Data Study - Chapter 3

As I spent 6 hours flying across the country last week I had time to ponder what I would change in my teaching in order to make sure my students are understanding or feeling motivated and engaged.  I feel like I have come up with three things that I already do but need to spend more time with.  I really would like more time in collaboration with my teaching partner.  We talk all day about how things are going but never seem to have time to really sit down and plan or talk about change.  It seems ot always be on the fly.  THis is very frustrating to me.  Our 1/2 days are filled with district tasks and the one day we did get collaboration time was this week when I had taken vacation to see my son on the east coast.  Argh!  The next thing I would like to do a better job of in my classroom is giving students more opportunity for reflection across the content areas.  I find this practice to be very valuable to me and I think it helps students feel that what they think and want is so important.  I plan to try and incorporate this once a week in each area.  THey have a writing journal and this could be used as a way to get them writing as well as gain informationm about their personal journey as students in fourth grade.  The third area I want to improve is the time my students spend with writing.  I love to teach writing but it seems that there is never enough time in the day, week, month to really get into a task and take one piece to completion.  I did this before I left on my Thanksgiving break and the kids finished the writing during the short week.  The ones I have read are wonderful and creative.  They struggle to get going but when I give them enough time they do a great job and become more comfortable with this type of communication.  I think the common denominator is TIME.  There is never enough of it.