March 21, 2017

Dear Ms. Zielinski:

It was a pleasure observing your student teaching in an 8th grade English class at Smith Middle
School. Your host teacher praised your implementation of the persuasive writing unit, which
culminated in multimedia presentations of research in a roundtable format. She especially
commended your thoughtful, heterogeneous grouping of students around topic and personality type
and incorporation of multiple technologies to support students composition process. Well done!

The 3rd period class I observed showcased your ability to utilize technology to support students
reading of literary text. Specifically, you used tablets and Schoology, an online learning
management system, to provide students with an annotated version of Flowers for Algernon that
made the text accessible to all students. Although you had frontloaded themes and characters, you
told students to refer to this part later because you would be reading the story first. This constituted
an astute use of technology as the Common Core State Standards encourage making meaning from
the text rather than frontloading.

To support students comprehension, you engaged in a shared read aloud. You instructed students
that they should follow along, silently, and that you would pose questions, which would make it
appropriate for them to talk. You read aloud, pausing to explain the meaning of the text: What this
is telling me is and point out stylistic features that provided clues about meaning: What do you
notice about the writing here? In doing so, you anticipated students misconceptions and modeled
how to paraphrase, teaching reading in a way that made the story accessible to all students.

You also supported students in thinking critically about the themes by pausing to pose provocative
questions: Do you think it would be good if we were all the same amount of smart? and Can you
tell how smart someone is by how they look? As we discussed in our quick debrief, these are
excellent, thought-provoking questions, and while you garnered adequate participation through
whole class discussion, allowing table groups two minutes to discuss them would deepen students
engagement with the text and maximize participation as a dialogic approach to teaching literature.

As I noted in my previous observation, clearly you have ignited your students curiosity, this time
with 3rd period and with a well-chosen literary text. At the end of class, one student asked if you
were going to finish the story the next day, and I overheard a student who had read ahead of the
class tell a classmate they would discuss the story at lunchtime. As your host teacher confirmed,
you are well-prepared to hit the ground running your first year teaching. I offer you an
enthusiastic recommendation for your job search!

Sincerely,

Amy Ford

Amy Carpenter Ford, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English Education

Central Michigan University 230 Anspach 1429 S. Washington St.
Mount Pleasant Michigan 48859 (989) 774-1976 ford1ac@cmich.edu