Carly Coyne

Professional Development
ARA Reflection
The Alabama Reading Association was very informative and allowed me to grasp a
different type of thinking when it came to reading. This began when the author and
illustrator Neil Waldman spoke. Walden is known for his worldwide paintings and prints.
He began by telling a story about a group of boys he helped through high school. These
boys had a lot of ambition but didnt have the grades to make it to college. Unfortunately,
not a single one of them had ever heard of college. They promised Waldman that they
would study hard if he helped them get into college. One boy in particular was fascinated
with art. His grades started increasing tremendously until one day he did not show back
up to class, even after a few years. Neils story proceeded to tell us about how after years
of not going to school, he came back. Both the student and Neil knew it was almost
impossible for him to get his grades up at this point to make it into college but it was not
something to give up in. Art began to show differently through his work. He began taking
pictures and editing them with cheap materials. Successfully his grades skyrocketed and
people were beginning to admire his work. Neil ended by telling us about the issues the
students overcame and the success that came out of it. This was a very influential story
and touched close to home. My love for working with lower income schools has no
boundaries. The more I learned from this story, the more I wanted to jump right into a
lower income school and get busy.

Carly Coyne
Professional Development
ELL Training Reflection
The ELL training event provided great information. This semester I have worked with
ELL students for my action research project and this seminar helped clarify how to work best
with these students. One of the strategies that I found useful was the performance definition
method. This provides English language learners a better understanding and proficiency. 6.
Reaching: a variety of sentence lengths of varying linguistics complexity in extended oral or
written discourse. 5. Bridging: A variety of sentence lengths of varying linguistic complexity
in extended oral or written discourse, including stories and essays. 4. Expanding: sentences
and paragraphs. 3. Developing: expanded sentence in oral interaction or written paragraphs.
2. Beginning: language with phonological, syntactic, or semantic errors dealing with sensory,
graphic, or interactive support. 1. Entering: oral language with phonological, syntactic, or
semantic errors that often impede meaning when presented with basic oral commands, direct
questions, or simple statements with sensory, graphic or interactive support. I referred back
to these strategies on my week back at Trace and worked towards interpreting these methods
with my action research group.

Carly Coyne
Professional Development
Tom Lin reflection
I attend the Tom Lin meeting in in the Howard room. This took place on world
missions week. Tom Lin leads a world class team oversees, long term collaborated
partnerships, recruitment and training of students and staff in missions, new global
initiatives, and Urbana. Lin is known for his experience in planting new student chapters,
leading numerous student missions projects abroad and in North America, and developing
new national fundraising strategies. In the room, there were panels covered with different
countries. Next to the countries, there were numbers. The numbers symbolized the amount of
people who are unreached. We took about 15 minutes to walk around the room and look at
the great amount of numbers and took a moment of silence. This opened my eyes to want to
go on a mission trip to one of these strong unreached countries. A lot of these countries have
no faith of their own or spiritual life. The greatest thing we could do was hold hands and pray
that the Lord will be shown to these people. I went into this conference to be there and get

credit, to be honest. Walking out of this meeting, I had an entire different look on life itself
and what is going on in the world.