Best Practices Examples | myteachingadventures

Best Practices

In a classroom of diverse learners, you can't hope to reach a majority of students without a consistent learning environment and well-developed instructional practices. My favorite instructional methods were ones that could be reused over and over again to strengthen crucial skills and that weren't restricted to certain types of reading or writing. Below are skills that I had my students practice regularly, as well as a description of the learning environment I attempted to create for my students.

In my first year of teaching, my classroom was clean yet sparsely decorated. I regretted how infrequently I hung up student work and the lack of decoration. When I moved down to eighth grade, I vowed to do better. Appearance matters when you're trying to make an impression on children. I added color through motivational posters, educational posters, butcher paper, and decorative borders. I added a classroom library and made an effort to hang up more student work.

On a more abstract level, I instilled the expectations that we work hard while in Ms. Lindsay's class, that effort in and care for education matters just as much as getting the correct answer. This has resulted in some resentment from my eighth grade students. My principal warned me at the beginning of the year that was to be expected because I have made them work harder in an ELA class than their teachers have in the past. I needed to work on consistency and breaking down materials for my eighth graders, but I was great at creating high expectations and not lowering the bar even when my students attempted to throw the towel in before genuinely trying.

Patrick, a goofy student-athlete who took to defending my writing-intensive teaching methods when others groaned, told me recently, "This is the most we've ever learned. Like I learned stuff in my other classes, but I've learned more in here in a single year than I have in all my other classes."

My Learning Environment

Context Clues

Kahoot!

Reciprocal Reading

Year Two - Room 40

When we were reading a new text in class, it was best to cover difficult vocabulary before reading. In my context clues lessons, I followed a format presented to me by former MTC teacher Liz Towle. I started by reading the text and making a list of words that my students may find potentially challenging or unfamiliar. I would narrow the list to 4-6 words, before writing up a short paragraph using each of the vocabulary words, hopefully referencing my students in some way. Context clues were incorporated into each of these paragraphs to help students develop their reasoning and inference skills for decoding unfamiliar words in the future. Each of the lesson presentations followed this general order:

Beyond my laptop and a projector, my use of technology in classroom has been minimal. (Which is a significant amount of technology compared to what most of my English high school teachers used. How did they teach without projectors? How? Blows my freaking mind!) I don’t think that is shocking news from a teacher working in a critical needs school district. We only had one cart of 30 laptops at the beginning of my second year to share between all middle school teachers. Very recently, two more carts of laptops were added to our school inventory, and now all teachers are trying to incorporate more technology in the classroom. So competition for their use, while not intense, takes some flexibility and compromise.

In my last semester, I used the laptops to practice vocabulary and state test questions with Kahoot. Kahoot was the new big bandwagon that teachers were jumping on. I first heard about it from Abigail Condit and then Alicia Sparer walked me through how to use it during a class weekend. Students really got into the game-show format of it, so I didn’t lose their interest as quickly while practicing state-test questions. Points were awarded based on correct answers and how quickly they answered the question. The game updated them to their overall place and had a leaderboard they could look at after each question. But best of all, I could save the data at the end of each Kahoot game and analyze what questions my students missed, the standards I needed to cover more, and which students were struggling the most with understanding the questions.

Read further on technology in my classroom: Technology Team-Up

This reading strategy slowed down struggling readers who had a tendency to skim rather than critically read and required them to think about and/or discuss the text as they were reading. When performed in groups of heterogeneous reading levels, this activity could help pull forward weak and strong readers alike. Students enjoyed the opportunity to work in groups and talk with classmates as well. With some well-enforced procedures, children were thoughtfully discussing texts with occasional insights from the teacher.

Reciprocal reading breaks down reading skills into four categories: predict, summarize, clarify, and question. Summarize requires a student to read and condense the information in the text to its main ideas, a basic skill necessary to learn large amounts of information in any subject. Predict has students take available information - a title, the first paragraph, illustrations, etc. - and infer likely outcomes based on that information. To clarify, students must identify unfamiliar words difficult phrases, or other language-based questions. They must utilize previous knowledge, context clues, reference materials, and discussion with group members to best understand the word or phrase. And finally, question is when students ask questions about characters, events, themes, and other contents of the text. Question, especially in regards to poetry, can even investigate the formatting choices of the author.

When these skills were used in combination, students not only built comprehension skills, but critical thinking and analysis skills as well. Reciprocal reading in a group setting helped weaker readers see when and how they should stop and evaluate their reading. Stronger readers developed leadership skills and learned how to explain their thought processes while they assisted their classmates. Also working with other students broadened the individual's perspective of a story since all students take away something different from a text. Finally, reciprocal reading built a student's annotation skills as they were expected to summarize, predict, question, and clarify in the margins of the text as they were reading. These aspects all came together to rework how a student thought while they were reading. I also found that this approach staved off boredom when reading state-test passages, especially when I made it into a competition by pairing the reading with a round of Kahoot the next day.

Read further on my learning environment my first year of teaching:

Classroom Preparation: Am I Forgetting Anything?

Getting Settled

The Learning Environment Blues

All Aboard the Struggle-Bus: Creating a Learning Environment that Supports All Students

Most of my students could get on board with this lesson. They were given several opportunities to participate. They could share what they thought the context clues were, what the definitions might be, and their answers to the Think, Pair, Share questions. At first, my students were afraid to guess wrong on the definitions, but now I think they recognize it as a doable, not-impossible lesson. They realized I wouldn't make fun of them or invalidate their thought process for wrong guesses. They saw me get more frustrated with the students who didn't try at all. I think the numerous chances to speak also helped engage them in the lesson.

Read further on my vocabulary lessons: Vocabulary Doesn't Have to Be Boring

A word puzzle that warmed up critical thinking skills.
Call-and-answer to practice pronunciation of vocabulary words.
Reading the paragraph aloud as students circled context clues.
Reading the paragraph a second time as student raised their hands for context clues.
Independently marking the paragraph for the remaining context clues, labeling the types of context clues, and defining the vocabulary term in their own words.
Discussing student responses to the independent work in step #5.
Using dictionary definitions to correct any faulty context clues definitions.
And time permitting, using Think-Pair-Share to answer questions involving the vocabulary terms that helped them remember their definitions.

Reciprocal Reading Anchor