wall charts

Sometimes, I can be a bit of a perfectionist.  I want things to be aesthetically pleasing, neat, error-free, etc.  But I also struggle to have a life outside of my job, as many teachers, especially elementary teachers, do.  So, I look for models of exceptional teachers who instead of taking painstaking hours to create class books or classroom displays, hammer out the many projects that I dream of doing.  Why don't I find the time for all the projects I want to do in my classroom?  Probably, I waste my time striving for perfection on just a few projects.  

Today I had one of those 'aha' moments, not in my classroom but at a training focused on blending National Urban Alliance (NUA) strategies, like thinking maps, and balanced literacy.  A coach involved in the training demoed a series of lessons on priming students for comprehension strategies with text.  She prefaced the demo by sharing that when she taught Stephanie Harvey's Comprehension Toolkit lessons, her students never had the comments that Stephanie's students did or went away with the same level of understanding.  In retrospect, she realized that when introducing students to a comprehension strategy with the Comprehension Toolkit, she was requiring students to learn a new strategy, a new text, a new subject and a challenging

For my 4th and 5th grade advanced English Language Learner (ELL) guided reading groups, I've been teaching using the teaching points from a unit of study off of the Columbia Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project website.  The units were written by Lucy Calkin's graduate students and are very well developed, but tweakable.