Running head: TARGETING WHOLE GROUP INSTRUCTION FOR INDIVIDUAL

Targeting Whole Group Instruction For Individual Learners: Formative Assessment At Work Vanessa Graves Foster Montclair State University

TARGETING WHOLE GROUP INSTRUCTION FOR INDIVIDUAL Targeting Whole Group Instruction For Individual Learners: Formative Assessment At Work Lesson Progression I completed a 3 lesson writing unit of study in my first grade classroom of 27 diverse learners, focused on writing events in order, using sequential words, putting pictures into

sequence, and adding details to stories using their five senses. This unit worked to directly meet standards W.1.3 (write narratives in which they recount two or more appropriately sequenced events, include some details regarding what happened, use temporal words to signal event order, and provide some sense of closure) and RL.1.7(use illustrations and details in a story to describe its characters, setting, or events). In addition to these three more formalized lessons, I have continued to reinforce these concepts and skills through center activities and short "do now" worksheets, and will continue to have my students develop the pieces that have emerged from this unit. I came to this series of lessons with the goal of harnessing the data provided in student work in a real-time fashion, in order to guide and direct the instruction on both a whole group and individualized level. As Roskos and Neuman state, formative assessment involves making judgments about the quality of student responses (performances, student work) and using those judgments immediately (midstream in instruction) to guide and improve student understandings and skills. As such, each lesson emerged as a result of the lesson previous. I had some sense of where I wanted to go, but I changed my trajectory as I gained more evidence of my students needs. Each lesson began with a whole group session, but individual student writing took place during a center of the guided-reading rotation. This allowed me to work with 6 or 7 students at a time, offering daily one on one feedback and guidance to each student. This allowed the midstream changes to instruction to be a reality.

TARGETING WHOLE GROUP INSTRUCTION FOR INDIVIDUAL In my initial lesson, I discovered that writing in sequence is an activity that all of my

students, including my students who are in the prewriting stage, were able to engage in robustly. There was great purpose and reward in the sequential pictures that emerged for some, a sharp contrast to the single images that were typically produced by these same students during writing time.

Sample A

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Students who have struggled with idea generation benefitted from the concrete nature of this task: first, next and then seemed to give some structure to their usually swirling thoughts.

Sample B

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However, I could tell that students who are typically very free-flowing with ideas were restricted by these new words, and struggled to find their usual unique voice. In the next lesson, the focus on adding details served two purposes: allow more advanced writers an opportunity to infuse their own voice into this work, and give explicit directions to struggling students on how to further develop an idea. This is when the labeling that is evident in Sample A emerged. This student, who has never before independently written anything beyond a reorganization of the letters in his name, was able to work with an alphabet sheet that I provided to phonetically add mbnch (my bench) to his illustration of a park. He also named his characters: himself, his mother, his sister, and a boy from our class. After noticing this

TARGETING WHOLE GROUP INSTRUCTION FOR INDIVIDUAL inclusion, I reechoed to him the core take away from the whole group lesson on adding details: details help the reader envision exactly what you had in your head when you were writing. This

one interaction has had resonant implications on his other work in this classroom, and has helped to increase his confidence and willingness to apply phonetic inventive spelling to his stories. This speaks to the idea posited by Roskos and Neuman, that in formative assessment the teacher takes an active role to deliberately scaffold learning from a lower level to a higher level of performance. For my advanced writers, previously stagnant work was able to take on its own individual voice.

Sample C

I used a technique suggested in conversation with my literacy professor, and physically cut up the original stories provided by this group of students. Rather than a procedural-type

TARGETING WHOLE GROUP INSTRUCTION FOR INDIVIDUAL listing of first, next, and then, these students were able to add details and a corresponding illustration to continue to expand on their work. This proved to be an effective and freeing strategy for this group, as evidenced in Sample C. In addition to the freedom to expand their ideas, I provided my students with a concrete rubric for assessing their inclusion of details. I drew pictures to represent the five senses (a

mouth, a nose, a hand, an ear, an eye) and had students check off when they had included a detail that came from that particular sense. This idea aligns with Dudley-Marling and Paughs idea of a student friendly rubric that identifies the expectations for writing in a specific area and the notion to utilize rubrics in dialogue with students to drive instruction and to demonstrate what students know and can do. Having just completed a unit of study on the human body, my students were very familiar with their five senses and including this pictorial rubric helped to increase their confidence in being able to link their prior knowledge to this new task. The final lesson emerged as a result of some students seeming to be stuck by writing about their own experiences, rather than freed. One student in particular, who is highly capable but who has issues with self-confidence that inhibit his ability to write using inventive spelling, added details to his story by copying words from his student dictionary: I see a horse. I see a lamb. I see a cat. For him in particular, I found that the provision of story sequence cards that dealt with a story that he already knew allowed him to relax his insistence on perfect spelling in favor of his desire to retell the story accurately. This then allowed for more work with details to

TARGETING WHOLE GROUP INSTRUCTION FOR INDIVIDUAL emerge in later lessons.

Sample D

Other students were able to grow as a result of the work with sequencing unknown stories. One student in particularly has a strong preference for writing about one particular birthday party. Introducing her to the sequencing cards helped her to expand her repertoire of story ideas. The story that she wrote would read: First I go to pack some worms to catch fish. Next down the fish rod. The I pull the fish rod for I can catch the fish I catch. I was struck by her inclusion of worms in the beginning of the story, because the sequencing cards of a boy fishing do not depict worms or bait at all. This was her inclusion of a detail that made sense for the story she wanted to tell, and it demonstrated growth in her ability to sequence events in order to tell a detailed story.

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Sample E

Implications for Future Work The ability to do this unit showed me several things. First, although students may have a wide diversity of needs, one whole group lesson can indeed meet the needs of 27 unique learners, but only when coupled with sufficient small group and one on one work. As stated in Rouskos and Neuman, focusing on a few children at any one time is a form of sampling and makes a lot of sense in a busy classroom. While I will not have the luxury of co-teaching next year, and will likely not be able to meet with all 27 students on the same day, I can clearly see the value of having this data to work with and directly hone my lessons. Midstream shifts in instruction seem less overwhelming, and I feel much greater freedom in being able to do what my students need, even if it deviates from the prescribed script. I am a bit overwhelmed when I consider the possibility of some students being lost when I am alone in a classroom, particularly the students at the top and the bottom of the group. Hopefully I will be able to create a more formalized data collection system that will help to prevent this from happening.

TARGETING WHOLE GROUP INSTRUCTION FOR INDIVIDUAL In the current instructional atmosphere of Newark, I have witnessed many disparate curricular pieces being thrown at students in a disjointed way, all in a rush to keep up with pacing charts and mandated expectations. This speaks to the conversations we have had regarding rigor- what it entails, what it can and cannot do for students, and what implications overemphasis on it as a buzz word can have in classrooms. I am now more confident stepping into the world of rigor, as I believe I can craft my instruction and interpretation of curricular

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tools in a way that both provides developmentally appropriate cognitive demand for students, but also results in a context-rich, seamlessly woven progression through material. Simply infusing the five senses, as taught in our CORE Knowledge curriculum, into this unit allowed for a continuity of learning that I hope to replicate in my future work. I get a sense that the work that emerged from this unit was a good place to start, but is far from the end of where we can go. We can do more work to recognize the uniqueness of each students individual viewpoint, by undergirding that not all viewpoints have to be the same, and that two people can write about the same thing in totally different ways. One idea I have for this is having the students write about one shared concrete experience, and allow their different thoughts to emerge. I can mitigate the risk of students feeling forced to write about one thing by providing a sufficiently rich and multifaceted experience that can be reflected on in a variety of ways that appeals to many learners. One idea that I have is to have students use pictures that we took from a field trip to an urban farm, where they were involved with harvesting plants, tasting vegetables, moving dirt, and smelling herbs as a sequential writing prompt involving details gained from the five senses. I believe that this will be a richer assignment because of the foregrounding done in this unit.