Jason's thoughts:

Today was a busy day in the LALLI workshop.

Addressing quesions!

As usual we began the day with a community building exercise:  we were assigned to order ourselves by birthdays without speaking.  There were two groups doing this, and luckily, both groups had several mistakes in their ordering, so no one had bragging rights!  This was a good way to release tension quickly with the group.  We've all been working hard, so even a quick exercise at the beginning was good at releasing tension.

Next, Mike Slider led the discussion with ways to use accountable talk sentence stems while watching videos in class.  This was great!  We all know what happens when students watch videos in class--they listen hard for something that matches the questions on the paper they were given, then they scramble to write it down, and then check out as soon as they're done listening for their questions.  Mike showed us that this doesn't need to be what they see while they watch videos.  Instead we used tools where students wrote down the parts they thought were important and then used accountable talk (AT) verbiage to articulate why those parts were important, confusing, etc.  This way way more engaging than just giving students a list of "listen fors" to go with a video.  He also made a good point about using a rubric on every single assignment so that students know exactly what an "A" looks like for the assignment.  Easier for us, easier for the students!

Amy charting applications

The video that we used with his lesson can be found at ENGAGE NY and detailed the need for higher complexity texts even for our low readers.  This was valuable to me as it highlighted that we need to read deeper and longer with these hard texts to make sure our students are getting value out of them.

After Mike's lesson, Penny then gave a brief talk on what the Growth Mindset is and the research behind it.  Namely, she tried to dispel the myth that early literacy always leads to good readers later on.  An interesting graphic she showed illustrated how readers still fall back over time as the work at school gets harder.  Teachers can never stop challenging and working with students to catch them up and expand their reading skills.

Hard at work!!!

Jean's lessons hit more standards than mine

Jean then gave us a fun project showing how we can use resources from outside our textbook to get engaged with a topic.  For her example, we looked at "Nutrition:  What Do We Think We Know?"  This inspired a lot of fun talk in our groups and got us all engaged writing on our chart paper.  After discussing the results of our brainstorming Jean connected this exercise to argument writing, claims and evaluating evidence.  She gave us three terms (evidence, corroborates, disputes) and after defining these terms as a group, we looked through pre-selected articles to either corroborate or dispute some of the nutrition facts we thought we knew.  This could be done with any topic, and with the awesome module builder website we were introduced to, finding resources shouldn't be tough at all.


The really cool thing about Jean's lesson was flipping through our standards and seeing how many of them she met with one exercise.  Here's a hint--it was a lot.  Plus, the activity was engaging, challenging and fun.  How many of our lessons can we say that about?  Hopefully more, after this workshop completes.

Finally, we got a demonstration of math reading lesson from the book we were all provided at the start of the workshop.  The lesson was fun, as it got us building lists and creatively talking, but again it turned us back to the standards, as we were reading complex texts, looking for terms inside reading and doing math.  It was definitely different than math I remember doing!

After breaking into content areas for a wrap up, we called it a day.  I was exhausted, but had lots of new ideas for lessons that I will be using in the upcoming school year.









Whitney's thoughts:

     If today had a theme I believe it would be entitled, "Getting into the Thick of It." Today's LALLI Institute presenters started the day off with the "Birthday Lineup" community building activity. 
Imagine a room full of teachers organizing themselves in birthday date order without talking! Yes, it was truly a sight to see! So many hand signals, head scratching and re-strategizing took place all within the first 5 minutes.        The "thick of it" was learning to communicate with others who didn't necessarily "speak" the same language. 

There's Shelley working hard in the
foreground while  Mike works the crowd!

Next up, was Mr. Slider who introduced eager participants to a new video evaluation strategy. Mr. Slider's Video "Usual," as the worksheet was titled, guided students to watch educational videos through a lens of inquiry using The Language of Thinking stems we received on Monday. The underlining purpose of the strategy was to help student begin to think about the "take away" after having watched a video in class. Often, students and teachers think about videos shown in class as a "day off from instruction." Mr. Slider's strategy holds the students accountable for analyzing the video to find "the thick of it," and holds teachers accountable for making sure videos are educational, purposeful and relevant. 

      As if our minds were already spinning like the class pet hamster on a wheel, Dr. Penny Howell added to, "the thick of it," by leading our discussion into the research aspect behind adolescent literacy. Dr. Howell's beautiful summary put everything the LALLI Institute stands for in perspective. Dr. Howell spoke on the fact that reading is not a threshold, rather a continuum that gradually shifts from learning to read (grades K-3) to reading to learn (grades 4-12). She also emphasized how all teachers, not just language arts teachers, have a responsibility to teach reading.