Questions:
1. How do you handle discipline in the library?
2. How do you differentiate instruction?
3. If you need help planning for lessons or differentiation, what do you do?
Answers:
1. Our school has a discipline plan in place and it is called a Wolf Pact Plan. Each day every student starts the day with 20 points. The goal for each student is to keep all 20 points each day and earn enough to participate in the "Fun Friday" activity. When students are in the library, if they misbehave or are off-task, they can lose up to four Wolf Pact points. If they lose all four points, then they may have to spend some of their time with the librarian during their recess. Fortunately, most of my students are very well behaved in the library. I rarely have to take any points, and I have never had to take any recess.
2. Sometimes I just differentiate by requiring less work from a student. For instance, if the class is required to write three events from a story, I might just require a student to write one event from the story. If it involves reading, I might partner a strong reader with a less advanced reader. Today I provided a cut and paste activity for my differentiated learners. Instead of having to write the setting, characters, events, and ending to a story, they had to cut, sort, and paste the events of the story.
3. Of course when I am planning my lessons, I always try to go to the teacher whose class I am planning the lesson for. I can almost always get ideas for lesson plans from them and ideas for differentiated learning activities. Our school is also very fortunate to have our own full-time literacy coach, and she is a blessing to our school. She can answer pretty much any question regarding literacy.
Reflection
Today I presented my first EdTPA lesson to a group of second graders. I asked our school's literacy coach to come in and observe me during the lesson. Normally I am not nervous while teaching a group of second graders, but today I totally was! I was presenting a lesson on comparing and contrasting different versions of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and the whole time my literacy coach was furiously taking notes! In my mind I was thinking, "What is she writing? Am I doing something good or bad???" At the end of the lesson she showed me her notes and assured me that everything was great. She wanted a running transcript so that we could go over the lesson together and see what worked, and what I could do better next time. She loved my activity for my differentiated learners, and actually suggested using it to do a group assignment for the next lesson. After speaking with her I felt very good about how the lesson went, and had a lot of great ideas for my next lesson.
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