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TWS 7 Instructional Decision Making

A. Whole Group Feedback

During the pre-assessment, I did not give the students any feedback
because I wanted to see what they knew on their own before beginning
the writing unit. As I began explaining what all-about books are and
what they can do for a reader I had the students give me examples
and ideas they came up with that would fit the all-about books. As they
were giving me ideas and suggestions, I would both assure them that
they were exactly right and tell how that fits right in with what we were
studying or I would try to rephrase that they said to make it correct
and explain what I did and why I changed it. If a student answered with
an incorrect idea during whole group discussion, I would allow another
student to help him or her by expressing their idea to the class. I gave
feedback to each students answer and related back to the main
concept of the unit. While the students were working on their all-about
books that we were writing together I conferenced with each student.
During the conferences, I advised the students what they could change
or add to make the sentence sound better. I also used post-it tape to
cover up any mistakes so that they could correct it. I always allowed
the students to figure out what was missing or how to spell a word and
either told them to try again or praised them for their hard work. By
the end of the unit, I gathered the areas that the students struggled in
and addressed it in a whole group discussion. I explained to the
students what they could do better the next time they write an allabout story and what concepts to focus on. I allowed the students to
give their thoughts on what they wrote and examples of what they
could do next time while writing an all-about book.
B. Three Individual Feedback
Throughout the unit, I tried to focus in on three specific students, a
high-, middle, and low-leveled student. Each day of the unit, I would
conference with each one of the students to see where they were at
with understanding the concept. I would allow the students to answer
questions or ideas during whole group discussions or encourage them
to participate if they were not. When I conferenced one-on-one with
each of the three students, I would first ask questions for
understanding because I wanted to see how well they were responding
to my lessons. The feedback I received from each student was as
expected. The high-leveled student did not seem to have any problems
with the completing the task each day, the middle-leveled student had
a few mistakes to correct and a hard time focusing but could complete
the task with a little extra time, and the low-leveled student needed
my assistance with almost every step. The feedback I gave to the
students was always positive and constructive. I would ask the
students questions to help guide them in the correct direction and

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have them think a little deeper for the answer. For example, I would
ask each student does that sentence sound right, look right, and
make sense? or is there another way of saying that? because I think
it is more effective for the students to figure it out for themselves.
C. Accommodations and Adaptations
Based on the pre-assessment, I knew that I needed to focus in on the
writing style and process of an all-about book because the students
were still writing how-to books. Once I started to explain what kind of
topics we would write about in all-about books, I let the students give
me ideas for topics. The answers that the students were giving were
still on the lines of how to do something instead of a topic that you can
tell all about. I decided to give them a couple of examples that I
thought of and I wrote them on chart paper as a visual for the
students. After the students heard the examples and how I would write
about those topics, they immediately started giving me great topic
ideas that were appropriate for all-about books. For example, they
gave me topics such as, puppies, dinosaurs, themselves, and their
brothers or sisters. My teaching style changed from just explaining how
to pick a topic and what to write about to actually picking a topic as an
example and letting the students participate in the discussion. After
reviewing the pre-assessments, I lowered my expectations for the
students to understand the difference between how-to stories and allabout stories. I expected the students to still have some form of how-to
processes throughout the whole unit because that was what they were
familiar with. Three days into the unit, we already covered picking a
topic, planning the story out, and choosing audiences for the stories.
After we reviewed everything we learned so far on the third day, I
realized that the students were doing a great job at conversing and
relating the main concept to their work. My expectations for their postassessment actually increased then because I felt that the students
were understanding the concept better and they were not integrating
how-to stories with all-about stories.