Meagan Bourdage - Inquiry 2 Part A

1. Describe your target area for guided lead teaching.
• My target area for guided lead teaching will be writing instruction, specifically I will be teaching strategies for writing a personal narrative. 
2. Approximately how much time per day is allotted for your instruction in this area?
• Approximately half an hour per day is allotted for my instruction in this area.
3. Which Common Core State Standard(s) will you work toward? 
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.3 Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, descriptive details, and clear event sequences.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.3a Orient the reader by establishing a situation and introducing a narrator and/or characters; organize an event sequence that unfolds naturally.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.3b Use narrative techniques, such as dialogue, description, and pacing, to develop experiences and events or show the responses of characters to situations.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.3c Use a variety of transitional words, phrases, and clauses to manage the sequence of events.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.3d Use concrete words and phrases and sensory details to convey experiences and events precisely.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.5.3e Provide a conclusion that follows from the narrated experiences or events.
4. How will teaching in this target area provide opportunities for students to learn important content and/or skills that relate to their lives?  In what ways does this learning include learning literacy, learning about literacy, and/or learning through literacy?
• Teaching in this target area will be very beneficial and provide students an opportunity to learn important content and skills that they can use in their own lives. This unit really focuses on using personal events in writing which makes the writing meaningful to students. The students will learn through literacy when we use different mentor texts that will help to illustrate different strategies for writing personal narratives. The strategies that students learn can be used in other types of writing as well which means they will become better writers as a whole. Since they will be learning these strategies using mentor texts they will learn how to identify different strategies in other texts as well which will also help with comprehension. 
5. What types of classroom talk take place within this target area? To what extent is the talk teacher-led, student-led, or focused on higher-level thinking? What norms for interaction would you like to build within your classroom as you teach in this target area (e.g., see ideas in Chapter 6 of Strategies that Work, the Berne & Clark 2008 article, or draw from some of the readings done in TE 402 on classroom talk)? 
• Within this target area there will be different types of classroom talk taking place each day. The talk will be teacher-led and student-led when new strategies are being introduced. The teacher will talk to introduce the strategies and then call on students to share their own ideas and thinking about using the new strategy. A great deal is also focused on higher level thinking since students will be writing about their own experiences, which makes the lesson much more meaningful to them. This meaningfulness is what lends to higher level thinking. I hope to encourage students to share their text-to-self connections with the mentor texts since this will ultimately help them with their writing. 
6. Which ‘core practice’ do you want to work on developing/improving as you teach in this target area (refer to document “Resources for Developing Core Practices”)? How will focusing on this core practice contribute to your own professional learning? 
• The core practice that I want to work on developing/improving as I teach in my target area is writing instruction. Focusing on this core practice will help me with creating methods for teaching writing strategies that are effective and evoke higher level thinking. Focusing on this area will also help me to learn through doing, I will be able to see first hand which was most effective for my students. For example, I will learn if using writing journals was a positive practice. 
7. What resources within the community, neighborhood, school district, school or classroom do you have to work with in this target area? 
• There are many resources that I can use for teaching this unit. I think that I will mostly use the elmo and promethean that are located within the classroom. These are excellent resources that I have become more familiar with using. I can also use the school copier for handouts, school supplies available by my mentor teacher, and writing binders that each student already has set up. 
8. What additional resources do you need to obtain?
• I need to obtain the mentor texts that I required by this unit since my MT is new to fifth grade and hasn’t taught this unit before. 
9. How will you pre-assess your students in your target area?
• Students will be pre-assessed using an on-demand personal narrative writing pre-assessment. For this assessment students will given pages of loose-leaf paper and pencils to write a personal narrative about a moment they spent with a person that really matters to them. This piece of writing will be scored using an assessment rubric.
10. What else will you need to find out about all students in your class to help you develop lesson plans for your Guided Lead Teaching?
• I will need to look at other writing pieces to get a better picture of who my students are as writers. I feel that looking at just one piece of writing is not enough. I also want to have conversations with students to get a feel for their own personal feelings about writing (do they like to write? do they write for fun? etc.). Asking these questions will help me to make writing more meaningful for students. 
11. What else do you need/want to learn about the ‘core practice’ to support your planning and teaching?
• I would like to learn different strategies for teaching writing strategies, I’m curious to find out what works best in my classroom. I think that I have a lot to learn in this core practice because I’ve never had experience teaching it and my class hasn’t done a lot with writing thus far. 
12. What concerns, if any, do you have about planning and teaching your unit?
• I am most concerned about the fact that my mentor teacher has never taught this unit before. This means that if there are any kinks or things that just don’t work in the plan haven’t been ironed out yet and I’ll be the first to figure them out. I’m also concerned about the length of the unit and fitting it in with the 1/2 hour time frame that my MT has set aside for writing.