Reading Kylene Beers WHEN KIDS CAN'T READ really changed the way I taught this past fall. I used so many of Beers strategies in both my language arts and science classes. A lot of the strategies are built into the Read XL program which is a mandated program for all of the level 3-6 stanines at my school. I had the opportunity to attend some professional development that went into specifics of how to use a lot of these strategies--like making inferences and buidling predictions. Even as I reread this book now, I am overwhelmed with the amount of information in it. Sometimes reading these types of books makes me feel more inadequate then enlightened. It is clear to me that becoming an excellent teacher is more an act of patience and dutiful hard work than anything else.

Beers talks about providing individual attention to "specific students with specific needs." In her final chapter she talks about all of the obstacles that get in the way of that. Atleast in my classroom last year, every student had specific needs and while I'd read a number of great books with reading and writing strategies throughout the year, I never felt like I could have possibly reached all of my students with the tools I was given. And that is a frustrating thought, which many of us first year teachers have expressed. You can have a whole garage shed of tools and strategies in your back pocket, but it is so difficult figuring out what the right moment to use them is and how to balance them. I feel that is my greatest worry for next year... how do I structure my year, how do I balance what my class needs as a group and what each one of my students needs individually? Right now I'm reading a bunch of books on teaching writing at once and trying to meld everything into some comprehensible structure; it's such a daunting task...
Has anyone come to some wonderful epiphany about structuring your class for next year? I'd love to hear it. :-)