Research Context

I. The School and Classroom Literacy Environment

The classroom literacy environment is important to establish, be aware of and reflect upon in order for literacy instruction to be at its highest level. The literacy environment I will be documenting is that of my own 3^rd grade classroom in Summit, New Jersey at Wayside Elementary. Wayside Elementary is a suburban school in an upper middle class community, and consists of grades 1-5. It is one of five elementary schools in the district, but is located in a section of town with the highest population of English language learners and lower income families, mixed in with high-income upper middle class families. The population of the school is 73.7 percent English speakers as the first language spoken at home, 17.2 percent Spanish, 3 percent Mandarin, 1.8 percent Hindi, 1 percent Russian, 0.8 percent Cantonese and 9.1 percent with Limited English Proficiency (LEP).

II. Wayside School Literacy Environment

Wayside school is a project school working with Teacher’s College, where reading and writing workshop is being implemented on a daily basis in all grades. Literacy is the catalyst for many decisions made in the school, such as assemblies, class trips, and decisions in science, social studies and other special subjects. The principal includes a substantial amount of money in her budget every year, for each teacher to order books for their classroom. Teachers are free to buy books each year to use in their balanced literacy approach. The books purchased can be used for read alouds, independent reading, book clubs, content studies, shared reading, etc…

Collegial collaboration is a major structure of the Wayside School community. Talk about literacy instruction is a big part of every faculty meeting each month. Grade level teams plan their reading and writing workshop units together, and meet regularly to support each other with lesson planning, trouble-shooting and assessment. Principal Tanner has fostered this sense of community in our school since she arrived in 2002. Long before our district began working with Teacher’s College, and long before Balanced Literacy was implemented in our district, Principal Tanner began an annual staff book club with professional literature about Balanced Literacy. Some past titles that the staff book club has read were Mosaic of Thought by Ellin Oliver Keene & Susan Zimmermann, On Solid Ground by Sharon Taberski, Reading with Meaning by Debbie Miller, Strategies that Work by Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis, In the Company of Children by Joanne Hindley, Growing Readers by Kathy Collins, Units of Study for Teaching Writing by Lucy Calkins, and The Art of Teaching Reading and The Art of Teaching Writing by Lucy Calkins. The literacy environment and community established by the principal and teachers at Wayside School have set up some good practices in all classrooms. Teachers take risks, think deeply and show themselves to be continual learners of literacy instruction.

III. The Classroom Literacy Environment

There are 18 students in my classroom this year. Five of the students come from homes where English is not the primary language spoken at home, while the other thirteen students come from English speaking homes. There are four special needs students in the classroom, three of which are autistic. A special education teacher, Miss Reardon, provides in class support 3 periods a day for the special needs students. Miss Nelson is an instructional aide in the classroom, whom also provides support for the special needs students. Eight of the seventeen students are reading above grade level, four are reading at grade level, and 5 are reading below grade level for third grade at this time. The entire class is currently working on a character unit in reading workshop and are at various stages in a personal narrative unit in writing workshop.

The ideal “literacy learner” in this classroom is one who wears the love of reading and writing on their sleeve regardless of their level. An ideal “literacy learner” is also someone who sees the point to all of the strategies they are learning. So essentially they are in love with reading and, as Lucy Calkins says, “they must write from the heart.” (Freppon & Dahl, 1998) In order for this to take place inside and outside the classroom I believe it is of the utmost importance that the teacher wears a true love of learning, reading, writing, and strategy/skill use on his or her sleeve. When I am excited about what I am teaching and doing in literacy I notice that my students are dying to try the same things. When the students are begging me to read aloud and talk about my reading, or begging me to write with them then I know that my love of literacy is transferring to them. When the students are itching to get into their notebooks, and they are writing fast and long then I know again that my love of literacy is making an impression. By watching me model my thinking and strategies students will also see that there is not one way to do things, and that we need to be open to changing our thinking and being open to not always having the right answer, because we learn by being flexible. (Farstrup & Samuels, 2002)

There is some evidence in my classroom of all four resources: code-breaker, meaning-maker, text user, and text analyst going on. When I was conferring with a student Kara the other day I saw all four of these resources going on with the one student. She was code-breaking because she was able to read fluently and used her “tricky word” strategies well when she approached a word she couldn’t decode. Various post-its plus her conversation with me about what was happening in her book proved to me that she was a meaning-maker. She was a text user because she used the text to make meaning and she referred back to parts of the text to prove some of her thoughts to me. I also found her to be a text analyst because she had put some post-its with questions in her book. When I asked her to talk about her questions and what she was doing to try and find the answers, she told me that she was reading on and looking for answers or clues to help her infer. This showed me that she was analyzing the text to try and help her find answers to her questions. Kara is a high student in my class, working above grade level in reading and writing, but I do feel with minilessons, coaching and strategy group lessons all of my students will be able to use these four resources well. Although the literacy environment of the school and my classroom continues to grow and change, I am constantly looking for ways to make it rich and supportive for all of the literacy instruction and work that goes on in our class.

Seeing literacy through the lens of multimodal learners, multiple literacies, and multi-media I want to expose my students to so much more in their reading and writing. Most of what I want them to use and create as literacy are things they probably already know a lot about, and in many instances probably know more about them then I do. Remember we, as adults are the “digital immigrants.” Bringing in literacy practices that utilize things such as Comic Life, Internet, movies and movie making, pictures etc… will expand and lift the level of literacy instruction and practice in my classroom. There is much more I need to learn in these areas, so I plan to continue to research and have discussions with colleagues about ways to make this happen in our schools now.