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Abby Prutzman

February 18, 2016


PD: Birmingham Area Reading Council
Today I attended a professional development opportunity hosted by the Birmingham Area
Reading Council (BARC). I was very excited to be able to attend this event, I love reading,
especially childrens literature. And wow, this was the perfect professional development for those
who love to read. Dr. Kelly Hill, a professor at UAB, gave a talk on her favorite childrens books
for 2016. She described the talk as speed dating for books! And that it was! She shared 34 books
with us in about 30 minutes. Dr. Hill showed fiction as well as non-fiction childrens literature. I
took away the titles of many different books that I would like to read in a future classroom. Dr.
Hill mentioned that this could be an activity you do with your students. You yourself could come
up with a list of books for the year and present them to the students.
After Dr. Hill presented we split up into groups and had the opportunity to go to a
session. I chose to go to a session with Stephanie Fort, a teacher at Shades Cahaba Elementary
School in Homewood. Mrs. Fort talked to us about the use of mentor texts during writing time
and how this instructional strategy has positively impacted her classroom. She explained that she
had not always been great at teaching writing. However, a few years ago she decided to change
that. She began to use a writing workshop as her writing instruction, teaching using mentor texts
and most importantly she has he students write every day. Mrs. Fort explained that through using
mentor texts as examples she was able to give students high quality examples and spark good
conversations about writing. Overall I really enjoyed this professional development. I walked
away from the event wit ha list of great childrens books as well as a better understanding of how
to use mentor texts in the classroom.

Abby Prutzman
PEI
April 22,2016
PD: Making Thinking Visible
This semester for a professional development experience we read the book Making
Thinking Visible with our PLC and held meetings to discuss our reading and thoughts about
implementing aspects of the text in the classroom. I can honestly say that at first I was not
looking forward to reading this book. However, as I began to read I found myself becoming
more and more interested. I would read different strategies and find myself thinking about how I
would use this in the classroom. The book, and information within, became extremely useful as I
began to write my unit study on American Indians. In my unit I used many of the strategies
mentioned in Making Thinking Visible; and I used them in different ways. Three specific
strategies I used in my unit are Claim-Support-Question, CSI and chalk talks.
Claim-Support-Question: I used the strategy claim-support-question as a basis for my
entire unit. I set up my lessons in a way that I was claiming a concept, supporting the
concept with facts and asking students to question my claim until they claimed it as well.
CSI: I used this strategy as a way to synthesize student learning in a particular lesson.
After talking about how a tribe attained their spiritual needs I had students complete this
activity. In total, thy complete three during the course of my lesson.
Chalk Talks: I used chalk talks as a way to engage students and connect themselves to the
content that was being discussed. The complete chalk talks about how they attained their
own needs. In doing this, they were better able to understand the overarching concept that
all humans have the same basic needs.

Abby Prutzman
April 23, 2016
PD: Edcamp Bham
Today we had the opportunity to attend Edcamp at Trace Crossings Elementary school. I
was unsure what to expect of this conference, I had never heard of Edcamp before. The
facilitators of this professional development described the conference as an unconference
conference. And I can say it truly lives up to this description. The conference did not have
traditional sessions or keynote speakers; it had a bank board. People were encouraged to sign up
to lead break out discussions. I, of course, did not lead a session. I was able to attend 5 different
sessions during my time at Edcamp. Each speaker touched on different aspects of educations and
encouraged those in the session to discuss the topic.
Of all of the speakers that I heard, my favorite was technology coach that worked for
Hoover City Schools. This speaker talked about digital storytelling. She offered up many
different resources you could use with your students for digital story telling. I enjoyed being able
to learn about new resources that I could potentially use in my classroom. There was a man
participating in the session that also knew of a few different resources and he also shared those
with us. I enjoyed the laid back environment of this session. Although there were some problems
with the technology, the speaker did a great job improvising.
Overall I thought that this was a good conference. However, I think I would get more out
of it if I were to attend as an educator rather than a pre-service teacher. Most of the sessions were
discussion based and because of my lack of experience in the classroom I was not realy able to
participate in a meaningful way. I did, however, enjoy listening to teachers from different schools
coming together to discuss similar issues and accomplishments.

Abby Prutzman
March 10, 2016
Professional Meeting
Today I attended a 3rd grade PST meeting. A PST meeting is a meeting where teachers
from a grade level, administration and any other relevant academic educators gather to discuss
children and ways to help the child and teach be more successful. At this PST meeting the
teachers each took turns discussing the students in their classroom that were receiving
intervention. One interesting thing I noticed at the meetings was that often times the reading or
math coach conflicted with the classroom teacher. After giving this some more thought I think a
reason for this could have been that they were looking for different outcomes. The reading or
math coaches are primarily focused on one subject while the classroom teacher has amore well
rounded view of the students.
There was one particular student that the team talked about that reminded me about what
we have been talking about in some of our classes. This particular child was struggling to
understand the concepts of multiplication and division. TO compound this problem, the parent
did not understand the new methods more teaching math (base 10, number line etc.). So at school
the child was being taught how to do math problems a certain way. And at home, the parents
were teaching the child the standard algorithms for multiplications and division. The problem
with this is that the child was not able to understand either type of math. The team decided that
the next step would be to conference with the part. I enjoyed that the team was able to help each
teacher create a course of action. Overall, I thought that it was a very interesting meeting an
enjoyed being able to listen to the teachers problem solve and together. It was a great model for
a what a productive professional meeting looks like.

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