Humanities Campus Visits - Snapshots from OC Taylor Elementary

Last week, I had the opportunity to spend a day alongside OC Taylor teachers and students. It was a great day filled with new ideas, interacting with students, and a memorable spelling bee! As this is the first year Ms. Young has been principal at OCT, I enjoyed seeing the way her leadership is already having an impact on classrooms. It is clear that teachers are making strides in their reading/writing workshop implementation and digging into the newly redesigned scope and sequences to adjust pacing and teaching practices to meet the new expectations.

My visit to OC Taylor started with the spelling bee. These students did an amazing job and had clearly studied lots about word patterns in order to be able to navigate their way through some words that most of us had never used! Speaking of spelling, I got to see some great examples of how teachers are studying words with their students. In 1st grade, I saw a very highly organized example of the Words Their Way program and the way it is meeting students' individual needs. I also loved seeing the energetic Watch Dog Dad working with readers in all of the 1st grade classrooms. Such a great program! As I moved throughout all grades, I got to see students meaningfully engaged during Tiger Time, beginning literature circles, writing in readers' notebooks, and some very well organized classroom libraries. I enjoyed having a 4th grade student explain to me all she had learned (and the research skills used to learn these things) in her passion project. She knew more about pandas than many zookeepers working in San Diego! :) One of my favorite ideas was the display of text-to-text, text-to-self connections, etc... in a 3rd grade room. What a great way to help students to be more mindful when they are noticing these things and to visually display this in a room (see picture in the OCT gallery). I saw many effective uses of technology, including the use of the Timeline app in 4th grade as students researched and built a timeline about Texas history.

As I wrap up my formal visits to all of GCISD's Humanities K-5 classrooms, I'm struck by the many common themes which I saw across all campuses. I'm so proud of our teachers for embracing the newly designed curriculum, adopting new instructional models, and staying committed to the work of developing empathetic students who are global citizens and effective communicators.

For a glimpse into the great teaching and learning I saw at OCT, please click here.

Humanities Campus Visits - Snapshots from Colleyville Elementary

Last week, I had the pleasure of spending time in the Humanities classrooms at Colleyville Elementary. They have been working hard during the past couple of years to adopt new reading and writing workshop practices, and getting to see these in action (and the impact on students) was a very rewarding experience. Truly, it was a joy to see the way they were taking risks to change teaching practices, empowering students to write about their interests, and fostering a love of reading across the grades.

In classrooms, I saw students working on cornerstone task completion (in a way that was aligned with the curriculum calendar), evidence on anchor charts of class discussions about social studies and ELA concepts, and students listening to read alouds about MLK and other current Humanities areas of interest. In 5th grade, I was blown away by the depth of conversation students were having during read aloud and during their comparisons between biographies and autobiographies. I also loved visiting several of CES's new teachers' classrooms. The first few years of teaching are SO challenging, but I was blown away by the maturity of these young teachers and the quality of work their students were doing. Reading and writing workshop practices are obviously being used this year on their campus. I saw examples of this across every grade with students reading and writing for real purposes, mini-lessons and conferring taking place, classroom libraries well organized, and writers' notebooks up to date with current writing and mini-lesson information.

I know CES has been working and learning lots about this model for the past couple of years. These efforts are bearing fruit and will continue to do so as students move from grade to grade with a similar instructional practices in place. For a peek into the classrooms I visited, please click here.