September Article for Instructor Magazine
How Research Informs the Grade I Teach: Am I Suited to Teach at the Grade Where I Have Been Assigned?---Part 2 (Tentative Title)
By Drs. Cathy Collins Block, Professor of Education, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, TX; and John N. Mangieri, Director, Institute for Literacy Enhancement, Charlotte, NC
This is the second in a series of articles designed to help you become the best teacher that you can be. Research has shown that exemplary teachers share common traits, such as high standards for student performance, effective classroom management, and in depth content knowledge (Block & Mangieri, 2003; Ruddell, 1998). Recently, a new study of educators in 33 United States, six Canadian providences, and seven English-speaking nations outside of North American revealed that exemplary teachers also possess 42 characteristics that are necessary for students to reach their fullest potentials at specific grade levels (Block & Mangieri, 2003; Block, Oakar & Hirt, 2002). These qualities were grouped into six domains of knowledge. Do you possess these abilities?
In the August 2003 Instructor, we presented three of these domains. In this article, you can assess your abilities in the remaining three bodies of grade-specific knowledge: (1) Are the actions you take the most effective ones to motivate your students? (2) When you reteach, are your actions those hold the highest likelihood of eliminating students' confusion? and, (3) Do your lessons contain the features and learning principles that students need at the specific grade level that you teach?
Whether you are a preservice teacher, veteran educator, principal, or central administrator, you can use the information in this article to answer these questions. It can assist you to (1) make more informed decisions about individual grade level assignments, (2) ensure that important teaching competencies are assessed in professional evaluations, and, (3) implement professional development opportunities that hold the most potential of increasing your and your colleagues' competencies.
To begin, we ask you to answer three questions from the National Exemplary Literacy Teaching Assessment (NELTA) (Block & Mangieri, 2003). Please circle the letter that most closely describes the first and most frequent action that you would take in each of the situations posed in the stems of questions 1, 2, and 3. Try not to guess what response you should give. Rather, if you select the response that most closely describes your present actions, you can ensure that your results will be most accurate.
What do your responses tell us? First, is there a pattern to your answers? For example, if you circled Òa, a, cÓ, then two thirds of your teaching repertoire is characteristic of teachers at level A. Did you record a different letter for each of the three test items? This pattern indicates that your behaviors are characteristics of exemplary teachers at three different grade levels.
Second, your individual answers can provide valuable information about how successful you are likely to be in three domains of professional responsibility at the grade level to which you are, or will be, assigned. Level A answers are behaviors used by exemplary kindergarten teachers, whose students mastered decoding more rapidly than peers who were taught by teachers who did not possess these abilities. Level B answers described behaviors of exemplary first-grade teachers, whose actions caused their students to achieve above grade level when compared to peers from the same social economic level (Block, 2001). Level C answers represent behaviors of exemplary second grade teachers, whose pupils gained more in literacy than did peers taught by teachers who did not possess these abilities. Level D answers are indicative of exemplary third grade teachers' actions more often than exemplary teachers at other grade levels or their less effective peers. Level E answers are representative of behaviors performed more frequently by outstanding fourth grade teachers. Level F answers represent the behaviors of the most effective fifth grade teachers.
Test item #1 describes the actions that you enjoy taking to motivate students. While excellent teachers were observed using each action described in item #1, the traits that were called upon most frequently by exemplary teachers at individual grade levels to motivate their students are described below. How can you use this information?
First, as you read the next six paragraphs, you can learn if the actions you most enjoy taking are the ones that have proven to be those that are most important to motivate students at your grade level. If they are, then you can rest assured that by improving the actions you are presently taking, you are providing maximum growth for pupils. If they are not, you can work to incorporate more of these behaviors into your teaching repertoires, or work to be assigned to a grade level in which the actions you most enjoy, and perform most ably, are called upon more frequently.
The levels of emotional involvement and positive self concepts that students are willing to invest in learning effect their motivation. Before most unmotivated students can move from feelings of indifference to a total commitment to learn, they need an exemplary teacher who knows how to build their intrinsic motivation. They are exceptionally talented at intervening appropriately when students face obstacles. Depending upon the age and needs of their students, they will take actions to vary (a) the breadth and depth of the content that they introduce, (b) the number of books that they teach in a specific day, (c) the time allotted to reading instruction, (d) the number of goals that they set for the class, or (e) the variety of materials used in instruction. In the next paragraphs, you will see the specific actions that exemplary teachers take to increase the successes for students at a specific levels on the developmental continuum, and commit fewer missteps in the process of motivating them.
A. Kindergarten Enliveners. Exemplary kindergarten teachers have exceptional skill in motivating students to learn through choral readings/songs, acting out stories, and using objects to teach reading. Such actions enable students to re-engage for longer periods of time that leads to students' greater commitment to master difficult tasks. These educators also have exceptional skill in stimulating children's imagination during shared readings, and providing time for indifferent students to learn at their own pace during whole class lessons than less effective peers. For example, students who do not yet understand that print is to be read from left to right sit beside those that do, and students who recognize single letters are encouraged to identify as many as they can when big books are read in a large group setting.
B. First Grade Stimulators. First grade exemplary literacy teachers motivate students by varying the depth, rate, and depth of lessons. It is common for them to teach up to 20 different skills in a single hour. Each day is packed with a multitude of constantly changing instructional activities to motivate students to want to learn. They create challenges and games so that students can enjoy themselves while learning. Unlike exemplary kindergarten teachers, each day they plan many varied experiences with difficult concepts so that all students can enter the world of literacy with greater ease. Such teachers are more adept at teaching many basic literacy concepts continuously in short segments than expert teachers at other grade levels.
C. Second Grade Connectors. Second grade exemplary teachers motivate their students by demonstrating how all subcomponents in a learning process can be tied together into one enjoyable, information-gaining process. They show how much they enjoy reading or writing themselves to motivate their students, and demonstrate how reading increases enjoyment in their lives. For example, they describe what they are thinking as they read as well as incidents within their own lives that enabled them to grow to become stronger decoders, comprehenders, vocabulary builders, and more fluent readers. Exemplary second-grade teachers are masterful at creating innovative whole-class, game-like learning experiences. For instance, they build students' alphabetizing skills through dictionary sword drills rather than through worksheet exercises. Such game-like lessons are intense learning experiences, and were observed to occur more frequently in these teachers' classes than in those at other grade levels.
D. Third Grade Promoters of Books . Exemplary third grade teachers motivate their students by introducing more genres from greater arrays of reading material than peers at other grade levels. In doing so, more of their students will fall in love with a specific book, and following these personal connections, these teachers place similar texts in their pupils' hands that they have never seen before. Through these actions, exemplary third-grade teachers keep students' interest alive on a student-by-student basis. These educators are also exceptionally skilled at helping third graders discover a favorite book that will last as a favorite throughout their lives. They keep students' interests alive by introducing new authors, stopping at a point that leaves students breathlessly waiting to discover Òwhat's nextÓ in a story, developing more complete character understandings, and teaching students how to turn to literacy to answer questions.
E. Fourth Grade Involvers. Excellent fourth-grade literacy teachers motivate students by varying their instructional statements so that pupils can move up or down the cognitive scale instantly to adopt information to their own needs. Through their masterfully crafted instructional sentences, these professionals keep most students highly intrigued with many topics. One of the exemplary teachers in our studies said, what in many respects could have been said about most exemplary fourth educators: ÒI say to my students that wherever they know now, they cannot be satisfied, because wherever that is, it is lower then they will understand tomorrow, after the next day's learning experiences.Ó Every day challenges these students' cognitive development, and it is this continuous challenge that demonstrated to build their internal motivation.
F. Fifth Grade Ingenious Producers. Exemplary fifth-grade teachers motivate students by producing innovative instructional activities that balance their two equally important goals: students' cognitive abilities and their self-efficacy. These experts believe that social developmental goals can be reached through cognitively-based lessons, and the intensely personal nature of their lessons significantly increases students' motivation to improve their own knowledge. These master educators are exceptionally sensitive to, and greatly vary, the amount of time that they spend teaching a concept to sustain student's interest. They also bring new research findings into a lesson more frequently than expert teachers at other grade levels.
Reteaching
It's not surprising that the ability to reteach is one of the six domains of teaching behaviors that distinguish highly from less successful teachers. In question # 2 above, you identified the actions you most often take to reteach. In the next discussion, we will take the information that you gained and enhance it. We will discuss specific reteaching actions that enhance students' understanding at specific grade levels.
K. Kindergarten Strategic Repeaters. Exemplary kindergarten teachers are termed Òstrategic repeatersÓ because that is precisely what they do often and well when reteaching. They allow more time for students to learn by repeating, repeating, and repeating instructions until students have learned a concept. Second, they invite many adults into the room to assist when instruction is occurring. Because of this resultant low student to adult ratio, exemplary kindergarten teachers, adult volunteers, or highly skilled peers are present to reteach when individuals need it. Third, these master teachers use the same concrete object that was present in the initial learning experience to reteach a concept. For example, when a specific repetitive book is used to introduce a phonological/phonemic awareness principle, subsequent exposures to that learning objective will use the same book so that students hear it repeatedly.
B. First-Grade Expectationists.. Exemplary first grade teachers reteach by communicating high but realistic expectations continuously. These master educators insist that all students work up to their capacities every day. Unlike their kindergarten peers, they review concepts using a wide variety of new content books, methods, and contexts that deviate from those used in the initial teaching episode. A third reteaching strategy that proven highly effective at this grade level is to establish two goals for each independent practice sessions. For instance, when students are to compose, their work must contain five sentences and each one must begin with a capitol letter. Or, when students read orally, these teachers' instructions might be: ÒI am listening to how well you read in phrases like we learned yesterday, and how well you think about the meanings of words as you sound them out. I'll ask you to tell me the meanings of words that you are struggling to pronounce and I'll pay attention to how well you read the phrasesÓ. These teachers increase demands steadily as the year progresses using intense scaffolding with children who need to be retaught.
C. Second-grade Improvisers. Highly effective second grade teachers distinguish themselves from exemplary teachers at other grade levels by reteaching with strategies that were not used in kindergarten or first grade. These strategies address the wide ranges in learning styles and levels of conceptual knowledge that charaterize second graders. These teachers are quick-thinkers, capable of improvising new, fresh demonstrations of previously taught concepts on the spot. They also reteach through masterful one-to-one conferences that enable these educators to relate to students in personalized manners, and provides students with extra time to fulfill individual gaps in understanding. Essentially, exemplary second grade teachers Òhold children's handsÓ individually during reteaching activities, until each child can answer their own questions about unknown concepts.
D. Third Grade Portrayers. Exemplary third grade teachers can be distinguished from peers at other grade levels by their highly honed abilities to cultivate new interests within their students. This occurs by portraying new horizons of knowledge and introducing new interests are what they use to reteach. They are also masterful at lifting students over obstacles that block their individual learning curves. For example, when students do not learn a concept during a first attempt these teachers (1) bring in different books and if these only have a few pictures, they bring the content to life with vivid stories and examples; (2) develop vivid backgrounds rapidly; (3) stimulate exploration of specific topics in greater depth; and/or, (4) reteach concepts in small groups, as soon as some students have not learned them on an initial exposure.
E. Fourth-Grade Tutors of Thinking. Exemplary fourth grade teachers reteach by teaching students how to ask questions of themselves whenever they have not learned. These professionals are very approachable and distinguish themselves from peers at other grade levels by being exceptionally skilled at teaching critical thinking. They reteach by helping students infer the cause of confusions, and instructing them in how to elicit several strategies to overcome misunderstandings for the rest of their lives.
F. Fifth-Grade Analyzers. Exemplary fifth grade teachers reteach by analyzing a content domain and emphasizing only its critical components. For instance, these highly effective teachers re-instill a love for literacy by (1) distinguishing features in award-winning literature, (2) teaching students how to analyze a story's structure, (3) reteaching how to predict outcomes in a novel, and (4) using students' writing to reteach and increase their depth of thinking about a wide range of subject matters. These master teachers also reteach by delving into many layers of meaning during a single lesson. Most of their students will not have considered many of these meanings in prior instructional settings. They are also Òmasterful devils advocatesÓ, debaters, and higher-level question posers.
Prior to the research upon which this article is based, most professors and directors of professional developments believed that a standard lesson plan format would address teachers' needs regardless of the grade level at which they taught. We now know that unique features should be included in lessons designed for individual grade levels. In question # 3 above, you identified traits in lessons upon which you frequently rely. In the next discussion, we will describe characteristics built into grade-specific lessons of outstanding teachers that significantly increased their students' achievement.
A. Kindergarten Positive Pacers. Exemplary kindergarten teachers are masters at creating lessons that respect and enable a student's individualized pace of learning. As we all are aware students even as young as five years of age tend to live up to others' expectations. In exemplary kindergarten teachers' classrooms, students perceive that their teachers see them in their best light. As a result, children engage in significantly more cognitive tasks because they want to share more of their best selves with their teachers. The pleasing result is that, in these kindergarten classes, lessons contain the following features: (a) students move their eyes appropriately from left to right as they read print from big books and eventually as they pretend to read smaller books; (b) read the alphabet and individual letters more frequently, (c) learn letter names and sounds faster; (d) play more oral blending games with and without their teachers being present; and, (e) more fully engage students in phonemic development activities such as oral segmentation of separate words into sound. These lessons also ask students to write what they can and teachers write the rest. Teachers words that students request and kneel beside their children as they scribe.
B. First-Grade Prospectors. Exemplary first grade teachers' individual lessons are rapidly paced, play filled, and describe why as well as how specific decoding, comprehension, vocabulary, and fluency strategies work . They teach synthetic phonics, onset rhymes, and spelling strategies without limiting children's access to authentic, intrinsically valuable children's literature. They teach lessons that contain two goals simultaneously. For instance, a single lesson would instruct students in how to use phonemic awareness skills in conjunction with context clues to decode unknown words. Their lessons also implement varied and broad-based approaches than those of their less effective peers. By the end of the year, each instructional episode places demands on most students with respect to grammar. Editing sheets and a wide variety of literacy and mathematical processes cue cards are created during many lessons, and these class-created charts are subsequently displayed in the classroom.
C. Second-Grade Inventors. Outstanding second grade teachers plan more creative lessons concerning decoding and comprehension than do their counterparts at other grade levels. They take such actions because they understand that for concepts to be effectively learned, second graders must be taught creatively. Many students have not yet learned basic reading skills by the time they reach second grade, and they will not do so if their teacher uses lesson formats similar to those employed in kindergarten and first grades. Because of this need, exemplary second-grade teachers invent new method of teaching basic decoding, vocabulary, or fluency skills. These lessons often arise from student-centered examples. They reinforce basic principles through oral and written language. Exemplary second grade teachers can also be differentiated from less effective peers by their creative use of journals and writing lessons. Journal writing lessons vary almost daily, involve student-generated topics, and contain assignments that students can not complete in only a single setting.
D. Third-Grade Catalysts. Exemplary third grade teachers are masters at designing lessons in which (1) abstractions are made more concrete, (2) different sized groups are used so as to provide prescriptive instruction, and (3) peers' voices are used to re-explain new concepts more often than teachers at other grade levels. Because of these lesson-planning, catalytic features, these professionals are distinguished from peers at other grade levels by their superior ability to state expectations clearly, rephrase instructions, give teaching examples, and provide strong peer group leaders when the teacher is not present in an instructional group. These teachers are also masters at stimulating deeper thinking because they ask students to defend their positions and take risks in thinking. They use their own passion for learning as a model to help students challenge themselves.
E. Fourth-Grade Option Quarterbacks. In football, option quarterbacks can hand the ball to a runner, pass it to a receiver, or keep it themselves. Exemplary fourth literacy teachers are masterful at creating lessons in which students can choose their own methods of reaching established goals. These lessons contain ÒoptionsÓ by which students can build skill and assume responsibility to learn. These lessons also engage more long-term projects, self-assessments, recompensing objectives, and challenge students to use what they read to help someone else in the classroom, the school, or their community than at lower grade levels. As one of the exemplary teachers in the research study reported: "Students know that they have choices in the lessons we plan so that they can learn to make them in the classroom and in their lives. My lessons don't just integrate reading and writing to make our studies authentic, but they enable my students to read about topics that are important to them individually and collectively. What connects us together as a learning community is that we respect and support each other's strengths and weaknesses in each lesson. We work on projects that we own, and every lesson is very important to us."
F. Fifth-Grade Empowerists. Exemplary fifth-grade teachers' lessons instill in students a desire to produce work that is excellent. In every lesson, these master educators teach students how to organize their thoughts, explore, and learn on their own by asking questions of students that require them to think on their feet and at high levels of abstraction. These lessons empower students to take chances. A typical lesson is that students are engaged in a formal debate that they have planned and researched. Another distinguishing characteristic is that most lessons mix structure with student freedom in some format. As a result of their teachers' lesson plans, the majority of students stated that they (1) mentally imaged content, (2) applied what they read while they were reading, (3) learned more than friends taught by other teachers because these lessons contained better and more concise explanations, (4) asked more questions about what they did and didn't understand than they had in prior years, (5) created something worthwhile with what they learned, and (6) wrote in more vary genres more frequently than did friends who were taught by less able teachers at this grade level.
In summary, the domains of teaching expertise described in this article vary by grade level. Exemplary kindergarten teachers motivate, reteach, and build lessons by being master Enliveners, Strategic Repeaters, and Positive Pacers. Exemplary first grade teachers excel as Stimulators, Expectationists, and Prospectors. Exemplary second grade teachers are highly effective Connectors, Improvisers, and Inventors. Exemplary third grade teachers are exceptionally competent as Promoters of Books, Portrayers, and Catalysts. Exemplary fourth grade teachers enjoy exercising their talents as Involvers, Tutors of Thinking, and Option Quarterbacks. Exemplary fifth grade teachers are master Producers, Analyzers, and Empowerists.
Where Do You Go From Here?
After having read this (and hopefully the August) article about exemplary teachers, we hope that you have more information to assist you in becoming an even better teacher for students at the grade level to which you are, or hope to be assigned. Additional information to continue your growth is in the side bar of this article. A common quote, often cited by educators is Òevery child has one great teacher, let it be youÓ. If the hard work that you have invested in analyzing your skills reaps the results that you want, we, as educators, may soon be able to change that quote and say instead that Òevery child has a great teacher at every grade level and the teacher at this grade level is me!Ó
Block, C.C. & Mangieri, J.N. (2003). Exemplary Literacy Teachers: What we have learned that they do to be highly successful. New York, NY: Guilford.
Block, C. C., Oakar, M., Hart, N. (2002). Exemplary Literacy Teachers: A Continuum from Pre School to Grade 5. Reading Research Quarterly, 37(2), 178-208.
Block, C. C.(2001). Effects of exemplary instruction upon the achievement of students who begin school without the precursors for literacy success. In C.K. Kinzer, K.A. Hinchman & D. J. Leu, Jr. (Eds). New Directions in Literacy: 50th yearbook of the National Reading Conference Yearbook (pp.279-293). Chicago: National Reading Conference.
Ruddell, R.B. (1997). Researching the Influential Literacy Teacher: Characteristics, beliefs, strategies, and new research directions. In C.K. Kinzer, K.A. Hinchman & D.J. Leu, Jr. (Eds.) Inquires in Literacy Theory and Practice: 46th yearbook of the National Reading Conference (pp.37-53). Chicago: National Reading Conference.
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