Kat Gross

Dr. Emily Phillips-Galloway

EDUC 6410
16 Nov. 2017

iSearch Reflection

I thought that using the iSearch process to guide my professional development planning
was extremely helpful. I began with setting my guiding questions. Initially my guiding questions
were:
(1) What instructional practices are already being used by the assistant teachers/lead
teacher in the classroom to support students’ phonemic awareness?
(2) What knowledge do the assistant teachers already possess about phonemic
awareness, its importance, and ways to approach its instruction?
(3) Is there anything unique/specific about the students in these Tier 2 groups that
would impact the type of instruction that would support their phonemic awareness
best?

I found, however, that as I observed in more and more classrooms and had the
opportunity to speak with teachers about what they felt their needs were, my guiding
questions changed and narrowed in their focus. The guiding questions that I ended up using
were:
(1) What instructional practices are already being used by the assistant teachers/lead
teacher in the classroom to support students’ phonological awareness and phonics
skills?
(2) What instructional practices/understandings could teachers incorporate into their
existing small group word work time to support student learning?

I think that my change of guiding questions reflects a greater understanding about what
the teachers I was designing this professional development for needed. For example, I initially
was only considering phonemic awareness as the target foundational literacy skill, but after
observing in classrooms, I noticed that while students did need support in phonemic
awareness, they also needed support with phonological awareness more broadly as well as in
phonics. This change ultimately helped me to decide upon using developmental spelling
analysis as the basis of my presentation.
Additionally, I think my final questions also helped me to maintain an assets-based
approach to working with these teachers. I intentionally looked for what these teachers were
already doing well in their classrooms in regard to phonological awareness and phonics
instruction and ways to build upon what they were already doing in the classroom. This was
one area where I was able to apply Hasbrouck & Denton’s (2005) approach to designing
professional learning by responding to the needs of the adult learner and proposing realistic
changes that build on what teachers are already doing well in reading instruction.
After establishing my final guiding questions and collecting observational data that
helped to answer these questions, I then turned my attention to finding research-based best
practices that would fit the needs of teachers that I had identified. Most of my research started
from reading articles from academic journals, such as The Reading Teacher and The Elementary
School Journal. After reviewing several studies in which developmental spelling analysis was
found to be helpful in supporting students’ phonological awareness and phonics abilities, I then
dug deeper into the seminal texts referenced in the articles: Kathy Ganske’s Word Journeys and
Bear et al.’s Words Their Way.
I think the research phase of the iSearch really helped to illuminate the importance of a
reading specialist’s role as a source of information on best practices, like we talked about in
class after reading Phillips-Galloway & Lesaux (2014). I spent considerable time reading through
these lengthy texts and articles in scholarly journals to get to the meat of what these practices
were all about. It would be difficult for a classroom teacher to navigate this time-consuming
process on top of all of her innumerable day-to-day responsibilities. This is where the role of
the reading specialist comes in. Reading specialists serve as an excellent source of knowledge
on various literacy instruction topics. That is not to say that reading specialists know all of this
information, but that they can take the time to read the literature and figure out what best
practices are, and then present these to teachers.
This iSearch process will serve as a guideline for future professional development
session that I may lead. I think my biggest takeaway from this process was the importance of
really getting to know what is going on in classroom and talking with the teachers that you are
designing professional development for. This helped to set me us as a teacher resource and
partner, instead of an outside stranger who comes in to tell teachers what they should be
doing. Building strong, working relationships with teachers is a really key aspect of the reading
specialist role.