Community Resources & Rationale 1

Community Resources & Rationale

Nathan L. Tamborello

The University of Houston

Spring 2018 – CUIN 6304

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Community Resource #1: WHACTE Fall Conference

On Saturday, 24th February 2018, I attended the annual WHACTE Winter Event for West

Houston Teachers, this one titled Reading and Writing Inspirations to Reinvigorate Our

Teaching. The event took place at Fort Settlement Middle School in FBISD and lasted from 8:00

AM - 12 P.M.

I began Session I by attending Kristen Stapp’s conference titled Developing Process

Savvy Writers for STAAR. Through this session, she introduced us to a way of thinking about

how our children approach writing in an autonomy- centred way. She had us create a tri-fold

paper, with columns representing A) writing strategies we were SOLID in; B) Writing Strategies

we needed SUPPORT in; and C) Ways in which we were going to PLAN to better the things we

needed help on revising in column B. It allowed us to think about, in a graphic organiser format,

how to talk to our kids about their own writing and make plans for them.

In Session II, I attended Kristi Thaemilitz’s talk entitled New and Improved Sentences.

This talk centred around forcing everyone in the room to create a graphic representation of

coordinating conjunctions, memorise that graphic, and then memorise a phrase that she had

invented for each word. For was represented by a magnifying glass and was titled “Problem

Finder”; And was represented by a plus symbol and was titled “The Match Maker”; Nor was

represented by an Ø and was titled “Negative Form of Not”; But was represented by a see-saw

and was titled “King of Conflict”; Or was represented by a 1 and 2 and was titled “Connects

Two Choices”; Yet was represented by a dandelion and was titled “The Wish”; So was

represented by an = symbol and was titled “The Problem Solver”; and lastly, there was a comma.

She then asked me to stand up after reviewing the chart for 5-minutes and recite from memory
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all of the conjunctions, their image, and their name, to which I did, but thought to myself “what

an incredible waste of my time.”

The last session I attended was given by Gary Loss and was titled I Have A Question:

STAAR Aligned Questioning Sequences. During this session, Gary introduced us to scaffolding

techniques for STAAR questioning chains, starting with Level 1 (Gathering Information), then

Level 2 (Processing Information), and finally Level 3 (Applying Information) questions. He then

introduced us to key words from every level of question along with question stems for that level

of questioning. We also looked at real STAAR test questions to try and identify which level of

questioning the test was asking for and how to identify that specific level. We then ended

discussions by talking about how to effectively integrate questioning into our daily planning and

instruction.

Overall, I’m glad I attended this event, as it introduced me to a lot of good information

for effective teaching, especially for STAAR preparation.

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Community Resource #2: Ready Player One

On Saturday, 31st March 2018, I attended a screening of Spielberg’s Ready Player One

based off the book of the same name by Ernest Cline. Being a Film Studies minor at A&M, I

always love finding ways to allow students to create multi-modal pieces or to incorporate cinema

into the classroom, so I was trying to see how I could utilise this film in the classroom, if at all.

After watching the film, I was introduced in my Senior Seminar class to the imagined

community of Online Fan-Fiction writers and how that type of writing gets kids excited about

creative writing projects. I think I could use this film to get kids to write fan fictions of their own

favourite stories and characters, or characters from the film that they identified with. We can

utilise scenarios from the film or they can create their own, but the idea of the movie (being

mostly fan-fiction centred) can tie into the lesson in how it approaches the kids’ writing.