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Curriculum Team
English-Language Arts (K-12) Philosophy
The goal of the language arts program in Greenville County Schools is to develop the necessary language skills within each student that will allow them to pursue their life’s goals and to become productive members of society. For students to become successful communicators, a balanced approach to literacy instruction is needed to meet all the needs of the students who make up our classrooms. Over the years, teachers and researchers have learned that there is not one basic approach that builds a proficient reader and communicator. It is the combination or balance within the instructional model that creates success in our classrooms.
A balanced literacy model should include instruction in phonics, reading comprehension, interpretation of literature, writing and reading fluency. Reading intervention is needed to assist students who need additional help and support to stop the flow of failure and to bring students to grade level through a series of effective strategies. Intervention is administered in addition to each student’s regular reading instruction.
Best Practices that are research based become the foundation for our balanced literacy model. The principles in Morrow’s Best Practices in Literacy Instruction guiding this “common ground” are as follows:
- Learning is meaning making.
- Prior knowledge guides learning.
- The gradual release of responsibility model and scaffolded instruction facilitates learning.
- Social collaboration enhances learning.
- Learners learn best when they are interested and involved.
- The goal of best practices is to develop high-level, strategic readers and writers.
- Best practices are grounded in the principle of balanced instruction.
- Best practices are a result of informed decision making.
Morrow, Lesley Mandel, Linda B. Gambrell, and Michael Pressley. Best Practices in Literacy Instruction. 2nd ed. New York: The Guilford Press, 2003.
The best practices employed through our literacy model include:
- Integrating the language arts as opposed to teaching them in isolation.
- Focusing on the application not mere recognition level of the strategies and skills in all areas of the language arts.
- Engineering instruction and practice that focuses on real reading and real writing.
- Reading aloud daily at all grade levels.
- Creating daily experiences with poetry, jokes, riddles, quality children’s and young adult literature, and other real world texts.
- Providing guided reading instruction that focuses on comprehension strategies and skills.
- Incorporating word study in conjunction with literature instruction.
- Instilling strategies that aid the reader to activate prior knowledge, predict and infer, monitor their own understanding, determine the importance in the reading, question themselves, the author and the text, and summarize within and between texts.
- Incorporating both fiction and informational text in the reading selections that students encounter throughout the year.
- Providing daily Self-Selected Reading instruction that builds reading fluency and allows students to read on their independent reading level.
- Conferencing with students during Self-Selected Reading to assess their progress and hold them accountable for their reading.
- Implementing Writer’s Workshop that includes the mini-lesson, student writing/teacher conferencing, and students sharing.
- Engineering opportunities that give the writer an authentic audience because writers write to be read.
- Incorporating journal writing that includes learning logs, writer’s notebook, response journals, and dialogue journals.
- Incorporating the student’s choice of topic within the teacher directed writing instruction.
- Allotting time for daily writing instruction.
- Modeling by the teacher of the writing process, writer’s craft, and conventions of writing through the “Writer’s Handbook.”
- Responding to student writing by teachers, administrators, and peers.
- Instructing students to become effective evaluators of their writing.
- Creating a print-rich environment that supports the learner in the areas of reading, writing, and spelling.
- Integrating language arts into other content areas.
- Incorporating authentic assessments that include rubrics, running records, writing samples, learning logs, story retellings, portfolios, etc.
- Incorporating traditional assessments that include a combination of multiple choice, written response, and extended response.
- Framing elementary reading instruction through Building Blocks, 4 Blocks, and Big Blocks - A Mulitmethod, Multilevel Framework which includes Guided Reading (Comprehension Strategies and Skills/Vocabulary), Writing (Writing and Language Skills), Working with Words (Phonics) and Self-Selected Reading (Reading Fluency/Listening Vocabulary).
- Seeking educational opportunities to refine and update classroom practices through graduate studies and attendance at professional development opportunities provided by The School District of Greenville County.
Recommended websites:
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Contacts
| Secondary ELA consultant Debbie Barron Phone: (864) 355-3191 dbarron@greenville.k12.sc.us |
Elementary ELA consultant Paula Burgess Phone: (864) 355-3166 pburgess@greenville.k12.sc.us |