Professional Experiences

2000-2005

2006-2007

        The 2006-2007 school year bought a handful of professional activities within and outside school. School related experiences included coaching and consulting with new teachers, serving as the Cluster IV representative on the Reading Teacher Advisory Council for Fairfax County Public Schools, collaborating with veteran teachers, and beginning a new before school reading program. Experiences outside school included attending conferences, participating in conference proposals, and working with Dr. Pierce as her graduate research assistant. Taken together, this work is directed toward closing of the achievement gap through student centered literacy considerations/programs and teacher development.
        Part of the reading teacher role is to coach, consult, and collaborate with other teachers. These sum up the topics of study and discussion I facilitated during Cluster IV reading teacher meetings. Additionally, I worked with new teachers at Belle View by creating a sort of consulting coaching system. I met with them every other week, sometimes with their mentors, to outline the county's expectations for balanced literacy in the classrooms. These consulting sessions were followed up with coaching sequences that included pre classroom visit conversations, classroom modeling or observations, and post visit conversations. The idea was that the coaching sequences would follow up on the consulting sessions. However, our upper grade language arts program was in the process of falling further and further away from the balanced literacy framework as students were being pulled from the classrooms based on ability grouping. As a result, the classroom teachers rarely had the need for balanced literacy coaching. The experience was a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, the new teachers really never got the feel for the instructional momentum that balanced literacy can create. On the other hand, I was able to really focus on attending to the teacher's agenda during coaching sessions since their language arts programs were not presenting balanced literacy issues. Putting my agenda on the back burner, as just as it me appear to be, was extremely valuable practice for me.
        Deciding when to coach, when to consult, and when to collaborate continue to be tricky. I worked with a group of kindergarten teachers on an intervention focused on phonological awareness and students at risk of experiencing reading difficulties.This project was and continues to be ideal for self study as I learn to negotiate the roles I play (coach, consultant, collaborative teacher) and the leadership attributes I am trying to develop (building personal mastery, building relationships and patience, building and sharing knowledge, and building coherence through systems). I am learning how to create the context for individual teacher development through their own inquiry and to overlay this with timely consultations. Simultaneously, I am also learning more about authentic instruction and assessment of English language development among our primary English language learners. My efforts with English language learners is greatly influenced by the work of Dr. Pierce. These experiences added a reading mentor dimension to our before school reading program in which older students were matched with kindergarten or first grade buddies for daily reading. All the school based projects cited here will continue into the next school year.
        Other out of school activities included attending conferences and participating in two conference proposals. Most of the workshops I attended at the AACTE conference dealt with action research and professional development schools. I submitted a proposal to the American Education Research Association based on a paper written for the class, The Achievement Gap. Also, I contributed to a proposal submitted to the self study conference known as The Castle Conference, which was based on work involving critical friends.
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Developing Competencies

Activity	Coaching, Consulting, and Collaborating	Self Study	Personal Mastery	Relationships and Patience	Knowledge Building and Sharing	Coherence within a System
New Teacher Meetings and Coaching Sequences
Kindergarten Intervention
RTAC Representative
Before School Reading Program
GRA with Dr. Pierce
Attended AACTE Conference
Attended Achievement Gap Conference at GMU
AERA Conference Proposal-- Moving Away From Deficits to Debt Management Systems
Herstmonceux VII Conference Proposal--Contributor

2007-2008

        My role as a reading teacher is split between working directly with students and coaching, consulting, and collaborating with teachers and parents. My work with students is met through Reading Recovery and another couple of groups. My work with teachers involves coaching, collaborating, consulting, and staff development workshops. The administration would like me to focus on those students not meeting benchmark as I work with teachers. The following paragraphs will detail my goals related to these areas.
        Many of my Reading Recovery students speak languages other then English. I would like these Reading Recovery programs to be more successful than they have the past couple of years. I will need to focus more on how I introduce books in order to facilitate English oral language development. I also need to collaborate more with the classroom and ESOL specialist to ensure these students are receiving increased opportunities to learn the English language. I am hoping this collaborative work will be done by considering relevant research and creating authentic ways of fostering and assessing language development during team meetings.
       Some members of the staff recognized that our program strayed from the balanced literacy framework and that this may have played a role in our not meeting annual yearly progress (AYP) for disadvantaged students. This was the first time we did not meet AYP; therefore, we may finally have our perceived need for change. The instructional coach, ESOL teacher, and I are attempting to set into motion a staff development system that will bring balanced literacy back to our upper grade language arts program. This system will involve two or three one hour workshops that will fuel subsequent team meetings, classroom collaborations, and coaching conversations and sequences. We are also hoping to embed the creation and analysis of authentic assessments in our efforts to bring balanced literacy back to Belle View. Most of the professional development time will be spent on coaching.

Developing Competencies

Activity	Personal Mastery/Self-Study	Relationships and Patience	Knowledge Building and Sharing	Coherence within a System
Coaching, Consulting, and Collaborating
VII International Self-Study Conference Presentation
HS-K Phonological Awareness PLC
School Improvement Plan (Pgs. 4-8)
Staff Survey on SIP Survey Results	-	-
Differentiating Within Classrooms Presentation	-	-
Differentiating to Close the Achievement Gap--PTA Newsletter, Oct. 08	-	-		-
Differentiating to Close the Achievement Gap--PTA Newsletter, Nov. 08	-	-		-
Principal's Steering Committee (Parent/Staff--GT Services & Differentiation)
Co-teaching (4th & 5th)
Cris Tovoni Conference	-	-		-
Accepted Proposal: Huey's Relevance...NRC Study Session
Accepted Proposal: Results in 30 Minutes a Day--National RR Conference	-
Accepted Proposal: Book Blogs, Reading Engagement, and Academic Identity--CEHD Alumni PD Conf.
Accepted Proposal: Job Embedded.....--NSDC Summer Conference

       I made some changes to the way I am defining the professional competencies I am developing. Self-study scholarship is a way of facilitating and documenting my growth in personal mastery and how this influences my research and practice, so I combined them into one concept. Self-study helps me to stay in touch with my purpose, to serve in closing the achievement gap in literacy, as I work through these activities with my colleagues. Inner control, a term used in early reading coined by Dr. Clay, describes the point at which the child has orchestrated the skills, strategies, and meta cognitive awareness into an internal process that drives all future reading. It is this inner control that allows the child to continue to develop as a reader and writer by reading and writing. The same term can be used for the internal process working within me as I approach research and practice--internal control of personal mastery, relationships, knowledge, and coherence. These competencies are present and will continue to develop as I work in scholarship and practice.
        The courses at George Mason and the experiences at Belle View merged to develop this system of competencies. My work on the principal's steering committee provides an example. The committee formed because some parents were very upset and confused when we stopped ability grouping for reading and math--a model taken up by the staff with community support in 2005/06. The committee's purpose is to explore models that ensure advanced opportunities for higher level students without diminishing services for all students. Unpacking this purpose will lead to many interesting and difficult discussions. My perspective of this work is being influenced by my understanding of my mental model in relation to that of my colleagues and friends that share the table. My personal goal is that we come away with shared knowledge and a potential shared vision--two ideas articulated in the Leadership Seminar.
    We need to discuss the idea shared by some parents and teachers that ability grouping was working because we met AYP and because most students accomplished passed proficient on the SOL tests. We will need to discuss what level of learning is expected for all of our students and then decide if a pass proficient is the goal. If this is the goal, then what is it in our mental models about teachers and learners that make that the goal? What is achievement or success and how will we know if it is accomplished? These questions come from ideas and readings discussed during the Achievement Gap class.
        Examining research on math, language arts, grouping, and gifted education will be an important part of our work. Skills in critically examining research have been a focus of all reading and research courses. These skills will be tapped during our conversations, particularly in terms of valid interpretations and implication for our school. Bringing relevant research into practice and communicating its effectiveness is another school-committee focus. I am working to this end through co-teaching in the upper grades and co-writing articles for the PTA Newsletter. Co-teaching allows me to blend learning from literacy courses (cooperative learning and multi-literacies) and professional learning courses while working in the classrooms with teachers. Finally, we are sharing how we differentiate in class with the community through an ongoing column in the PTA Newsletter titled, Differentiating to Close the Achievement Gap: Raising the Bar for All Learners.
           The committee is meeting with mixed reviews from parents and teachers. However, I think it embodies the CEHD's core values: collaboration, ethical leadership, innovation, research based practice, and social justice. Its potential influence on school level policy decisions and our ability to form a shared vision is impressive. GMU is very much a part of my preparation to participate.

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