CIL 621 Canady 12/11/17

Alyssa Glenn
This semester, I chose to focus my first year of instruction on organization

and culturally responsive, student-centered lessons. My I As A Learner goal was to

create and continually update an electronic Google Drive, complete with ready-to-go

culturally responsive and grade-level appropriate lesson plans, TESL adaptations

and scaffolds, and specific resources on phonics and fluency instruction for low-

level learners. This seemed a very daunting task to me as a first-year teacher, so I

enlisted the help of my school sites strategists and my fellow fourth grade team

teachers to aid in the creation and upkeep of this Google Drive. Throughout the

semester, we constantly discussed and generated ideas for lesson plans and student

engagement activities as well as accumulated resources for our low level (Tier II and

Tier III) students and English language learners.

This goal is especially important to me for a multitude of reasons. Teaching

itself is an incredibly overwhelming profession. I chose to focus on organization and

building a tool belt of plans and resources for the year because this will best help set

me up for success in the classroom so I can best teach and meet the needs of my

students. In addition, I teach in a classroom of thirty-four (34) students, most of who

are not on or even near fourth grade level and many do not speak English as their

native language. The wide range of student abilities in reading and writing makes it

very difficult to adequately teach and meet every students needs without the proper

forward planning and carefully thought out scaffolds in place. It is incredibly

important to me to be able to have all of my students reading on grade level by the

end of the school year and this organizational foundation will allow me to best

support my students.
CIL 621 Canady 12/11/17
Alyssa Glenn
The fourth grade teachers, strategists, and I produced a team drive

connecting our Google accounts that allows each of us to add, edit, and modify

documents and other materials as well as compile our unit lesson plans, separated

by standards. We were each able to discuss what we added in the team drive and

why we added it to ensure we had consistent communication and were able to share

as many of our resources as possible. This team drive provided many scaffolds for

our Tier II and Tier III students already put in place in our lesson plans, however I

felt that there were not enough resources for teaching our English language learner

students. I decided to supplement the materials in our Google drive with materials

and knowledge I had gained through dialogue in a TESL (teaching English as a

second language) class at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I had tracked

progress of a culturally and linguistically diverse student in my class with a case

study that allowed me to see how she responded to various scaffolds and

paralingual aids.

My original I As A Learner goal included that I acquire and implement at least

three (3) strategies to use with my current students, trying a new skill or strategy

every six (6) weeks. This turned out to be easily attainable; I was able to try out a

new strategy or skill every week and could adapt my teaching practice around what

worked for the children and what was not as effective. For example, the first

scaffolding strategy I included that addressed the needs of both my English language

learners and low-level students was to consistently create anchor charts with

visuals for each lesson and to update my classroom word wall with key vocabulary

essential for students to reference. This was very successful for these students and
CIL 621 Canady 12/11/17
Alyssa Glenn
they were able to refer back to them whenever necessary, specifically for

independent work and class discussion. A strategy that I implemented that was not

as successful was the use of an application on our classroom iPads call Duolingo. I

implemented the use of the Duolingo app in order to help my students that are still

in the emerging phase of learning English and have scored a one (1) on their WIDA

testing, which determines their language acquisition growth. This app was not

successful because it required many procedures and frequently confused my

students. The content was often not applicable to what we were learning in class

and did not have any academic language components, so the buy-in for my English

language learners was very low. After two (2) weeks of using the Duolingo

application, I decided against its continuation and began to look for new strategies

to aid in their English language acquisition.

This goal was very beneficial for me as a first year teacher. While I had a fair

idea of what would be required of me as a teacher, this goal served as a solid

foundation to build up from. I felt grounded and able to expand and truly focus on

teaching in the best way possible for each of my students, rather than trying to just

teach the curriculum materials without any sort of differentiation. I was more

prepared and able to critically analyze what I was doing in the classroom and

determine if I was being an effective educator and, in response, adjust my teaching

accordingly. I believe that I have met my goal for the semester and I will continue to

build on this goal for the second half of the school year and throughout the rest of

my years as a teacher.