The course Teachers as Leaders certainly pushed me beyond my normal, everyday duties as a classroom teacher. It pushed me demonstrate leadership inside of my school and out in the community. As a part of Marble's Word Week, I was able to assist in the planning of literacy activities that children would be able to partake in. To further my leadership experience at Word Week I also participated in facilitating the literacy stations at the museum!
To help the students that surround me each day inside of my school, I chose to write a grant on Donors Choose. The purpose of the grant was to provide students with mentor texts that would serve multiple purposes. A mentor text, as Culham (2014) describes, is any text that can be read with a writer's eye. The books included on the Donors Choose grant will be used to help develop students' social and emotional fluency in order for them to understand more complex social situations presented in text, collaborative situations, and social situations.
According to Culham (2014), "Texts are the glue that binds reading and writing processes together. It seems logical, then, to turn to texts to understand writing more deeply rather than relying on worksheets to figure out how writing works."
In addition to the development of social and emotional skills, the texts will serve as mentor texts for reading and writing. After reading the narrative stories, students could respond to the text by writing a personal reaction or writing about a personal experience that connects to the story. Students could also write a letter to a friend summarizing the story and stating their opinion by recommending the story to them. According to Graham and Herbert (2010), newer and better understandings of textual material are likely to occur when students write about text in extended ways involving analysis, interpretation, or personalization. Furthermore, with these books students will learn various writing crafts that they can incorporate into their writing by adopting crafts that these authors use within their own writing.