Projects and Students and Plans! Oh my!

As I reflect back onto the month of October, I can’t help but consider where we all were at this time last year.  Even with the things that we are facing in the day to day that are throwing us for a loop, we have to celebrate that we are leaps and bounds above where we started.  I have been grounding myself in that on the days where I am leaving work feeling exhausted or defeated.  I have come a long way with my students.  I have come a long way with my instruction.

Since last month, there have been even more changes to my life in the classroom.  I am no longer teaching reading and science but am now responsible for reading and language arts.  We have added a fourth fifth grade teacher to our team who is not teaching science.  While this was ANOTHER change that affected me greatly, this one was more welcome.  I am now able to really focus on my reading instruction and give the students the guidance that they need in the day to day to become great readers. 

As I consider my practice over the course of this month, I want to celebrate my writing class.  My students are really loving writing.  They are asking to work on their writing in the morning and any other free moment.  Some of them are taking their writing to lunch with them to work on it.  They are working so hard independently and in collaboration with one another to become great writers.  They are sharing their work readily no matter where they are and providing pointed and valuable feedback to their peers.  I am so proud as I watch them work together in writing block.  I am seeing large growth from many of my writers.  I am enjoying watching the choices that they are making in their writing and working with them to extend it.  Writing conferences are getting better with time.  We are finally getting into a good routine where they can articulate what they are working on better and talk through different parts of the writing process with me.  Conferences have been the biggest struggle but I feel like they are improving more and more as I ponder “How it’s going” with them each day.  Writing used to feel like such a burden each day that I wanted to hurry up and get through but it is so much more enjoyable for both me and my students.

I have been thinking a lot about how to take this success in writing and work its effectiveness into my TICC project.  The more I think about the project, the more I consider what I want for my students in a bigger picture.  I spend so much time and focus on the nitty gritty and day to day that I forget that there are things that I want to instill in my students that will guide them toward success in the long term. I want my students to be readers and writers – not for the purpose of passing a test, but as a way to equip them long term.  I want my students to know that they have a voice and that their voice can change their world.  This has come into culmination through my project through the term “self-advocacy” that keeps popping up for me as I have conversations with my students.  One of the ways that they can advocate for themselves is in their writing.  Written word is such a powerful means of communication and one that many of my students are lacking skills in.   I want to tie all these things together but I am still considering how to integrate all of these things together.

The other thing that has popped up this month is some of the relationships that I have with students.  I feel like that has been where most of my lows have come from in the day to day.  I have great relationships with almost all of my students but sometimes those great relationships don’t translate into the classroom.  There are a small handful of students that continually arise as behavior problems in class.  None of these students are in my homeroom and I think that many of them are not getting the attention that they want or deserve from me because I only see them for an hour a day and they are lumped in somewhere with 70 students.   In the upcoming month, I want to work on more individualized plans and relationships for a specific handful of students.  I think that this will revolutionize classroom culture and really change a lot of the issues that we have in class.  These students that I have in mind would have been DRC candidates last year and I want to carry out a similar process as I think about them, their families, their communities, and what they need from me as we move forward.