Instructional Commentary

3. Engaging Students in Learning

Refer to examples from the lesson plan in your explanations.
a. Explain how your instruction engaged students in developing an essential literacy
strategy and requisite skills.
Through the activities, the students learned a basic literacy skill that modeled the
process for searching for and interpreting intra-textual connections within texts by
identifying, classifying, and organizing cause and effects. Students interacted with
foldables that defined cause and effect to aide in concept development. Students
created intra-textual connections during the collaborative group activity within written and
pictorial responses to strengthen students ability to illustrate based on the causes within
the story. The students engaged in a writing activity in which they used textual evidence
from the story to synthesize an effect in a collaborative setting. Students were introduced
to the strategy through class discussion and teacher modeling to identify, classify, and
organize cause and effect. Students then applied strategy during post-assessment as I
circulated to individual students to assess their comprehension of the central focus.
b. Describe how your instruction linked students prior academic learning and personal,
cultural, and community assets with new learning.
The instruction linked to students prior academic learning by applying to actions and
consequences within the classroom such as the disciplinary system of pulling sticks. As
the hook, I asked students what would happen if a student didnt follow school rules and
what would be the consequences. Students responses were based on their prior
learning of school rules at the starting of the semester. The instruction gave insight to
how cause and effect applied to real world connections briefly shown during the preassessment to link to personal, cultural, and community aspects within the daily lives of
the students. These activities help the students make connections and relate to their
daily lives and provide a perspective of how one cause leads to an effect.
4. Deepening Student Learning during Instruction
Refer to examples from the clip(s) in your explanations.
a. Explain how you elicited student responses to promote thinking and apply the literacy
strategy using requisite skills to comprehend or compose text.
Students constructed responses during collaborative group work that promoted intratextual thinking and social collaboration. I circulated from group to group asking
questions to promote higher order thinking. I asked one group, What if the cause is you
give a teacher your homework? One student responded, The effect would be
(Paused) the teacher will grade it and give it back to us in our folders. Students applied
think-aloud strategy during questioning. The questioning developed real world context to
aide in comprehension of the main focus as well as apply to higher order thinking.
Students were praised for using academic language introduced at beginning of lesson.

b.

Explain how you supported students to apply the literacy strategy in a meaning-based
context.
Students in each group practiced think-aloud strategies when I circulated the groups as I
asked how they came to their solution to the cause they chose. Some students struggled
with practicing the strategy to think-aloud based on intra-textual connections, so I
modeled the strategy that was text based as well as questioned the group about the
cause and what happened. This line of questioning allowed the struggling students to
compose responses based on the story once a consensus was made. Students provided
their rationalization for responses that were text based and showed evidence of
development of strategy proficiency.