East Lake Elementary, Chattanooga, TN: Grade 4 – Sketching the Way To Content Understanding
Working directly with students in grades 4, Ann modeled a trio of lessons designed to support content retention, acquisition of academic vocabulary and visualization. Ann modeled how to help researchers and readers capture important images and words in a visual format, activating a multimodal system of understanding. She began by demonstrating reading a small portion of the text and stopping to create a small line drawing with labels to capture learning. With guided support, the students worked in partner pairs to read and discuss their understandings, what they thought was important and to explain their representations. Modeling continued as students then wrote summaries of their learning. Academic language and concepts flowed easily on the foundations of the student sketches!
PROGRAM GOALS: To support the staff in teaching written reflections and academic language acquisition in content area studies through the delivery of dynamic demonstrations and ongoing formative assessment opportunities. To support the staff in an intensive, long-term professional development project designed to improve the design and delivery of powerful instructional strategies to Title 1 students.