Sharing Teaching Expertise

Over the summer, I was home visiting my family in Buffalo and my sister-in-law and I took my daughters and nephew to the Buffalo Zoo. When we got to the Merry-Go-Round, my phone rang and one of my students called with a question. During our conversation, he shared how it can be challenging to be a new teacher because he doesn’t always feel he has someone to discuss his teaching with. It can be challenging to find someone to discuss your lessons with when you are a new teacher. This comment has stayed with me all semester and I have really tried to create spaces for the students to speak with each other about their teaching. The Literacy Coaching class I teach has been a place where I have been able to include time for the students to discuss particular lessons and meet with others who teach at similar grade levels to swap lesson ideas.

For the final assignment in the Literacy Coaching class, the students were asked to deliver a professional development session on an area of literacy instruction. They did an awesome job! They picked a range of topics to present on – engaging assessments, phonics instruction, teaching high frequency words, Social Emotional Learning, and creating a supportive learning environment  for literacy instruction. When presenting, the students were engaged and interested. They shared stories from their own teaching and why this type of instruction was working well for them. One student created many different phonics centers – all of them are highly interactive – and she shared how she decided on each center and also shared the amount of time it took her to create them (many weeks!). There was a lot of conversation and interaction during the sessions – the students presenting and from those attending the session were sharing their own experiences with the type of instruction.

Engaging Phonics Activities for Emerging Learners

As I was observing everything last night, my big take-away was that it is so important for teachers to have time to discuss their work and how it is going. These are powerful and impactful moments and the students will benefit.

An engaging and interactive way to assess students!