My Mission Statement

In a course I'm taking at Walden University I've developed and refined my mission statement. One of the outcomes of the course, Teacher as Professional, is to demonstrate that I adjust my teaching strategies and techniques based on reflective thought. Since this blog is my main place for reflective thought I'm including my mission statement below along with some goals I've developed for the this year:

Mission Statement
I believe all students can achieve academic success in an environment conducive to learning and that each student brings a unique set of strengths to the classroom. My mission is to motivate students to be lifelong learners, to inspire them to achieve academically, and to prepare them to be productive members of a global and digital society. My responsibility is the betterment of education, within my classroom and beyond by collaborating with colleagues and engaging in critical self-reflection.

Goals
One goal this year is to deepen my connection to students and empower them to achieve by helping them feel valued, creating a culture of belonging, and making learning meaningful and relevant to them. I will try to have a one-on-one affective conversation with my students weekly. I will sign up for another course on linguistically diverse learners between now and next Fall.
To motivate students to be lifelong learners I will model that learning does not stop after high school or even college. I will discuss the courses I'm taking now with my students and share one new thing I learn each week.
I will inspire my students to achieve academically by purposefully integrating technology to enhance student achievement. My goal is to create at least one smart board lesson per week using strategies from Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (http://www.siopinstitute.net/).
I will fuel my passion for teaching by seeking out at least two professional development opportunities in my district this year and applying my learning in the classroom.
My goal with regards to the betterment of education is to present three trainings to staff at my school or to other educational professionals this year and to practice and share my critical self reflections on my blog.

Neuroscience of Learning and Becoming an Expert Teacher

This blog is one of my forays into developing my collegial interaction and since the purpose of my blog is to facilitate the exchange of ideas in order to promote student achievement I thought I’d post my thoughts on becoming an expert teacher.
I’ve become more and more fascinated by the research that has come out regarding learning for students and the brain and understanding how students learn is a key endeavor of mine.

In a course of mine at Walden University we are studying the facets of the concept of Teacher as Professional. This week we are focusing on what makes an expert teacher. We read an article from the Journal of Staff Development (Garmston) that discusses the journey of teacher along the continuum from novice to expert. In this article he discusses six areas in which expert teachers must be knowledgeable; Content, pedagogy, students and how they learn, self-knowledge, cognitive processes of instruction, and collegial interaction. When I think of these six areas I think of them as irrevocably intertwined. It is important to be an expert in the content matter you are teaching but you must also have a good understanding of your own learning styles so that you don’t teach to only one style of learner. Garmston states that “Knowledge of one’s own patterns and preferences supports informed decision making and the overcoming of egocentric teaching choices.” (p. 2) This self-knowledge in turn affects the cognitive processes of instruction where the teacher uses a wide variety of teaching modes and “take an allocentric perspective, employing the learner’s frame of reference in instructional planning, teaching, and evaluation.” (p. 2)
Understanding a learning style or frame of reference is important but we must also delve deeper into how the students learn and teachers can learn from each other through collaborative reflection. This also requires us to reconsider current teaching trends and critically analyze popular research into learning including the brain-based learning research that has come out. Pat Wolfe in an article from her website cautions against implementing strategies that have not been tested in classrooms (Brain Research and Education: Fad or Foundation?).
As a Reading First (http://www.readingfirstsupport.us/) school we are conducting a book study on “How the Brain Learns to Read” (Sousa, 2005). What I’ve found interesting are how male and female brains process language. In the book, Sousa confirms that "Male brains tend to process language in the left hemisphere, while most female brains process language in both hemispheres." (pp. 14, 15) He goes on to mention that in females the nerve bundle connecting both hemispheres, the corpus callosum, is larger and thicker in females and he implies that information travels between the two hemispheres more efficiently in females and may account for why young girls often acquire spoken language more readily than boys. As a first grade teacher this idea merits more than passing consideration. We know from research that boys learn differently in many ways than girls do. The open question for now is “How do we capitalize on that research and differentiate learning for boys and girls?”

Garmston, R. J. (1998). Becoming expert teachers (Part one). Journal of Staff Development, 19(1). Copyright 1998 by National Staff Development Council. Reproduced with permission of National Staff Development Council in the format electronic usage via Copyright Clearance Center

Sousa, D. A., (2005). How the Brain Learns to Read. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press

Wolfe, P. (2003, Fall). Brain-compatible learning: Fad or foundation? Retrieved May 24, 2007, from http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa..edu/forum/fall03/brain.htmlReprinted with permission. From the December 2006 issue of The School Administrator.

Brain photo from Killermonkeys

How to turn a Word document into a Powerpoint presentation.

Tonight I'm leading a study group for my elementary school on brain research and how students learn to read(Sousa, 2005). For this lesson we will also be learning how to turn a word document into a powerpoint presentation.
We will copy the text below (notes we developed while reviewing a chapter) and change the questions by highlighting them and assigning them a "Heading 1" font style. We will highlight the questions and give them a "Heading 2" font style(I'll add an asterisk in front of the content that should be formated "Heading 2". The document doesn't need any extra returns. Then we will click "Send to Power Point" from the file menu and it will populate powerpoint slides with "Heading 1" text at the top of the slide and "Heading 2" text below. Then it's up to everyone to add a color background or style. *EDITED We found that when we sent the document to Powerpoint all the data was on one slide and the font was too big. FIX: Put a hard return between the Headers and then once you are in Power Point change the font by going to VIEW, MASTER, then SLIDE MASTER and selecting font 20 for the Header and font 32 for the text.

The option now is to select slide design and give it a style or color.
Text to copy:

How the Brain Learns to Read (Sousa, 2005).
Discuss the difference between learning to speak and learning to read. Why does this difference exist? (pages 31-32)
*Speaking is a natural, genetically hardwired capability and areas of the brain are not specialized for reading.
Were you surprised to see that learning to read is not strongly related to intelligence? Do you agree? Why or why not? What skill does Sousa say children must have if they are to learn to read? (page 33)
*Learning to read is dependent upon learning the alphabetic principle and phonological awareness.
Sousa states that “being aware of sound differences in spoken language is crucial to learning to read written language (2005, p33).
Why is the English language considered to have deep orthography? How does this make English more difficult to learn to read than many other languages? (pages 35-36)
*In English one letter has many sounds. English has a poor correspondence between how a word is pronounced and how it is spelled. (1,100 ways to spell the 44 phonemes).
Discuss Ehri’s four phases of word recognition in early reading. Do you agree with Ehri’s model? Explain your answer. (pages 37-40)
*We, Kemp, believe there might be more stages than just the four and we teach specific parts such as multi-syllabic etc.
What are morphemes? How does morphological awareness help students learn to read?
*Smallest word element that can change a words meaning. Morphological awareness helps students learn to read by allowing them to understand chunks of meaning.
Discuss the six syntactic variations found on pages 43 and 44. Does your teaching experience confirm that these variations are difficult for young readers? What strategies have you used to address the reading problems caused by these variations?
*We found negation, word order, and passive voice to be difficult for our students.
How does morphological awareness contribute to reading comprehension? (page 45)
*It adds meaning to what they’re reading. If students understand affixes and other morphemes it can lead to understanding of unknown words.
Why are children’s reading comprehension often less than their comprehension of spoken language? (page 46)
*The complexity of written language is greater than that of oral speech. We also don’t always talk in complete sentences.





Sousa, David A., 2005: How the Brain Learns to Read. Thousand Oaks, CA. Corwin Press

Ésta es mi primera tentativa de fijar un vídeo a mi blog. Éstos son mis estudiantes presentando sus primeros patrones. Necesito arreglar el nivel de sonido también. Ésta es nuestra primera tentativa en desarrollar nuestras voces profesionales.

Rockyou slide show

Video Screen Captures using Smart Board

Last week I practiced capturing screen shots from a United Streaming video about farms. The students really liked that we could write on the screen shots. I dropped the photos into RockYou.com slideshows with comments in Spanish. We will use that to review our learning on Monday. The next step is to have the students doing all the work and deciding what to capture and why. This might be a fun way to expand on a lesson about sequence of events. The possibilities are almost endless!
Now if I can only figure out how to embed the slide show in my blog post.

First day with Smart Board

Today was the first day of school and I introduced my students to the Smart Board. I showed a couple of students the set-up procedure so that after many practices they will be able to connect the Smart Board, Laptop, and LCD projector. My goal is to have my students proficient in running the technology hardware and software we will be using in class.

I had the students practice aligning the Smart Board. There were many opportunities for practice because they kept bumping the board or the projector. We practiced writing on the board and many students found it challenging to make legible letters on the board. The shadows of their hands obscured what they were trying to write. To get them accustomed to the markers and erasers I had them practice playing tic tac toe. I drew a tic tac toe grid with the line feature and they put in the Xs and Os. After they got the hang of it I used the tic tac toe game to introduce the idea of writing with transitional words.

I like the idea of using the screen capture tools to save our learning moments. I also look forward to integrating literacy and other content area skills.

My focus over the next week will be on how to add photos and other media to this blog. My students are first graders so they can't really write. I'm interested in having them post short videos, photos, and podcasts. One of the cool technologies I saw recently is flixn.com. It's used to create short videos with a webcam. You can't edit these videos but they look easy enough for a first grader to use.

My First Blogpost

This is my first blog entry. The purpose of this blog is to facilitate the exchange of ideas regarding the integration of technology to enhance student achievement and the creation of a global learning environment in my classroom. In this blog I will share my successes and failures in an effort to learn from them and to share with other teachers.

Ésta es mi primera entrada del blog. El propósito de este blog es de facilitar el intercambio de ideas con respecto a la integración de la tecnología para realizar el logro del estudiante y la creación de un ambiente de aprendizaje global en mi sala de clase. En este blog compartiré mis éxitos y faltas para poder aprender de ellas y de compartir con otros profesores.