LTED 667 Suzanne Graybush Blog Post #3

 

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            The climate or culture in my school is Children first, sometimes this can be  a good thing. How?Well,  we are a school that gives students EVERY chance at success, sometimes too much.  I think there is too much entitlement in my middle school plus parents have too much say and therefore we have lowered our standards little by little to the point where "we all get A's!"  There is little diversity, mostly white middle class America and parents kick and scream until they get what they want.

            Now we are at this critical point, where we do not give homework, give too many chances, and the bar is set too low.  The administrators hardly back us as teachers, and bend towards the parents. The only ones who seem to be held accountable are US as teachers. 

What does this mean for literacy? It is terrible, the students do not take initiative to read at                         home, so I try to provide time in class, but it isn't enough. We need help, we need                                 administrators who are tough, we need  remediation. 

             As far as the reading Pre-Assessments given at the beginning of the school year, I have many below average readers. About 1/3 of my students are below grade level reading level. I currently teach 3 blocks of ELA equalling about 55 students. Out of these 55 students only about 25 are on grade level. Ten students are on the 7th grade level while the rest range from grades 3 through 6. This is a town where most parents are college educated and homes range from 500000 to in the millions. Sometimes I shake my head in  disbelief, this should not be. Honestly this is one of the main reasons I am here enrolled in this course and many others, to help these students become better readers. To hopefully one day lead this school into literacy and academic success.

            In our district we are kind of on our own. Supervisors have come and gone over the years, one year here, another two here, sometimes our Vice Principal who never taught ELA is our supervisor, other times it's a Social Studies Supervisor. And over the 20 years I'd say for ten of them we have been completely on our own. This year we have a 6-12 supervisor who is trying to remediate the system. We only really meet with our 8th grade ELA teachers to discuss our curriculum each day and once a month with Social Studies and ELA teachers of all grades. I feel like literacy has been lost in the shuffle in our district. 

        For a very brief time we did have a literacy coach, possibly a year, but I feel her responsibility was to collect and sort data on students for implementation, whereas in the text coaches are defined as, "In many schools literacy coaches and reading specialists are synonymous terms--the reading specialist ISthe literacy coach. With so many of the same jobs being performed by reading specialists and literacy coaches, it is even more important for today's reading specialist to have a clearly defined, written job description that is disseminated to teachers standings about what reading specialists "do all day" can be resolved by completing this extremely important task (p. 46)." This is interesting information because I have heard this around, but our specialist doesn't model lessons, just keeps running records and works specifically with "lower level" students in an RTI class who need the  extra help.

        We use various programs like I ready where we are required to use 45 class minutes a week practicing on it, which is supposed to help move our students up through the levels they

are behind. We have not been trained on the system as of yet and we have had it for two 

years. We have Lucy Calkin's books, but again I have had one or two trainings on Reader's 

 and Writer's workshop in all of my 21 years of teaching. We use a RTI approach with a few  identifying students who need remediation. Our school does offer Wilson reading and a few Read 180 classes,  but in very small groups. 

  I do my best and try to implement all of the practices I have learned in order to help these students grow as readers and writers the best that I can.

Upon reading our text book I came across something that could help my district and others like it, "Creating the comprehensive two-year literacy improvement plan/grid is a written document. It

 incorporates the components previously developed, including school and district demographics, a list of literacy team members, a description of current practices, a summary of the findings from the needs assessment, and a proposal for professional development," (p. 99). Our school would benefit from this type of structure for reform, so I will keep this handy to one day implement it as part of our literacy team.

           My literacy "dream team" would be made up of one representative from each grade and subject level. This is important in order to see literacy from a Math perspective, Social Studies, Science, and even Art or Health classes. I am sure the content area teachers notice the inability of students  to be able to read the various texts in their classes. 

           Our Vice Principal, English supervisor, and reading specialist should be chief leaders of this group in order to gain support and clearance on certain needs to be assessed and implemented quicker. I would love to enlist the help of a technology teacher too, in order to know what programs may be more efficient in aiding our students grow as readers and writers. 

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