Experience, or the lack thereof...

I remember my first teaching job...1st grade. They were soooo cute and eager to learn.

As a Teach for America corps member, I had no official educational background. I had gone through a 5 week teacher "boot camp" that taught me the basics of what I needed to know before I got into the classroom with my own students for the first time. Some of those essentials included classroom management 101, reading state standards, how to make a basic lesson plan, and the do's and don'ts of working with the faculty and staff at school. "Be nice to the janitorial staff, or else your room won't get cleaned."

Once I was in the classroom, I realized I that I knew how to read state standards, but I didn't know what student work should look like. I also discovered that 1st grade was the first time most of my students had structured schooling and were learning to read and write; kindergarten is not mandatory in Louisiana. (My placement area for TFA)

I soon figured out what students were able to do: invented spellings, pictures with no words, initial and ending sounds with no vowels, etc. I soon learned that asking what students were saying and writing that information down was my saving grace until I learned to interpret the different types of student samples. LOTS of practice!

For a long time, I thought my role was to make students spell everything correctly. They needed to sound things out and get those words correct! I later learned that I was doing more harm than good. Writing, like reading, is learned in stages. I learned that I should encourage invented spellings while holding students accountable for grade level words (sight words, word wall words, spelling words, words being copied directly from a source, etc.)

As I began working with older students, my lack of experience showed its ugly head once again. Students were needing to write more complex pieces of writing. My 1st grade students were writing anywhere from 3 sentences to a complete 5 sentence paragraph. Now, my 3rd graders were needing to write longer pieces with more complex conventions. I was soon exposed to 6 + 1 traits, although none of the schools at which I worked had an official writing curriculum. I also began following the writer's workshop model. Students had a lot of concrete practice for writing, and I was able to give meaningful feedback, while learning to become a better writing teacher along the way. Once again, trial and error helped me flesh out outstanding, average, mediocre, and unsatisfactory writing samples-valuable information on which to base my future instruction.

Now, after having taken several courses at Regis, attending a multitude of professional development sessions, and reading countless numbers of books to further my own learning, I have learned a couple of things. I learned that reading and writing co-exist. You can't have one without the other. Duh! I learned from my Teaching Reading in Secondary Classrooms course that all students need reading and writing instruction, even past elementary school. That we can't just think someone else has taken care of this "literacy problem". I also realized that I identify most with the Word Recognition View. This view suggests that "written language must be learned." I think both the Word Recognition and Sociopsycholinguistic view can co-exist and perhaps be adapted depending on the group of students. I have spent my career working with minority and ESL students and have found that the phonics, concentrated vocabulary, and demonstrated orally reading have worked really well for their progress. While contextual clues and individual processing of material is essential for truly understanding a text, many of the students with whom I've worked initially lacked these skills on a certain level until they were given strategies by which to apply them. Again, my experience.

In conclusion, I have once again switched grades. I continue to be a learner who develops my craft and relentlessly seeks out the best ways in which educate my students.