Instructional Commentary

3. Engaging Students in Learning Refer to examples from the lesson plan in your explanations.

a. Explain how your instruction engaged students in developing an essential literacy

strategy and requisite skills. Through the activities, the students learned a basic literacy skill that modeled the process for searching for and interpreting intra-textual connections within texts by identifying, classifying, and organizing cause and effects. Students interacted with foldables that defined cause and effect to aide in concept development. Students created intra-textual connections during the collaborative group activity within written and pictorial responses to strengthen students’ ability to illustrate based on the causes within the story. The students engaged in a writing activity in which they used textual evidence from the story to synthesize an effect in a collaborative setting. Students were introduced to the strategy through class discussion and teacher modeling to identify, classify, and organize cause and effect. Students then applied strategy during post-assessment as I circulated to individual students to assess their comprehension of the central focus.

b. Describe how your instruction linked students’ prior academic learning and personal,

cultural, and community assets with new learning.

The instruction linked to students’ prior academic learning by applying to actions and consequences within the classroom such as the disciplinary system of pulling sticks. As the hook, I asked students what would happen if a student didn’t follow school rules and what would be the consequences. Students’ responses were based on their prior learning of school rules at the starting of the semester. The instruction gave insight to how cause and effect applied to real world connections briefly shown during the pre-assessment to link to personal, cultural, and community aspects within the daily lives of the students. These activities help the students make connections and relate to their daily lives and provide a perspective of how one cause leads to an effect.

4. Deepening Student Learning during Instruction

Refer to examples from the clip(s) in your explanations. a. Explain how you elicited student responses to promote thinking and apply the literacy

strategy using requisite skills to comprehend or compose text.

Students constructed responses during collaborative group work that promoted intra-textual thinking and social collaboration. I circulated from group to group asking questions to promote higher order thinking. I asked one group, “What if the cause is you give a teacher your homework?” One student responded, “The effect would be… (Paused) the teacher will grade it and give it back to us in our folders.” Students applied think-aloud strategy during questioning. The questioning developed real world context to aide in comprehension of the main focus as well as apply to higher order thinking. Students were praised for using academic language introduced at beginning of lesson.

b. Explain how you supported students to apply the literacy strategy in a meaning-based context.

Students in each group practiced think-aloud strategies when I circulated the groups as I asked how they came to their solution to the cause they chose. Some students struggled with practicing the strategy to think-aloud based on intra-textual connections, so I modeled the strategy that was text based as well as questioned the group about the cause and what happened. This line of questioning allowed the struggling students to compose responses based on the story once a consensus was made. Students provided their rationalization for responses that were text based and showed evidence of development of strategy proficiency.