Instructional Dynamics I: Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment for Integrated, Engaging and Creative Lessons

How do children become readers and writers?

This was the guiding question for Instructional Dynamics I, a course which was centered around a 60-hour practicum in an primary level literacy classroom. I completed my practicum for this course in a local third grade classroom. During my time there, I got to know the teacher and the students, helped out as needed, and designed and taught a lesson of my own.

The primary text we used in this course was Thomas Gunning's Creating Literacy Instruction for All Students. This book is incredibly practical, yet thorough, and gives a lot of good advice for teaching literacy to children at all different levels.

One thing I took away from this text is the idea of Reader Response Theory. This is the idea that the reader plays a great role in making meaning of a text; meaning is built, in part, on a reader's prior knowledge and experience, so meaning can be quite subjective according to who the reader is. In a literacy classroom, this means that we teach our students to take on active roles as readers, and we teach them how to analyze what they're reading and make judgments about it so they can develop a deeper connection to it. Hearing their fellow classmates' thoughts on what they're reading helps them, too, to broaden their understanding.

The book also mentioned that it's important to expose kids to higher level vocabulary by labeling things around the room. Ultimately, though, the best way to have students develop a richer vocabulary, though, is by having them read a wide range of texts.

One of the highlights of this course, for me, was the exposure to all sorts of children's literature that we got. Not only did we get to see and read a lot of different children's books, we also learned a lot about how to use them in our classrooms for literacy instruction. I created a book review presentation for three books (although it was hard to choose just three!).

Another valuable resource we used was the book, How to Create a Culture of Achievement in Your School and Classroom. One chapter entitled, "Do No Harm," reminded me a lot of the work of Barbara Coloroso.

I presented to the class on an article by Bridgit Dalton called, "Engaging Children in Close Reading: Multimodal Commentaries and Illustration Remix." The main point of the presentation was that inferencing--the engine of comprehension--can be facilitated through multimodal close-reading activities, including using Powerpoint.

We discussed in class how powerful the use of puppets can be in a literacy classroom, that Readers Theater is a valuable tool, and that it's important to teach children the habits of good readers. We talked, too, about how to identify "just right" books for students using the five finger rule: If there are five words or more that you don't know on one page, then the text is just a little too difficult for you. We also discussed the the importance of writing in the classroom and various ways to incorporate it into the class.

Just like in the math practicum, this literacy practicum was a huge learning opportunity for me. I learned more about what goes into writing lessons and determining if what I'm doing is working for my students (formative assessments). Above all, I have an even clearer vision of the type of educator I hope to be and a better understanding of how to go about doing that.