D182_Task_2_Professional_Growth_Plan.

OHM2 Task Two: Developing a Professional Growth Plan Introduction I am a first-grade teacher in a small Title 1 school within a small district. The class consists of 20 students, 8 boys and 12 girls—16 of them being English Language Learners. ELLs get pulled out throughout the day for LEP resources. Native languages spoken in the classroom are English, Spanish, and Russian. Ages range from 6-8. Many students read and write below grade level. Engage New York is the curriculum used for mathematics and ELA. Challenge Given that regular classroom instruction has been minimized over the past year, and current instruction being a hybrid model of in-person and distance learning, the challenge for my class is that reading skills are at an all-time low. Students are not being taught to read at their level anymore. We are cramming first-grade level reading curriculum with very little testing and progress monitoring that tells us any information. I have many students learning Phonological Awareness as a step before reading. We have an assessment called the Phonological Awareness Screening Test that covers eight areas in kindergarten and eight different areas in first grade. Many students aren’t able to pass kindergarten sections. Along with this, there is a struggle with students’ ability to read fluently. Most students can decode but when it comes to putting it into a sentence or paragraph, they struggle with reading it in context. Long-Term Goal To increase student accuracy of substituting last phonemes to 70% or higher on the PAST 1 Assessment by researching and implementing three new strategies for teaching phonological awareness by the end of the 4th quarter.