Sheila Owen

Ms. Owen's students are viewed as "readers and writers from day one". She is a teacher who believes in the potential of every student to become successful in these areas and makes her students believe in themselves too. Before any other skill, I believe that this outlook of a teacher is a key to effectively teaching students, no matter what the course material. When a teacher believes that every child can learn, she will find the ways to connect to and reach this student in order to get the results she knows she can achieve.

Ms. Owen is an extremely devoted teacher who instills in her students the love and interest in reading and gives over to them the skills to read and write and to be able to use as a basis for further learning. In teaching reading, this teacher uses a daily routine of 4 types of reading activities. The teacher reads aloud, where she can generate the students interest in the text and discuss the relevant topics with them. This pre-reading discussion not only generates excitement for reading, but also gives the children an idea of the concepts in the book as well as a chance to connect prior knowledge to the new text. She then pulls back her instruction and lets the students fill in more and more, scaffolding as necessary through the steps of shared reading, guided reading and finally independent reading. These steps give the students the skills as well as the confidence necessary to be able to accomplish the independent reading even from day one. Specific reading skills which I noticed and appreciated included having students point at each word so that they connect what they see to what they are saying, and figuring out a word in a sentence according to context and first letter of the word. Another skill that the teacher encouraged students to use was to look at the picture and back at the word. Ms. Owen gives them this set of skills so that they can choose from their set of strategies and read on their own.

Ms. Owen also accommodates the ELLs in her classroom. The students who are learning English are encouraged to express themselves in their first language, so as not to lose that one and to strengthen comprehension in both languages simultaneously. The bilingual assistant in the classroom also helps to accomplish this by making sure the students understand the concepts at hand.

One point which impacted me was how she started the students with independent reading from day one without waiting for them to master reading before starting them with actual books. This method minimizes frustration because the students know that they are still in middle of learning, and will get better and better with time as opposed to feeling as though they completed learning to read but then still have trouble getting through the text.