EDUC 397 Curriculum & Instruction in the Humanities
UNBC School of Education, Regional Program
Instructor: Melanie Baerg
May 27, 2022
Teacher Candidate: Sara McManus
PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT JOURNAL
My morning began by settling in to watch Nancy Hennessy’s online webinar, Seriously, Syntax Matters: Critical Connections to Comprehension. I took about seven pages of notes and found it much more interesting than the Rethinking Instruction in Phonological Awareness: Focus on What Matters webinar that I had tried to watch a few nights ago and fell asleep during. It probably wasn’t Dr. Susan Brady’s fault, as much as I was just plain exhausted and still in recovery mode from our intensive week in Prince George. I also felt a connection to the webinar on Syntax out of guilt for not truly understanding it during my three-week practicum, where it was a part of the curriculum that I had intended to cover with the grade 6-7 class.
I was impressed by Hennessy’s ability to weave her work into the work of so many others before her, like Dr. Hollis Scarborough’s Reading Rope. I enjoyed the visual graphic she presented by Scott and Brattizar, 2013 on the ‘Potential Troublemakers’ in sentence comprehension and found it a practical example to help me make sense of why syntactic knowledge is so crucial. I do not consider myself a naturally strong writer, and I feel blessed to have technical assistance to help me in my weakest writing areas. Therefore, most of my significant learning gains came from Hennessy’s explicit examples in the second half of her webinar, where she provided grammar-based deconstruction, sentence-based, and cohesive device activities.
I was very intrigued by the title of the second webinar that I watched, called What Adolescent Learners Need for Good Reading Comprehension That Is Often Ignored by Dr. Claude Goldenberg. It had some good content and tips, but it wasn’t what I was hoping for. I thought it was funny when he was called out for redesigning Scarborough’s Reading Rope into a simpler version of two converging paths. His concept that “reading has to become language at the speed of sight” will probably stick with me. I was surprised at his suggestions for increasing fluency by practicing sight words through flashcards. Still, I am confident that those would be for words that students had the knowledge to decode and only needed to increase their speed of decoding to orthographically map them for fluency. All-in-all, I liked his bottleneck analogy where he posed himself as a struggling reader to support his position that “fluency is a bridge to reading comprehension.”
The rest of my day was spent watching Implementing Structured Literacy Instruction in the Kindergarten Classroom: A three-part series by Emily Moorhead. Using the sandwich method to summarize how I felt about this Professional Development series, I could say that I loved her explicit demonstrations. However, she repeated herself too many times! (Although, I suppose that is what Kindergarten Teachers are used to doing.) But overall, I enjoyed the practical applications of what we have been learning in Louisa Moats’ Speech to Print: Language Essentials for Teachers.
There were some lovely takeaways from Moorhead that I know will come in super handy down the road. Examples include that sometimes it is easier to teach small compound words before multi-syllable words, a “stepping stone” from syllables to phonemes can be onset and rime, and it is okay to use nonsense words when teaching blending sounds. I liked how Moorhead did not necessarily do all the twenty-six alphabet letters first, before digraphs and units. This allowed her to move into such a wide variety of carefully selected words for her students to read. I also appreciated how she addressed words that cannot be decoded, like “the” or “was,” as her red card words. Her little vowel phrases like “itchy, itchy, /ĭ/, /ĭ/, /ĭ/” were very cute and handy. It would have been nice to see how she used the apple, Eddy, Oscar, and udder.
I am glad that I took the time today to watch all these Professional Development videos. I know I have lots of reading this weekend to get ready for Monday’s class, and I still need to do my workbook and quiz from our Intensive Week in Prince George, and this was the perfect way to get geared up for it.
References:
Brady, S. (n.d.). Rethinking Instruction in Phonological Awareness: Focus on What Matters. Core, Inc. Retrieved from https://www.corelearn.com/resource-posts/webinar-rethinking-instruction-in-phonological-awareness/
Hennessy, N. (n.d.). Seriously, Syntax Matters: Critical Connections to Comprehension. Core, Inc. Retrieved from https://www.corelearn.com/resource-posts/syntax-webinar/
Goldenberg, C. (n.d.) What Adolescent Learners Need for Good Reading Comprehension That Is Often Ignored. Core, Inc. Retrieved from https://www.corelearn.com/resource-posts/adolescent-readers-webinar/
International Dyslexia Association Ontario – Implementing structured literacy instruction in the kindergarten classroom: A three-part series by Emily Moorhead Retrieved from https://www.idaontario.com/previous-webinars/
Part 1 – Phonological Awareness – March 20, 2020 https://youtu.be/7ZrA8ak0Inw
Part 2 – Moving to Print – June 3, 2020 https://youtu.be/jDcb5Jfc658
Part 3 – Putting it Together – June 24, 2020 https://youtu.be/OBjzsfml-qo