BLOCK III EDCI 362 Literacy in the Elementary School, Part I Beverly Cox October 19, 2007

EDCI 362 Teaching Literacy, Part I To successfully meet the needs of today’s learners, prospective teachers build:  A sound (though developing) background in literacy theory, research, and pedagogy.

EDCI 362  Our theoretical framework for building this background:  Revisits fundamental issues and concepts through a spiraling approach, and  Is coupled with an experiential model that supports opportunities for feedback, reflection, skill development, and scaffolding.  This research ‑ based, systematic teaching method that helps students consolidate knowledge, skills, and strategies more effectively is implemented in an elementary school where students meet for 5 hours of instruction per week, including a 2 hour practicum with a Mentor Teacher over a 15 week period.

EDCI 362 continued  The university instruction focuses on the cognitive, perceptual, and sociocultural aspects of literacy and how literacy learning, teaching, and assessment can be effectively and systematically integrated and diversified to meet individual needs.  To this end, our goals are to develop literacy teachers who:  Understand current models and theories of language and literacy development, learning, assessment, and responsive teaching.  Identify patterns of language, reading, and writing development among elementary children  Understand and evaluate a continuum of approaches to teaching literacy.

 Understand the specific skills and strategies involved in the development of students’ literacy abilities  Critically examine and evaluate literacy curricula and practices that are employed in public schools.  Develop, teach, and reflect upon lesson plans and units that integrate literacy with other subject areas.  Understand and implement formal and informal assessment tools and how the results of these tools influence instructional decisions.  Develop a literacy program that meets the needs diverse students.

Regarding the Integration of Literacy and Content Areas To integrate literacy and social studies:  Students plan and teach an integrated lesson in the elementary classroom.  Students work in teams to develop an extensive two week Integrated Literature Unit based on Indiana Standards for both literacy and social studies. Includes planning a 2 week overview and 4 integrated lessons which address social studies content as well as literacy activities such as vocabulary (or word work), drama, text/literature comprehension, and a writing workshop.

Regarding the Use of Informal Assessment to Guide Instructional Decisions - The Emergent Literacy Project for Taskstream requires  Each Purdue student to work one-on-one with a kindergartener by  Reading to and talking with the child over a 1-2 week period  Assessing the child’s  Concepts About Print  Emergent writing and re-reading of his/her writing  Emergent reading of a favorite storybook  Classroom writing sample  Evaluating the assessment results through a workshop and conferencing with the Purdue instructor

Emergent Literacy Project continued  Develop a class profile from the assessment results  Use the profile and individual results to develop two connected, developmentally appropriate, ILAS indicator- based, and multi-level literacy lessons that will benefit both the class and the target child.  Write a paper:  addressing the demographics and culture of the community, school, and child  analyzing how the two literacy lessons meet the INTASC Standards and the Gate C Rubric.

Regarding the Development, Teaching, and Reflection on Lesson Plans  Each Purdue student is required to develop, submit for approval, and teach 3 lesson plans.  A social studies lesson plan (the Taskstream artifact)  A literacy lesson plan  An integrated (social studies and literacy) lesson plan  Following teaching of each lesson plan, the student is required to submit the Mentor Teacher’s evaluation and his/her own reflection on the lesson plan and performance.

Scenes from EDCI 362!