Monday: Students will identify rocks with specific characteristics (ex: individual or groups of students have a few rocks and hold up rock(s) as teacher calls out characteristics, such as "smooth," "rough," "black," "shiny," etc) This is a LISTENING language objective--students don't yet have to produce language but they are listening and comprehending.
- Tuesday: Students will orally describe a rock. (ex: student has a particular rock and must orally describe it, perhaps using a sentence frame to support language use at the sentence level; "My rock is _______.") Students are producing language orally--this is a SPEAKING language objective. For beginning language learners we might only expect the use of one particular adjective.
- Wednesday: Students will write a sentence describing a rock. (ex: student does what he/she did yesterday, but this time in writing) This is a WRITING language objective--we might even use a more complex sentence frame today to encourage children to use more than one adjective in describing their rock: "My rock is _____ and _____.")
- Thursday: Students will compare 2 rocks. (ex: students work in bilingual pairs and orally complete the following sentence frames: Our rocks are similar because they both _________. Our rocks are different because one is ______ but the other is ________. Perhaps they could use a Venn Diagram to prepare for this more complex level of thinking and language production.)
So on and so forth...
I had a huge light go on for me--I realized that language objectives were tightly connected to different modes of thinking and different ways of visually organizing information. I began seeing how the same graphic organizers and sentence frames could be used across all content areas to promote high level thinking and explanations of such thinking. I immediately went to the Thinking Maps website (www.thinkingmaps.com), pulled out release TAKS tests from grades 3 - 6, etc. and began drafting a set of graphic organizers/thinking maps, accompanied by general sentence frames, that we could use to much more systematically and powerfully build comprehension, high-level thinking, and academic language production. For example, a simple Venn Diagram for comparing and contrasting has 2 sentence frames connected to it: ______ and _____ are similar because __________. ______ and ______ are different because ____________. This could be used in reading, writing, math, science, social studies, anywhere!
Here are some quick examples...
We now just need to translate into Spanish.
Kinder: The Kinder team had been experimenting with Preview-View-Review quite a bit and decided that instead of adding Preview-View-Review in their regular lesson plans, they'd create a document that just contained their P-V-R plans. It was obvious they were a little further along in this area than the other grade levels. Some great things kinder is doing to make P-V-R more powerful:
- posting same vocabulary words (in different languages) with the same visual in both the Spanish and English classrooms
- when content areas transfer to the partner teacher (every three weeks), teachers exchange anchor charts (ex: a reading workshop chart outlining what readers do and don't do during independent reading) so that the partner teachers can recreate them with the same visuals in the other language.
- every classroom has the same unit anchor chart (for example, during a unit on the 5 senses, each teacher posted the outline of a child on the inside of their classroom door with the title: How did I use my 5 senses today? or ¿Cómo usé mis 5 sentidos hoy? Teachers would give students a chance to review their learning each day (from either English or Spanish classes) and record its connection to the 5 senses using this ongoing anchor chart)
- Whole grade level team planning of P-V-R for the upcoming week
I'm going to stop and explain a little bit about the evolution of structured collaboration on our campus (as I think I've neglected to explain it here)--we've understood more and more clearly the importance of team planning in our model. Every grade level has 60 min of common conference time per day (in addition to about 110 min of personal planning time scattered throughout the week). The common conference times have some very specific objectives:
- Monday: Grade Level Team Meetings (facilitated by the grade level leader--agenda items can cover anything and everything. It's often about logistical things--field lessons, homework, upcoming events, etc--though 2 grade levels have often started spending about 15 min each week discussing a book they're all reading). Once every three weeks team leaders are expected to dedicate 15 - 20 min of this meeting to discussing students teachers are considering referring to the SAC (Student Assistance Committee--part of RTI). This is called Pre-SAC.
- Tuesday: Personal Planning (we try to leave Tuesday open as this is when we schedule SAC meetings, LPAC meetings for ELLs, etc. Lesson plans are always due Tuesday nights, so this, hopefully, gives teachers the chance to sometimes work on them during Tuesday conference.
- Wednesday: Same Language Partner Planning -- every grade level has 2 English teachers and 2 Spanish teachers. They divide the planning together. Let's say that for a given 3 week period Spanish teachers are teaching Reading Workshop and Math (instead of Writing Workshop & Our World--taught in English for those same 3 weeks). Every teacher also teaches Language and Word Study every day, so that children get this in both languages every day. Spanish Teacher A would create the lesson plans for Reading Workshop & Math while Spanish Teacher B would create the plans for Language and Word Study and Centers. During Wednesday's conference period, they review all plans together so that both teachers are on the same page and fully understand the lesson plans created by the other, have the resources they need, etc.
- Thursday: Bilingual Team Planning -- After both English teachers and both Spanish teachers get on the same page within their respective languages of instruction on Wednesdays, they are ready to come together to collaborate across languages on Thursdays. My teachers have tried several different things for this meeting--first it was just in pairs (the Spanish teacher and English teacher that teach the same 2 homerooms), then it was as an entire grade level (both English teachers and both Spanish teachers), but both my Kinder and 1st grade teams have decided upon a balance of the two. For the first 30 minutes of this meeting, they meet as an entire grade level and identify key areas they need the partner language teachers to preview or review for. This helps every teacher of the team better understand how their instruction contributes to the overarching unit of inquiry and also how their teaching helps reinforce instruction in the other lanuage. It also helps them identify how everyone can help children make critical connections across languages and transfer knowledge and skills from one to the other. The 2nd 30 minutes of the meeting is spent in separate bilingual pairs (just 2 teachers)--here they discuss individual students they teach together, share data, agree on key procedures or approaches that need to be kept consistent across both classrooms, etc. Last week (week of Dec 14 - 18) I observed both Kinder and 1st conduct this bilingual team/pair meeting and saw we've come a loooong way compared to the beginning of the year!)
- Friday: Problem of Practice (or) Personal Planning -- I reserve Fridays for grade level "problem of practice" meetings. Or, if this doesn't happen, teachers have additional personal planning time. Problem of Practice meetings can be really powerful. This is where I can address common needs across the grade level--as I observe and debrief with all first grade teachers, I might find that there are certain areas of instruction in which all of first grade could benefit from support in. So, I facilitate "problem of practice" meetings where I'll help develop grade levels around a particular aspect of instruction. We might watch video, observe in other classrooms, hold discussions, etc. Some example of "problem of practice" meetings are: Writing strong objectives, Posting and communicating objectives to students, Increasing student engagement to 100%, etc.. Often a by-product of these meetings are observation templates that teachers use to conduct peer observations...10 min "peeks" into a colleague's classroom, focused on our current problem of practice. It makes sure teachers step outside of their own isolated classrooms every once in a while. I expect each teacher to conduct a minimum of one 10-min peer observation every 2 weeks. My assistant tracks completion of this expectation.
That sums up how we've structured collaborative planning. Teams are learning to be better about assigning a time-keeper and note-taker each meeting. They're also reporting that without these meetings (Wednesday and Thursday meetings in particular) their following week of instruction can sometimes really suffer. As a school lead team, we're working to make sure we never interfere with Wed and Thurs meetings if at all possible. We're working to really safeguard this time and treat it as something of very high-priority.
I also dedicated an entire Faculty Wednesday afternoon professional development session (students have early release so we can hold PD on Wednesdays) to "fine-tuning" collaboration. I gave grade level teams substantial time to discuss and plan together. They had to identify clear objectives for each collaboration session, articulate standing agenda items (and time allocation for each), and identify common obstacles to meeting efficiency & efficacy and brainstorm solutions. They had to discuss meeting facilitation and roles/responsibilities of each team member. They reviewed team norms and re-committed themselves to this. Each grade level turned in a written synopsis of their decisions to me (I, in turn, reviewed these with Dr. Mercuri for feedback--she was highly complimentary of the strides teachers were making in this area).
I also talked to her about another challenge that teachers keep bringing up--the tri-weekly transfer of content areas (all except Language and Word Study). Teachers have expressed that they feel "out of it" when it comes back around to them to teach each content area every 3 weeks. They feel unsure about what objectives have been taught and how individual students are progressing toward mastery of these objectives. I discussed several solutions with Dr. Mercuri:
- Changing subjects bi-weekly or weekly: This would shorten the time during which teachers don't teach a particular content area, leaving them less "in the dark" about what's being taught. Dr. Mercuri recommended we consider this--either piloting this year or considering for next year. Melissa (grade 1 team leader) posed the idea to her team but they preferred to keep it tri-weekly.
- Improving communication between bilingual partner teachers: If we don't change the timeframe of content area transfers, then we need to improve flow of information between the teachers sharing students. I proposed one idea to teachers and they seemed to like it--I suggested that once every 3 weeks that their co-teacher cover class for the morning or afternoon, giving them the chance to spend a whole AM or PM session in their team teacher's classroom--watching carefully how and what is being taught in each content area to facilitate a more seamless transfer of subjects from one language to the other. I was very honest about my only worry--that it would taken them from their own instruction too often, but my teachers' feedback was that, at least in these beginning stages, the longterm benefits would outweigh that drawback. They felt this would really help transfer of subjects.
- Finally, I need to figure out how to better use Faculty Wednesday (periodically) to facilitate transfer of student achievement data across team teachers. We've done a couple of exercises, but nothing that really has become an ingrained and regular practice for us. One data analysis activity we did do a month (or so) ago seemed to be very powerful in getting bilingual teaching pairs to look at data together. I printed out the most current student achievment data in reading levels, high frequency word mastery, math objective mastery, etc. Teachers worked together to "color-code" results according to the following categories (I gave them clear quantitative guidelines around this too): CRITICAL (far below expected standard--red); BORDERLINE (below expected standard--yellow); MASTERY (meeting expected standard--green); EXCEEDING (well above expected standard--blue). Using this color-coded spreadsheets, teaching pairs then created student priority lists for each homeroom, with the highest-need students at the top. We divided the list into English-dominant and Spanish-dominant students, so we could prioritize within language dominance. I also added a column for "behavior-priority" children. Sometimes a child might not be struggling academically, but might be a top-priority child (for interventions and support) due to behavior. I'm trying to use these priority lists to help me better focus my observations and debriefs of teachers. That particular activity is one I plan to replicate periodically as we get more data.
VACATION PRIORITIES
During this Christmas vacation, I want to take some time to do the following:
- Think through a pilot of changing our tri-weekly subject transfers to weekly or bi-weekly. Perhaps Kinder would be willing to pilot this? I'll consider presenting the idea to them but will not force anything at this point. They are already trying so many new things--any other changes/tweaks will require 100% investment on their part in order to be succesful.
- Analyze progress monitoring reading data for our 1st grade Spanish dominant students reading at a critically low level. Figure out some short-term and long-term solutions.
- Start planning what kind of curriculum work must be done in preparation for the 2010 - 11 school year and when/how it will be done. What materials need to be purchased? What professional development needs to take place?
- Other reflections on the past semester... Dr. Mercuri and I had a conference call just over a week ago. She was very kind and complimentary as she praised the work that has gone on at our campus thus far. She encouraged me to record as much as I could concerning the process we've gone through. She mentioned that she's considering writing/editing a book about curriculum planning for dual immersion programs, and asked me to write down as much as possible in preparation for potentially contributing our school's experience to this collection of articles/essays. What an opportunity that would be. For that reason I'm trying to get as much as possible down in this blog. I know some things make sense only to me, but hopefully it will be reminder enough for me to come back to and really get down on paper so that other schools can benefit from our successes and victories.
