It's about the journey...

In my district each year we are asked to create an ILP (Individualized Learning Plan). This ILP is basically an outline of goals we are looking to meet, in order to make ourselves better teachers. In September, I started the school year, with Daily Five in my hands, like an eager child ready for their first day of school. I had my materials but then had to think, what are my goals to achieve with these materials? Although there were an endless amount of goals I could set forth for myself, my two main focuses were, "Engaging Students in Learning" and "Reflecting on my teaching". These two goals are at the heart of Daily Five. At the end of the school year, we are asked to reflect on our ILP and how it has help to improve student learning along with our own professional growth. Below is my ILP reflection. 

The students in my classroom had opportunities throughout the school year to initiate choice and create individual goals for themselves. With my guidance they were encouraged to create goals for themselves and choose the necessary strategies they would need to meet these goals.

With student choice, each student was motivated to achieve their goals and took ownership of their learning. Learning was purposeful for each student. This was evident through student-teacher conversations, classroom discussions and classroom activities. During Daily Five students choose between Read to Self, Read to Someone, Listening to Reading, Word Work, and Work on Writing. With this choice I saw an increase in students stamina for the choice they choose and also an understanding of why they were choosing that particular activity and/or reading strategy. This in turn then led to self-motivation. For example, students would pick “Work on Writing” if they knew they had to catch up on a writing assignment and wanted time to do so outside of our writing block. Students who picked “Read to Someone”, often picked this choice if they were working on Fluency. While other students choose “Listening to Reading” in order to work on and monitor their reading comprehension.

Through classroom discussions and conferences students were able to express their learning growth and even create their own reading goals. When thinking about student engagement and ownership of learning, a conversation I had with one particular student comes to mind. This student asked me for a reading conference because he wanted to discuss his reading goal and strategy. When we sat down for our conference I asked him why he wanted a conference. He said, “ I wanted to conference with you because my reading strategy is choosing a good fit book and I don’t think that is a good strategy for me right now.” When I asked him why he said, “ because we are reading our biography books right now and I won’t be able to practice choosing a good fit fiction book.” I then asked him if he had a reading strategy in mind and he said, “I think the one Joe has would be good for me, because it is cause and effect. Joe said he picked this strategy because Martin Luther King effected our world and so did Jackie Robinson.” This conversation showed me many things. His conference showed me this student was taking ownership of his learning, understood the reading strategies, and also was learning a lot from working with and discussing reading strategies with other students in the classroom.

Along with reading instructions, the students in my classroom also had choice in other subject areas, such as math. Due to the positive results I was seeing from Daily Five and CAFÉ, I also implemented Daily Math. During Daily Math students had the opportunity to choose from different daily activities, such as Math by Myself and math games. Each day students’ choose “Math by Myself” with the choice of completing the LAB book pages with my assistance or by themselves. It was extremely interesting to see how in tune the children were with their learning abilities. During Daily Math we had two rounds, allowing the kids one round to do “Math by Myself” and one round of games. The children choose games that they felt would benefit their learning, such as multiplication fact fluency or sums of ten.

In addition to engaging students in learning I also choose to reflect on my teaching. This past school year I reflected on my teaching in many different ways. This reflection included blogs, emails with another teacher who is in her first year of implementing Daily Five, Think Tank sessions with five teachers from various Long Island school districts, discussions on Proteacher.org and feedback from the students. Reflecting on my teaching has helped me tremendously. My reflections have been honest and allowed for me to grow as a classroom teacher. Throughout the school year I constantly re-evaluated my teaching practices and made sure that the teaching I did was individualized meaningful for each student. Daily Five, CAFÉ, and Daily Math have all helped me to individualize classroom instruction and master the management of small group work while implementing purposeful learning activities.  Reflecting on these activities and my teaching allowed me to realize no one is perfect and with those imperfections we grow. As I say to my students each day, “It is about the journey that we take to get the destination, not about the destination itself.” This year has truly been a wonderful journey, and if I’m considering becoming “distinguished” in my ILP goals of “Engaging students in learning” and “Reflecting on my teaching” as my destination, I think I’ve definitely arrived. It is quite the opposite. I have now carved the path for many other journeys to occur, and goals to be met.