Borkowski, Jessica

ED 215R
Self-Assessment
I choose to do an interactive read aloud because it addressed the diverse literacy
needs of all of the students. I was doing the reading, which freed up the students to focus
on doing the thinking. The students had moved to a hire level of texts during their
independent reading and my cooperating teacher and I noticed that the students were
struggling using good reading strategies.
I decided to do an interactive read aloud to remodel good reading strategies. In
particular, I remodeled making predictions, activating prior knowledge, and using clues
in the text to deepen understanding of the text. The objectives of the lesson were (1) the
students will make connections between the text and their own lives by using their prior
knowledge and (2) the student will make predictions to understand the story. The
students were able to do the thinking during the lesson because the text dealt with a topic
familiar to their lives. The students were also able to practice the strategies on books at
their own reading levels during their independent reading time in the future.
This lesson reflects my growth in Wisconsin Standards for Teacher Development
and Licensure number eight. This standard states: The teacher understands and uses
formal and informal assessment strategies to evaluate and ensure the continuous
intellectual, social, and physical development of the learner. This means that a teacher
uses a variety of assessments to evaluate students learning. A teacher also uses these
evaluations to determine further learning objectives that meet the learning needs of the
students.
In my previous lesson, I discussed with my instructor how I should be assessing
the quality of the students work, not just if they were able to meet the objective. With
this feedback, I designed a rubric for this lesson that evaluated the students ability to
make predictions, the quality of the predictions, and the quality of the students thinking
that went into making the prediction.
This lesson also reflected my growth in the Alverno Education Ability-Diagnosis.
Diagnosis is the ability to relate observe behaviors to relevant frameworks in order to
determine and implement plans that will meet students needs and lead them to the next
level of development. This means a teacher uses assessments in relation to education
frameworks to guide their teaching.
While planning my lesson I discussed with Mrs. Krum the observations we both
were having with how students were using good reading strategies to help them
understand the text. From these previous observations we determined to review
activating prior knowledge, using clues in the text, and making predictions with the
students. I also demonstrated my growth in diagnosis by assesses my own performance
of previous lessons and adapting the feedback from those lessons to this one.
The second Alverno Education Ability that I showed growth in was
Conceptualization. Conceptualization is the ability to integrate knowledge of discipline
with educational frameworks in the context of a broadly-based understanding of the
liberal art. To determine the objective for this lesson I used previous assessments. These
assessments helped me to design a lesson that meet the current needs of the students.
From my assessments done during this lesson, I would be able to plan future lesson to
take my students to the next stage in their learning. This follows Vygotskys theory of
the Zone of Proximal Development. This model moves students from having a limit
ability of the learning task to mastering the task. Using assessments allows the teacher to
determine the students level of mastering a task.
I planned my lesson following the model that my cooperating teacher requested.
She does interactive read alouds during snack time, not during Readers Workshop. I
found this model difficult to plan for because it is different than what I had previously
learned in ED 225. I did include, in my written lesson, a full plan of how the teaching
would look in my future teaching. If I could change something about this lesson, it
would be the setting of where I would do this lesson. For this lesson, students were
sitting at their desks, eating snack. In my future teaching I would change this to the
students sitting on the rug. This would allow me to expand on this lesson even further. I
would be able to chart students responses and have students write their own responses
that I could use as an assessment piece.
This lesson was rather difficult to manage student attention. Students were eating
snack and it was one students birthday. (He passed out treats while I was reading)
During my interactive read aloud students were eating food and throwing things away. It
was hard for students to talk with their partners with a mouth full of cupcake. This is the
normal routine for the class at this time. My cooperating teacher also stopped my lesson
midway through because it was time for recess. I continued the lesson after recess.
Before I started reading the lesson again, I summarized what I had already read and what
we discussed before recess. When the students returned, they settled in and were more
engaged in the lesson.