Creating Structured Student Partnerships in Your Literacy Block with 3rd Grade Teacher, Dena Dornfield

Sara
Hey there, happy Monday, I am so glad you are tuning in to today’s episode because today, we are having a first on the podcast.

Sara
Today is the first time that I am interviewing a member from inside the Stellar Literacy Collective, which is our membership site for upper elementary reading and writing teachers. And one of the things that I love about our membership is getting to know the teachers inside our membership community.

Sara
We have a private Facebook group, and we often do trainings and professional developments. And over the years, with all of the interaction that we’ve had, I really get to know a lot of our members really well. And I get to know their challenges and their struggles. But I also get to hear about their wins and successes and the things that they are really good at when it comes to teaching their students.

Sara
And one of our members, Dena Dornfield, is working in a district that is moving away from the traditional reading workshop model. Now, they still have a lot of the same elements that you would see in a reading workshop classroom, they use mentor texts and do whole group lessons and they do small group instruction. And they still have independent reading.

Sara
But the amount of time and the significance that they put on each aspect of their literacy block has really shifted over the years. And one of the things that they are putting a huge focus on is creating intentional student partnerships within their classrooms, and giving students daily opportunities to work and practice literacy skills within these structured partnerships.

Sara
And making this shift has really had a significant impact on her students engagement, mastery and overall confidence. And I’m super excited to share this conversation with y’all. If you are a longtime listener of the podcast, then you know that I am a firm believer that there is more than one way for you to be an effective literacy teacher.

Sara
And I think by listening in on our conversation, you’re going to hear how one teacher is effectively setting up and structuring her literacy block to meet the needs of all of our students. So let’s jump into the episode.

Sara
Hi, Dena, welcome to the podcast. I am so excited to have you on today.

Dena
Hi, Sara. I am so excited to be here. It was a very nice unexpected surprise. Thank you.

Sara
Absolutely. So Dena is one of our members inside the Stellar Literacy Collective. And she is just a wealth of knowledge and information and experiences. She has been teaching literacy for such a long time.

Sara
And her school is moving away from the reading workshop model. And they’re starting to do a lot more structured partner practices in their literacy block. And so we’re going to talk about that during our podcast today.

Sara
But before we jump into that, Dena, can you take a minute to introduce yourself to my audience, let them know who you are, where you’re from what you teach, just give us a little bit of a background.

Dena
Okay, thanks. My name is Dena Dornfield. I live in Shelby Township, Michigan, which is about 20 miles north of Detroit. I just celebrated my 35th anniversary with my husband Michael. And I have three adult daughters one’s name is Amy. She’s married to an airline pilot. So that’s kind of interesting.

Sara
Do you guys get a discount on travel?

Dena
Never. But they have a little boy named Teddy who’s three. I have another daughter Sarah, her husband is in the skilled trades. And she is our building sub. She eventually wants to be a regular classroom teacher but she is raising a family right now. She has two teenage daughters and eight year old boy our seven year old boy.

Dena
And then my youngest daughter is Marie and it’s so funny because Sarah Marie and I love that. Yeah, Maria is a professional dog trainer. And she is getting married in August to a young man who is a police officer slash firefighter for his community.

Dena
I am in my 23rd year of teaching, and I started when I was a bit older, I stayed at home and raised my kids while I went to college. So when my kids were in school full time, that’s when I started to teach. And I taught sixth grade and fifth grade, and I was a literacy consultant in our district.

Dena
And currently, I’ve been teaching third grade for 12 years. And I love it. I didn’t love it at first, I cried. I said, What am I doing, they don’t know how to write. They, you know, it was just going from fifth grade to third grade was a huge change. But I love it now. And I can’t imagine myself being in any other classroom.

Dena
I have my master’s degree in reading and language arts, and I have a specialist degree in administration. And I have just a couple more years before I have, I can retire. And I’m, I know, I will work at least two more years. But if I’m feeling up to it, I just will keep doing it.

Dena
And something that I am trying to plan and do for my community is I would really like to develop a free tutoring service in our community, for kids all the way up to adults. There’s a great need for having those reading skills for those kids and tutoring is so expensive. So I would like to just develop that in my retirement,

Sara
I love it. And I you have such a full I mean a full life, you’ve got kids grandkids, but caring that you’ve been in the classroom for, you know, over 20 years, and that you’ve, you know, found this love, especially in third grade, but even even though you’re close to retirement, you have these ideas and visions on how you want to continue just being involved in education. So I just I love it.

Sara
I love connecting with teachers that still have that passion for teaching, even after so many years. So I’m super excited for us to have this conversation today.

Sara
Okay, so you’ve been in the classroom for a while, which means you taught pre COVID. And you’ve taught post COVID. And I feel like a lot of teachers, you know, have experienced some additional challenges, maybe some extra challenges as a result of just how school has changed since the pandemic.

Sara
Let’s kind of recap the school year a little bit. What has been one of your biggest challenges, you know, as you reflect on this last school year?

Dena
Well, this school year, my third grade group was the Kindergarten group that went out in COVID.

Sara
Which is wild to think that like those kindergarteners are now in third grade.

Dena
Yes. And they missed four months of school for the kindergarten year, four months, that is huge in a kindergarten year. And then they went to first grade. And first grade was very chaotic. We had half days we had well, we didn’t even come to school till January, it was all virtual.

Dena
And then in January, we divided the kids in half and half of them came in the morning, half came in the afternoon. Wednesdays, we kept them home and to small group because we couldn’t do small group everything at a social distance. It was just awful. It was like something I would never ever dream that I would ever experience.

Dena
Yeah, and me, I am not technology literate at all, and having to be thrown into it, literally thrown into it. Take your computer home. The setup I have in my classroom now is nothing I had a computer and a laptop. Now I have all kinds.

Sara
You survived it, though, you figured it out. So you’re going off to ball.

Dena
It was not fun, but I did figure it out. And I actually, as much as I didn’t like it, I really had learned a lot. I learned a lot from that experience.

Dena
So second grade last year was their first year of somewhat back to normal, but they are so behind. And not just academically, but they are so behind in their behaviors, in their maturity levels in all of it. It’s it’s just been an eye opener, and just not being we’re just having a conversation today, with my team. They’re just having us struggling with being kind to one another in just teaching all those social emotional skills.

Sara
Yeah, that’s hard. And I feel like so many teachers can relate to those challenges. You know, it’s like we’re, we’ve been constantly playing catch up since the pandemic, not just in academics, but like you were saying, even in behavior, and that just can make you know, the behavior challenges can make the academics even more challenging, because it’s hard to get kids who don’t have the community or aren’t able to focus to actually be engaged in the lessons.

Sara
But I know even though that that has been a challenge, I’m sure you’ve had some wins from this last year. So share with us what is a win that you’ve had this past year with your students?

Dena
Well, I am a real big proponent for social emotional learning. And I have been incorporating a lot of that in the classroom, and I am seeing some success with it. I have taken some professional development on calm classroom and we’ve been doing some practices with that and when it feels like it’s getting really kind of crazy., I have them take a moment or two and we we breathe and we calm ourselves down.

Dena
I’ve arranged my room with a lot of lamps, I don’t do overhead lighting. And on top of it music just, you know, a calming sense, instruments, you know, and it really, when I had the overhead lights on, you can tell the difference, they just are so much calmer with the lamps.

Dena
And something that we decided as a team, we noticed that our afternoons were really, really difficult. And so we decided, we switched, we, you know, I taught science and my teaching partner taught social studies.

Dena
And we’re just like, Okay, we’re done, we’re just going to self contain it. And it has been so much better. And we’re so much better that we are going to actually start off that way next year.

Sara
That’s awesome. I always love it, when you can end the year with some reflections on like, this worked so much better. And I’m going to start the year in this way.

Dena
And we’ve all been switched. So I mean, this was quite a change for us.

Sara
I love that. And I especially love the impact that you’ve seen with like focusing on social emotional learning, it’s amazing how small things like lamps or music or just the way we set up our classroom can like, impact the whole like feel in our classroom. So excited to hear just even next year, how the things that you do with SEL continue to impact your students.

Sara
So let’s jump in to kind of, you know, what I want to talk with you about and I know that you’ve shared with me in the past that your school is kind of starting to move away from the traditional reading workshop model. And they’re putting less focus on small group instruction and more focus on explicit whole group lessons.

Sara
And really this idea of having intentional student partnerships, which I think is really cool, and I’m excited to hear more about. Can you tell us a little bit about why your district has decided to make this change?

Dena
Well, our district is really focused on the MTSS model of instruction is the Multi Tiered System of Supports. And what it is, is it’s like, it’s like a triangle. And the biggest bang for your buck is 80% of your class. If you are instructing 80% of your class whole group, you’re probably going to experience more success.

Dena
And then 15% of that triangle is your small groups. And like 5% is your EL or your special ed that get pulled from your classroom. But I think when COVID happened and I we were practicing MTSS before COVID, we were starting to get professional development, just getting a base knowledge of it, because that was a new, you know, term and education, we get so many new terms all the time.

Dena
But that was the new term. And it was really hard. You know, some of us think of it as RTI, that is something that some teachers know, RTI is a part of that. But that 80%, our district doesn’t want us not to do small groups, you know, but they really want you to focus your instruction on hitting that 80% of your class.

Dena
And then doing small groups. I do two small groups daily, I went from doing four a day. And my whole group instruction was like short, where I got to take that 20 minutes for each group, that’s an additional 40 minutes that I could add on to my whole group instruction. And I can break my whole group instruction up into like many parts.

Dena
And that’s where my AV partnerships come in. And that was a professional development that we received for our English Language Learners. And the strategies that they use in English Language Learners, are beneficial to all students.

Dena
So we looked at that MTSS model of whole group, and how could we make that even, you know, better. And because there was so much, so many strategies and skills from the ESL professional development, we decided to pick two that we could really work with, and it was the AV partners, where we match a high level instruction student with mid low level, and then mid high level with our lowest level.

Dena
So it’s, you know, so it’s not such a gap in the students, you know, abilities. And I formed those groups by analyzing their NWEA data that we do our, our independent reading assessments that we do our dibbles our spelling inventories, we look at all of that we establish our routines, and I don’t really get the partners going until like mid October, but that I can start matching the personalities with their abilities.

Dena
And it really, it really has been so beneficial and those partners stay together. And it’s baby steps. We do a lot of practice before they get good but then we include sentence stems for them to use as a way to engage in the have discussions or a way to answer written responses. So it has been very, a very good practice for us.

Sara
I love that. And I love this idea that, you know, we’re thinking is kind of like, we know that small group instruction can be an effective way to reach our students. But it’s almost like wait a minute, like, let’s put our focus on making sure that the majority of our students are understanding our whole group lessons, because then we don’t necessarily have the need to put every single student in a small group.

Sara
And so it’s really this idea that like, let’s, you know, maximize our whole group time, and then we have less of a need for these small group lessons. Can you tell me just a little bit about, you know, what is it like to have this sort of like, shift?

Sara
I know, you know, schools go through shifts all the time, whether it is with a curriculum shift, or a structural shift or a new program. And so, you know, what was it like, for you, as a teacher to sort of change the structure and how you approach teaching literacy?

Dena
Well, my actual reading block time did not change a whole lot. It’s just it was tweaked when it came to the whole group and the small group lessons. And actually, it was like, so much easier to be honest.

Dena
I, you know, I, you think, Oh, my gosh, you’re trying to find an easy way out, but it wasn’t like that. It was, it was like, I could do 12 small groups in 15 minutes, you know, I could go and meet with each one of those partnerships. Yeah, that’s kind of like a small Yep, absolutely.

Dena
And you can really address misconceptions. And, you know, see if they’re on task, see if they’re understanding what the task is. But I really didn’t like change my whole routine, I just was able to extend my whole group lesson. And then my small group lessons, I could make them a tad bit longer. And I could spend more time with the ones that really needed it.

Dena
And I don’t, I’m not really good with all of the making centers and stuff like that, that was a real challenge for me. And I felt like if the kids had to do it, I had to correct it type of thing. So and that’s on me, I know, a lot of teachers don’t do that. But I felt that I’ve always felt that way.

Dena
So we use a lot of technology. And that is kind of more my independent work time the kids are doing some sort of technology east, or they’re doing their word study practice. And that’s basically all they have in that 20 minute time to 30 minute time period that they can get done.

Dena
And then my second small group time the kids are reading independently for 30 that my kids come in, after lunch, they know, they don’t even talk, they come in, they sit down, they grab their silent reading book, they love it, they love reading.

Dena
And it wasn’t like that, in the beginning, it took like a half a year to get them. But they love it. And I can meet with a group at that time. And then I meet individually to check fluency. So I really haven’t changed a lot. I’ve just been able to spend more time doing things that I think are more important.

Sara
And I think that’s such an important reminder, because you know, things are caught up in an education long enough things are constantly changing and shifting. And there’s new programs that come in.

Sara
And I think anytime that teachers get the news that it’s like, hey, there’s a new program, or here’s a new, you know, initiative or new whatever it is, it can feel overwhelming and scary to teachers like oh my gosh, I have to completely change everything.

Sara
But I think in most cases we you don’t have to change everything. It’s you’re making the the small shifts, or the small tweaks or you’re putting emphasis on something else, and hearing you talk through just your literacy block, you know, it sounds like you’re still doing all of the all of the things that we know are effective in terms of instruction.

Sara
The whole group and the small group and the literacy centers and the independent practice, you’re just reallocating the amount of time that you spend on each of those.

Dena
And the resources. I don’t do a lot of paper pencil activities, like I used to do five, six years ago. It’s more technology that addresses their needs, their individual needs. It’s adaptive, and they don’t need me helping them out with that and there and then their word study is they’re in a group based on their spelling inventory. So they’re working on work that they can do independently.

Sara
Yeah, that’s awesome. So can you walk us through kind of like time allocation so like, what does your reading or your literacy block look like in terms of how much time do you spend on the various parts?

Dena
My district is blessed with having a lot of autonomy in their teaching. We are provided resources we’re kind of expected to use them but like it’s, a lot of them are beneficial for newer teachers but for someone who is has been teaching nearly 25 years, I don’t need a cookie cutter scripted lesson.

Dena
You know, I I’m fine. I know the standards. I tried to teach more standard base, but I have about 120 minutes that I can allocate.

Sara
That’s awesome because I know so many teachers have like 60-75 minutes. So the fact that you guys have two hours is incredible.

Dena
We’re able to get our math and our and we do science and social studies every other day. So we get everything in. But my whole group reading lesson is usually where I start my instruction is with my whole group. And it’s about 30 minutes.

Dena
And that’s where I include my AB partnerships. And then I do my first rotation after that, where I meet with one small group and my other students are doing technology, we do East Park Reading, and they do their word study practice. So they have 30 minutes, whole group, 30 minutes rotation.

Dena
And then I go into my writing lesson. Sometimes my rotation, my small group will be with the writing group, too. So it’s not always reading groups, most of the time it’s reading, but I do draw in my writing small groups at that time, too. And we just spend 20 to 30 minutes writing every day, that’s in the morning.

Dena
And in the afternoon, right after lunch, I do my second rotation, which is 30 minutes, I meet with a small group, and I meet with individual students for fluency checks. But then might while I’m doing that my students are doing their independent reading time everybody is reading at the same time. So there’s not a lot of distractions.

Dena
You know, and I make sure I don’t pull the same group all the time during that time, because I want everyone reading at that time. So I try to mix up in that in that time too I have several my kids pulled for their EL services. So if I there pull for their EL services, I tried to get that group of kids in the morning rotation.

Dena
And then on Mondays and Tuesdays, I meet with my small groups for Word Study, to get the groups to introduce the spelling pattern or word pattern, and then they have independent work for the rest of the week to do with that. So that’s basically my literacy block.

Sara
I love it. And it I mean, it’s so simple, like I said earlier, you know, you’re really simplifying the way that you’re teaching and focusing on the important aspects, you’ve got your whole group lesson. And then you’ve got your small group with a rotation where you can incorporate some of those other activities.

Sara
I think that’s one of the hard things for teachers is like, there’s so many things to incorporate. There’s word study, there’s fluency, you know, comprehension, all of those things. But as you say, they, they still have that rotation while you’re pulling a small group to where you can easily incorporate, you know, these extra activities that they need to get practice in, without having to take away from, you know, additional whole group time or having to do a huge complex center rotation.

Sara
So I love just hearing what your literacy block sounds like. And it sounds like you guys have just like a great allocation for the amount of time that you’re using.

Sara
You’d mentioned a little bit earlier that AB partners is a big focus for your school, and that the students work together for long periods of time. How does this partnership, you know, if you’ve got students that are paired up and they’re working together for months at a time, how does this partnership impact your students?

Sara
Have you noticed a difference in you know, your students engagement and their mastery and their confidence? What does the partnership, you know, what does that look like for students?

Dena
Well, first of all, when we develop our partnerships, like I said, I spend a lot of time looking at the data that I get at the beginning of the year. And then we switched the AB partners mid year too, when I relook at their data and their personalities. So we tried to do a very, we do some switching tweaking when we first start making them of course, you have to.

Sara
I’m sure it’s like a seating arrangement where it’s like, you don’t get a right necessarily right away, and you have to, you know, move a few kids around in order to get it to work.

Dena
You would never realize that two kids work terribly together, or two kids, you know, they’re too talkative together. And you would not put those two together thinking that they would be but they are. So you do have to do some tweaking.

Dena
But once you get it and you practice the routines, it is so easy. They know what to do. So it’s always based on like, if I have a whole group lesson as they were filling out a graphic organizer that day, we’re talking and I’m modeling it in the beginning during my lesson, I usually don’t give them the graphic organizer until I’m done. Because I want all eyes on me. I don’t want them starting to fill it out.

Dena
And you know, so they’re all eyes on me and the kids are amazing think I have eyes at the back of my head. And you know, I tell him I’ve been teaching so long I know when they’re not on task.

Dena
But I do the modeling for them and then I hand out and they just get to work because they know what they need to do. And at that time while they’re working, I’m roaming the room talking to the kids asking them they’re asking them about their thinking and how they can improve on something or are you sure you want to write this down.

Dena
Or you know, all those things that we asked kids when we’re working with them. And I can just knowing that I have a higher student with one it just they built confidence in themselves, even the ones that struggle develop a sense of confidence, and they’re as eager, when they get comfortable with those partnerships, they’re as eager to talk as the higher level student the confidence level, it just builds and it’s in, it’s nice to see.

Sara
That’s awesome. And I think you’re right. You know, it’s like one of those things where it’s like when students really develop that trust and familiarity with another student, it’d be they become so much more comfortable. Whereas I think sometimes students can be reluctant to share in a whole group, if they don’t feel like they have the right answer, or they don’t feel like they’re particularly strong in a subject.

Sara
But when you’re only sharing with your partner that you’ve worked with, for months, like it’s so much easier to take that risk and try something new.

Sara
I, when I was in the classroom, I loved doing partnerships, and I never had students do partners for long periods of time, I kind of wish that I would have tested that out. But we were constantly working in partners.

Sara
And one of the things that I always had my students do is if it was, you know, a partnership completing one graphic organizer, or completing one response, they would have one piece of paper that both, you know, one piece of paper and one pencil, but both students were responsible for contributing to that and just sort of creating that forced collaboration made such a difference for their communication, their independence, their confidence.

Sara
So I love hearing that this has had such a positive impact on your students. Can you share some of the specific activities that your students do in their partnerships? Because you said that this is something that usually happens during your whole group, instructional time. So what are some of those specific things that your partnerships will do?

Dena
Well, for instance, today, we had a science reading passage that I had the partners do, and they read together the passage, I always make them read it twice, they tally mark, so I know that they have read it twice. And I walk around. And before they can’t.

Dena
Because I do what is called, I call it Oreo reading, you know, it’s a first Oreo read at the beginning of the year, I give the kids Oreo cookies, and they eat fast. And they have to just quickly tell me about the Oreo. And that’s just getting the gist of the story.

Dena
And then we eat an Oreo cookie a second time. And they have to eat it really slow with their eyes closed and think about all the senses. And we do that every year at the beginning of the year. So whenever I refer to any activity, I talk about a first Oreo read, or a second Oreo read.

Dena
What do we do for first or read? It’s getting the gist of the story? What is the second Oreo read? We read for deeper meaning I love that analogy. So like today, they were reading and then they have to highlight and they’re working together to do RACE strategy to answer the question.

Dena
So we’re practice that, you know, still third or third grade, they still struggle with it, we’ve been doing it all year, I tell them, you know, you just have to keep persevering. We have to we have to keep going, it’s May and I know we’re done. But we are we’re not.

Dena
So we do graphic organizers, reading passages, I also do it with their math and their science and their social studies. So it’s just not for my literacy. But when we do writing, I have them, you know, check each other’s writing. And you know, peer editing may be a little bit.

Dena
But it just depends on I have them do it every day, they do something every day with their partners. But you know, it’s not that I, there are opportunities throughout the, you know, week or something that I let them work with other people too.

Dena
But when I really am, you know, involved in a lesson that I think it’s really important that they’re like introducing new concepts or whatever, I really want them with their AB partner, because they have developed a relationship, a relationship to share.

Sara
I love that. And so I mean, it sounds like you know, it’s I think one of the things we’re oftentimes teachers are like, Well, what do I have my partners do? Like I want my students to work in partnerships with what do I have them do? But they can do anything, you know, anything that you would have students do independently they can do with a partner.

Sara
And I think having an extra person to talk through the process with to hear their thinking to collaborate with that just helps students, you know, with building their confidence, and really, I think fast tracks them to mastery if they’ve got somebody else that they can work through, you know, understanding the content with so I love hearing about that. And just I love that you’ve made partnerships such a big part of your instructional block this year.

Sara
Dena, I know you’ve been in the classroom for such a long time. But you know, you still seem to so much excitement and passion for teaching and even hearing you talk about things you want to do when you’re retired. What are some of the things that you have done over the past few years to help you really just maintain your excitement and passion for teaching even when the circumstances have been so difficult?

Dena
You know what, I don’t know exactly why I am the way that I am. I’m just a highly motivated person. I love it. I love teaching. And it’s so funny because I think back when I first started and I still feel that same sense of urgency and excitement that I did when I was a first year teacher. It just hasn’t changed for me.

Dena
I have the personality that goes with the flow really good. I don’t get involved in the negativity, I try to avoid it. I’m very flexible in my, in my teaching and even in my work outside of the classroom like in in committees and stuff like that. I just it I have such a passion for it.

Dena
And I have such a, I don’t even know what the word is I just, I love it. I just love teaching and I love being I don’t always love being around the kids to be honest with you there they can be draining at times.

Sara
I think anybody who has been in the classroom knows that.

Dena
Yes, but I just I think it is that it matters to me that we have good teachers in the classroom. It matters to me that our kids today are successful when they graduate high school. And when the COVID thing happened, I really got in a dark, not dark. But you know, it was very difficult time.

Dena
And I just, I’m like nothing is going to change the way that I feel and think, except for me. And I really develop that. That attitude of positive thinking and compassion and just positive affirmations every day, every day, I start my day with this program that not it’s not a program.

Dena
But I read a book several years ago called the Miracle Morning. And I don’t know how it was introduced to me because it was like three years ago. But you know, I had it on my bookshelf, like in October. And this was before COVID happened, like the October and COVID happened in March.

Dena
And I had it and I was going to do it, I was going to do it and you know, we were going to do a group of us girls, we’re going to do a book club with it. And then we just never got to it in the COVID happen. Well, then when during that really a month or so of really being sad and feeling sorry for myself and all that self pity.

Dena
And like I have pulled myself out of this. So I pulled out that book and I’m like, it was just an amazing thing. And it really all it does is it wants you to reflect on who you are. And you do it through journaling and reading, like self help books and, or if you’re religious reading things that, you know, that connect to you, and affirmations and all of that. And I started doing it every morning, I have been doing it for three years now.

Sara
Wow, that is some commitment.

Dena
Because now I can’t start my day because I know I’m gonna be going into negative situations I’m gonna be going in with challenging students, I, we are a really tough title one school, we have a lot of diversity, a lot of economical diversity. And we have a lot of behavior issues in our building but I love it.

Dena
And I wouldn’t want to work anywhere else. But it’s draining. So if I don’t have that positive affirmation every morning, if I don’t put out my positive Facebook posts that I do, I’ve been doing for three years, I don’t feel complete.

Dena
And it’s like, like, you know, this, you’re you have tons of followers. And you know, I started getting followers and I and I really, you know, I people say don’t stop ever doing that. So that gets me going and keeps me going.

Sara
I love that. And I love how you said that nobody else is gonna come in and change your circumstances, you have to be the one to make the change. And I think so often we forget that even in the midst of the most negative circumstances, we still have control over how we respond to those circumstances. So I love that you just sort of made that connection, and have been living that out in the last couple of years.

Sara
I would love to know, you know, as we wrap up this interview here, what advice would you give to teachers who are in a district that is making a major shift in the way that they teach reading. Either they’ve got new curriculum, or they’re completely changing the structure of their literacy block. What advice would you give them?

Dena
My advice would be, don’t try to do it all. Don’t try to do it all because you just can’t, you’ll become frustrated, you’ll, you know, you’ll feel inadequate.

Dena
To just pick like I did with the AB partners and the sentence stems. Pick two things are so that you know, that you could master it’d be like throwing a whole curriculum at the kids and you know, you know, say just you master it, you have to pick one or two things that will impact you and you can continue to add to them each year.

Dena
Know your limitations and be okay with that. You know, some people are, you know, can tackle four things, you know, I can’t I only can do two at a time. My brain won’t let me do anything more than that.

Dena
And not be jealous that they can, you know, just that’s just accept who you are. Do you know your limitations? You know, do what you want to do with that new curriculum, do what works for you. That’s what I would say.

Sara
I love that because I think you know so often especially during the summertime teachers get a lot of professional development. They get a lot of new ideas. As you know, schools are putting new initiatives in place, and it can feel overwhelming to try to have to do all of these new things.

Dena
And you want to do all of them because they sound so wonderful. Oh, I want to do this and I want to do that. And, and you can’t.

Sara
Yep. I love that where it’s like, start with two. And you know, that doesn’t mean you’re only going to do those things, but start with two do those two well then add on to that. So I love that.

Sara
Well, Dena, I have just enjoyed getting to know you inside the membership. And I love hearing about all of the successes that you’ve had with your students. And I’m so grateful that you were willing to come on the podcast today, and especially share how your classroom in your school is prioritizing student partnerships and the impact that that is happening.

Sara
So thank you for coming on to the podcast today. This was such a fun conversation to have.

Dena
Thank you.