Professional Development

ARA Conference Attendance and Reflection November 12th and 13th

The ARA Conference was such a great two days of professional
development. I really enjoyed all of the speakers we heard. I was present
from 8 to 12 both Thursday and Friday. On Thursday, November 12th the first
introduction speaker was Jeff Anderson. Anderson talked about his recent
book 10 Things Every Writer Needs To Know. First, he discussed the
importance of writing and what it means to be a writer. Every person has a
schema of writing. Using the comparison of a writer to a tree, the audience
completed an activity of drawing tree rings and filling in memories of writing
in each ring. For me, the first tangible memory I have of writing is from
kindergarten. As a class we wrote a book titled, When I Grow Up and I
was chosen to draw and write the cover title. I felt so honored to have my
teacher pick me to do this special job, this made me feel like my writing
(even though it was simply just the title) was good. While this memory was
good, memories from high school created a negative connation towards
writing in my mind. Anderson talked about the 10 necessities in writing with
much emphasis on the first and in his opinion the most important, motion! A
person must move, start, and send out his or her writing. If there is no
motion involved, nothing will ever get done. This is so true, I so often find
myself just staring at the computer afraid to start writing because I want it to
be perfect the first time. As a teacher I want to create an environment for my
students in which mistakes are okay and they know that the initial draft of a
piece of writing is indeed jus a draft. The idea of motion is something easy to
enforce by using simple activities like we practice such as power writing, free
writing, or 5.7.10. After this session I went to hear Todd Gerelds, the author
of Woodlawn. Gerelds told us the beautiful story of his fathers football team
in Woodlawn who grew together only by the power of Jesus Christ. Gods love
totally transformed their whole team from the inside out. By this everyone
will know you are my disciples, if you love one another. (John 13:35.) When I
am a teacher the way I love my students will have such a big impact on them
and I hope to convey the same love and grace that the Lord shows me daily.
The 3rd session of the day was by Elfrieda Hiebert. She talked about the idea
of learning new words and how important words are, especially in todays
world. The following day (November 13th, Friday) the opening speaker was
Tommy Bice, the state superintendent. He was so great! I could genuinely
see how much he cares for the children and teachers of Alabama. His goal is
to redefine what success looks like and figuring out how can we better
achieve it. The second session I went to on Friday was by Dr. Underbakke. He
is also so great and funny! We went through a list of high quality childrens
books, definitely found books I need to add to my Christmas list. The last
session of the day was by Diane Barone. She is the ILA president. She went
through the importance of visuals of childrens books. This whole experience

was so great and I am glad we got the opportunity to come to this

conference.
November 10th and 11th
ELL Seminar
Laura came to speak to us about how to teach academic language to
EL students. ESL, ELL, EL all the same thing. This was such an interesting,
helpful two days of professional development. Starting off, I didnt know too
much about how ELLs learn. Honestly I wasnt positive that ESL, EL, and ELL
were all the same thing. There are 4 objectives that she wanted us to get out
of the two days hearing her speak examine how students acquire a second
(other) language, investigate how classroom teacher can use WIDA resources
to plan lessons, identify the components of academic language, identify
necessary strategies that help master ELL content. The first objective we
covered was examining how students acquire a second language. There are
four language domains listen (receptive), speak (productive), read
(receptive), write (productive). When learning a language it always seems
easier to receive rather than produce. When taking Spanish in high school I
could match vocabulary words or listen to my teacher speak but trying to
form sentences to hold a conversation was the most difficult. I could not
produce the language. Something that was very much emphasized during
both two days in the ELL seminar was that language acquisition is a process.
The process is not the same for every child but language acquisition does
have steps an EL will go through, just at different paces. The stages of
language acquisition are preproduction, early production, speech emergence,
intermediate fluency, and advanced fluency. Preproduction (3-6 months) is a
stage in which children are encouraged to listen and not speak. For teachers,
it is necessary to implement realia and lots of visual aids. Early production is
the stage in which students are learning basic needs vocabulary. Teachers
can effectively use point and show. Speech emergence is the time when
students are speaking Spanglish, but are working on forming sentences. At
intermediate fluency, students begin to speak in sentences and can
elaborate while an advanced fluency speaker is speaking to a native with no
problem. We read a classroom assignment in each stage of this process, as
an ELL would hear. This put in perspective how my students in my classroom
at Trace hear and process what Im saying. We have 3 ELLs in my
kindergarten classroom, all three in different stages. It made me realize the
confusion that could be occurring in their mind. Understanding the different
stages will help me know what activities to do to help them. We also
discussed BICS, which is (playground language), how kids talk to one
another, very simple and CALPS (academic language). The next day we
talked about Sentence frame for academic content language. We covered
multiple strategies that would be helpful when teaching an ELL. We also
talked about SIOP and how we can incorporate that into our classroom. SIOP
not only helps ELL students but also every other student. Overall, these two

days really taught me a lot and I am glad for all of the opportunities we
have!
PLP group w/ family studies major
The PLP group was beneficial in learning my personality type and how
that will effect communication with my students and parents. There are
many different types of personalities and parenting types that can affect the
students in your classroom. I had never thought about the affects for a
teacher in the classroom based off of how a parent deals with discipline and
what their personality traits are. As a teacher I will have to learn how to
effectively communicate with most likely all of these personalities. For our
first meeting with our family studies major, Morgan, she asked us to take the
personality quiz to help up recognize what traits we possess and how are
personalities have been researched and proven to react in certain situations.
My result was an ENFP. An ENFP is typically energetic, curious, observant,
warm, and expressive communicators. The weaknesses of this personality
type are poor practical skills, find it difficult to focus and overthink. I think
these qualities are pretty accurate. We completed this first meeting on
October 5th over Google chat. We went over our personality types and what
that means when relating to teaching and dealing with parents and students.
The next meeting we had was October 15th; this was on how teachers convey
bad news to parents. There are 8 steps that Morgan went over with us that
are critical when informing a parent of something bad. Different personality
types process and communicate information differently. When in a parent
conference you have to keep in mind the personality type of the parents as
well as yourself. We also went over other general tips for communication
between parents and teachers. Lesson 3 was held October 19th and we
discussed parenting styles and how a teacher must keep these styles in mind
when understanding a student. We also discussed the discipline aspect of
parenting. We talked about the affects on a child that can come from
parenting and how this can determine their own personality. Our last lesson
was on October 26th and we discussed what type of teacher we are. There
are four different main categories, The Guardian, The Artisan, The Idealist,
and The Rationalist. We learned how each of these different teacher types
relates to our own personality type. Overall, I really enjoyed this PLP time.
Personality traits are so interesting to read and research about. These
qualities can truly affect a teacher and how he or she communicates with
other teachers, parents, and students.
Most Likely To Succeed Movie Screening November 12th
The screening of Most Likely To Succeed was a wonderful night that put
a new perspective in my eyes on teaching and how schooling is changing for
the future. Most Likely To Succeed focuses on a high school based in San
Diego, California High Tech High School. High Tech High is a public charter

school that specializes in math, science and engineering. The way this school
focuses on the student is unlike anything I have ever seen before. HTH
students do not have a strict schedule or bells that tell them when to change
classes or what subject they should be focusing on. Instead students are
allowed to develop their interests and throughout the year they work in a
team or individually on a project that will be showcased at the end of the
year to all of the community. This project depicts what students are
interested in and identifies where their strong skills are. The teachers role at
HTH is very much a facilitator. They allow for students to figure things out on
their own. HTH wants students to be independent and college and career
ready. They discussed how many other schools are preparing students for
standardized test instead of the real world. Many teenagers transition from
high school to college and then college to the real world and acquire zero
social skills to help them in their adult life. Students at HTH are collaborating
with others, learning how to make decisions on their own, think creatively
many things that my high school did not focus on. For me, I can clearly see
the focus that was placed on standardized testing at my high school. I
appreciate that I went to a traditional school that was heavy content based
but when transitioning into college I was not prepared to make academic
choices on my own. I also was not taught how to study or process
information. At the beginning of this movie I was skeptical of this new idea of
schooling and where education is headed. But after considering my schooling
experience, education could use a change. Even in college sometimes
classes are only focused on passing the test and earning the grades. This
problem seems almost impossible to solve but I could see a start at HTH. The
way these students were engaged and excited about their final projects was
so cool to see! They were passionate about what they were learning and how
they were growing. I do believe that students should be learning basic
language arts, math, science, and social studies concepts but the interests of
these students correlated to multiple subjects. They were also genuinely
learning things that will eventually help them in the real world. Education has
been the same for the past century and isnt necessarily producing well
informed, prepared for the real world adults and who knows if the new
direction education is heading towards will either. But I do think this new,
creative, innovative idea of how education should be could work and could
spark interests and passions in students that they would never realize they
had before. Creating personal connections is always beneficial for me when
learning material so creating a project or completing an assignment based
off of my own interests could have really helped me stay engaged and want
to learn throughout high school. Education is always changing and being
flexible is part of this career! I am excited to see where education is headed!