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.