A Season to Celebrate

Region 4 has had many wonderful professional development sessions, professional learning groups, and coaching opportunities lately. We continue to grow our knowledge in learning about the Alabama College and Career Readiness Standards. We’ve spent some time focusing on learning more about close reading, understanding the connections between reading and writing standards, collaborating with AMSTI in professional learning groups, and formative assessment. The ARI Region 4 team is excited about our joint efforts with AMSTI in working towards increased levels of student achievement!

Tuscaloosa City PLG

Learning about Formative Assessment

One of our big celebrations was having the opportunity to work closely with a school in Tuscaloosa County as part of our team learning. As a team, we developed a professional development session, “Digging deeper into close reading”. We read an article written by Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey, Close Reading in Elementary Schools. The article allowed us to deepen our understanding of the close reading process and ways we can plan for multiple readings throughout our instruction. By having the opportunity to apply the close reading routine throughout our planning and execution of instruction, our team and participants could see the benefits of having students read complex text multiple times. If you would like to read the article please click on the link below. 

http://www.americanreading.com/documents/close-reading-in-elementary-schools.pdf 

 Another exciting session we’ve had in our region was our second CCRS quarterly meeting! Throughout this session we learned more about the connections between reading and writing throughout the standards. Participants also had an opportunity to read and reflect on the EQuIP rubric. The EQuIP rubric is just one resource for teachers, coaches, and instructional leaders to analyze and plan for rigor throughout instructional lessons. A link is attached below if you’d like to read more about the EQuIP rubric. 

CCRS Quarterly Meeting #2 Resources and EQuIP Rubrics 

These are just a sample of the great efforts going on in region 4 to support student learning and teacher practice! Before wrapping up this post, we encourage everyone involved in education to make sure they are knowledgeable of the three big shifts involved with the college and career ready standards. Make sure to share these mind shifts with all who are willing to listen! These three shifts are below:

1. Building knowledge through content-rich nonfiction and informational texts
2. Reading, writing and speaking grounded in evidence from text, both literary and informational
3. Regular practice with complex text and its academic language

Thanks for reading and we’ll be back soon!