Hidden Valley Middle
School has an emphasis of job-embedded professional development opportunities
for teachers. Therefore, this was a neat opportunity for Mr. Hall and me to
learn about the great instruction Mrs. Ferrell is conducting with her students
who need support and services to learn English as a second language. Mrs.
Ferrell’s classroom has a much smaller student size in additional to a slower
pace of instruction. When Mrs. Ferrell introduced the concept diagram, the
students required some prompting when volunteering key words; however, Mrs.
Ferrell provided her own examples and insights then her students began offering
their own examples. The students also enjoyed coming up with their examples and
non-examples of nonfictional text. I was concerned they might be limited with
their background knowledge, but Mrs. Ferrell was great about facilitating this
discussion with them. Overall, the students were hesitant at first, but they
warmed up quickly and seemed to have a strong understanding of nonfictional
text following the classroom instruction.
