Book Club Plus Week 4

Like my co-members of this blog, I am also in an upper elementary classroom, and because of this all of our literacy instruction has been MEAP based and does not mirror our actual classroom instruction on literacy.  I however have been able to talk to my CT about what our classroom is going to be like after the tests, so I used those conversations in my hypothetical comparison for this blog.

            In the assessment chapter, I really found a lot of thing that I think are similar to our literacy model.  Our students will be placed in leveled reading groups, similar to the book club plus model.  In these groups, each student has a role they are responsible for while all reading a common book.  These groups are discussion based, with the students responsible for their own progress and learning.  The Book Club plus framework discusses self-evaluation, and at the end of each of our student’s books, they have a self and group evaluation form that they fill out.   In terms of assessments that I have seen so far in my classroom, we have done DRA’s and collected a few writing samples.  Other than this, there hasn’t really been any assessment done (once again, blame the MEAP).  The writing samples we do have are paragraphs based upon a prompt, but were not assessed in a formal way.  We are still definitely in the process of determining levels and abilities, and don’t really have very much for formal assessments.

The book also identified the importance of matching up to benchmarks and standards.  While I have been unable to really see this in literacy in my classroom, I know that in all of our other subjects so far, we write the objective on the board and state it for our students.  This not only gives the students a common goal and purpose, but also allows for us as teachers to really shape our daily instruction.  I really liked the idea of shaping these objectives in the frame of “I can statement”, because I feel it really would give students ownership of their own learning, as well as a form of assessment for teachers.

When reading about the classroom management strategies, it was really almost impossible for me to make connections, as these are all specific to the framework that I haven’t been able to observe yet.  In terms of selecting quality literature, my CT has a selection of books that are sorted by level and genre that she has students select their books from.  After looking through these books, I have seen that  these books contain themes and topics that really allow for discussion and have content relatable to the 5^th grade standards.  These books are also incredibly diverse and are culturally relevant to our schools diverse population.   I’m not sure exactly how my CT normally groups our students, however I really liked the idea of grouping quiet students together or a group of talkative students.  I also thought it would be better to pair some quiet and some talkers, however upon thinking about it further I really see the potential advantages.  Students who are generally normally quiet would have to speak if they were in a group together, rather than a talkative student taking over.  Vice versa, important compromise skills could be learned by a group of talkative students.  After reading about all of these ideas, I’m really interested to see how my CT conducts our literacy.