CORTNIE BELSER'S MSED PORTFOLIO
Weekly Routines
To strengthen classroom culture and climate, routines and structures foster consistency and discipline for students to understand and practice instructional strategies the teacher builds to meet students' learning goals.
Introduction
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Every classroom has routines and procedures that teachers and students follow in order to ensure smooth transitions, reiterate high priority tasks, and instill consistency as a critical skill in college and career readiness. In my classroom, intentional weekly routines are reinforced through academic skills that illustrate to students the importance of maintaining high expectations towards learning goals. Since I have established instructional routines as a strategy, students hold me accountable to providing content knowledge or skills practice that allows them to be successful throughout the week. Since instructional strategies function to encourage learners to develop deeper understandings of content and their connections, I utilize instructional routines to hold myself as a teacher accountable to ensuring I am providing students access to rigorous learning. In addition, I use these three main instructional routines to backwards plan how a week's content and skill focus is practiced and out of the classroom. Moreover, these instructional routines encourage students to connect their lived experience and content knowledge through multiple lens of reading and writing. The instructional routines highlighted demonstrate how teachers can build student engagement through daily and weekly practices that students know impact their achievement in the course. As weekly routines, students know that the content and skills expressed in the beginning of the week are structures of support for their formative performance at the end of the week or unit.
Weekly Instructional Schedule ​
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Each day of the week, I craft a mini-lesson during instruction that reinforces the class's learning goal of the week. Each day has its own focus and the instructional activity could range from 15 to 45 minutes during the day's lesson. As another form of an instructional strategy, the purpose and intent of each day is represented in its title:
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This weekly routine reinforces a variety of instructional strategies through integrating cross-disciplinary content, infusing technology, and offering students opportunity to engage in reading and writing skills practice. I have found that providing students with a weekly instructional routine allows them to understand how they learn differently through a variety of methods. In addition, it guides students' self-efficacy as they know they will have opportunities to practice content skills, pose clarifying questions, or utilize their critical thinking throughout the week. As the teacher, I have found that students invest in instructional routines as they feel that they can be successful when there are transparent academic expectations.
Music Mondays: Since music is an informal instructional strategy I utilize in my classroom, I decided to introduce each week with a creative writing prompt tied to music. On Mondays, after the restorative circle, students listen to a chosen song and we review the creative writing prompt choices of the week. To reinforce text-to-self-to-world connections, students engage in a close reading of the song lyrics and practice another academic skill such as annotations or text-dependent responses. By the end of the week, students will revisit the song during an individual or group formative assessment that integrates content knowledge or skill through the various instructional strategies introduced during the week.
The PowerPoint above demonstrates how I incorporate Music Monday into content or current events of the week.
The image above shows two student leaders annotating the questions to prepare students for the video.
This is a sample of the response students are expected to provide in the five minute writing prompt.
Text & Talk Tuesdays: Through planning and teaching experience, I have constructed my weekly instructional schedule to reflect the culture of academic engagement and rigor consistent with my school. Since Mondays tend to offer less instructional engagement due to school announcements, low student attendance, and the overall climate of the beginning of the week, I have introduced this instructional routine to reflect the values and experiences of myself students. Instead of using Monday as an intensive reading instructional day, I construct Tuesday lessons and activities to reinforce reading comprehension and enrichment. While reading and content knowledge is introduced on Mondays, students do not get to the main chunk of reading and analysis until Tuesday. On Tuesdays, students can also expect to have either independent or small group reading. This instructional routine encourages learners to spend structured time engaging in rigorous reading and building reading comprehension skills. Even though Tuesdays are not the only day students are engaged in reading rich and rigorous texts, I focus instruction heavily on reading comprehension and analysis so that students can begin to apply content knowledge and skills throughout the rest of the week.
The image above represents a group of students participating in academic discourse using the Stop, Say, Ask discussion protocol. As shown in the image, each student is performing a different task such as reading, annotating, and writing responses, while all engaged in rigorous reading and discussion.
The PowerPoint above represents one of the ways I integrate Text & Talk Tuesdays as an instructional strategy. To give students an opportunity to read and analyze texts through student-friendly discourse prior to assessments, it serves as an instructional strategy to meet diverse learning needs.
Gallery Walk Wednesdays: As a midweek point, it is essential for me to provide students with adequate opportunity to remain engaged in learning throughout the week. Thus, weekly gallery walks present students with content in visual forms so that they can deepen their understanding of content or apply cross-disciplinary skills. Each gallery walk does not take up the entire instructional time of the day, but is the anchor instructional activity almost all Wednesdays. As students rotate around the classroom, they have an opportunity to be mobile learners and work collaboratively in their groups. During this same time, I am able to rotate to smaller groups of students to evaluate their progress and gauge common misconceptions, strengthened skills, and the depth of understanding across students. As students synthesize connections between Monday and Tuesday's content with the written and visual content presented on Wednesday, this functions as formative assessments to measure gaps in knowledge and application of skill that can be reinforced later in the lesson or week.
The students in the two images above demonstrate how students are on-task and engaged during most weekly gallery walks. Even though the student on the left is working independently, I allow groups of 3 to collaborate as shown in the image on the right. As an instructional strategy, I encourage peer collaboration as a gallery walk can be a productive time for students to clarify understandings or deepen content knowledge though student-to student interactions.
Techy Thursdays: On Thursdays, I utilize interactive learning technology platforms to integrate multimedia learning for students. As a point of access to equity, I chose to integrate technology in my classroom to demonstrate to my students how to effectively and productive use their technology for learning. Since more than 70 percent of my students have access to a cell phone, gaming device, or another technology platform with internet access, I encourage them to complete homework assignments and engage with online resources that reinforce the content knowledge and skills applied in class. Through this instructional strategy, I am able to establish a routine for students to understand when they can utilize their technology in class.During Thursdays, a part of instruction engages students in the subject matter either through incorporating video or visuals or assessing students learning for online formative assessment resources. Based on data from Thursday assessments, I am able to make informed adjustments to the end-of-the-week assessment and address gaps in student learning so that my instructional strategies make content more meaningful.
The PowerPoint to the left is a sample of how I introduce the activity for Tech Thursday. Often times, to reinforce the vocabulary of the week, I will incorporate content knowledge through the technology engagement to assess how student are moving towards meeting their academic goals. As an instructional strategy, I offer students a variety of choices to present their understanding.
The student work sample to the right is the finished product of a Tech Thursday instruction. Since this particular Tech Thursday was used to reinforce the vocabulary word of the week, I tailored instruction to provide students who struggle with vocabulary comprehension with an additional layer of learning to deepen their understanding. This student's visual reveals that an area of growth in his comprehension is to assess an analysis of vocabulary in real-world contexts.
The images above demonstrate how students take advantage of the differentiation provided throguh Tech Thursdays. While the female students in the image on the left are typing their stories, the male group on the right image are constructing a PoerPoint presentation of their story.
Formative & Flashback Fridays: Every Friday, students are engaged through either an assessment or reteaching lesson. First, for formative assessments, Fridays serve this purpose through end-of-the-week quizzes, tests, or assessments. Secondly, I utilize data from previous Friday's formative assessments to inform me on what skills students have not reached at least 85 percent or above mastery. For these students, I will offer a mini-lesson, small-group instruction, or additional classwork to reinforce these skills. As an instructional routine, Fridays allow me and my students to evaluate the effectiveness of the entire week's instructional practices as each one builds on the other to inform deeper understandings.
The Powerpoint above is a sample of formal Formative Friday in which students take a more traditional test or quiz. As shown in the first two slides, I establish the expectation of these formative assessments so that students understand positive testing culture. Additionally, as slide 2 demonstrates, I will play music during the assessment as a strategy to engage students.
The image above shows a group of students engaging in an informal formative assessment through Kahoot, an online interactive assessment tool. As pictured, the students got the answer correct which I am able to observe as I rotate the room during the game.
Weekly Restorative Circles
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As a restorative practices school, every middle school grade has a morning circle after breakfast. In addition, school administration has encouraged all middle school teachers to integrate restorative circles in their classrooms at least twice a week. While the structure of the restorative circles can range in practice, as an instructional strategy they facilitate conversations that can draw connections between content and real-world problems and serve as an anchor during class discussions.
In my classroom, restorative circles occur every Monday and Thursday immediately after students complete their Ready now drill. Every week, 2-3 students volunteer or are selected to design the restorative circle in class. While some students allow a sitting circle, others assert the need for students to stand in a traditional circle. In addition, students decide on the question or prompt that connects to the class's essential question, vocabulary, learning goals, or other content as well as personal experiences. As an instructional routine, I prioritize the consistency and engagement necessary to maintain student investment in the classroom restorative circles. Through implementing restorative circles in class, I have found that students are more attentive during instruction when they can utilize shared experiences and knowledge in connection with content. This routine is a beneficial instructional strategy as it promotes student ownership and encourages the lead student to draw upon class content to connect to personal experiences as a way to deepen understandings.
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The image above shows the guidelines and assignment set-up for the weekly gallery walks. To encourage students to activiely participate, I include behavioral and academic expectations.