Rebecca Adams is the Media Specialist at Waccamaw Middle School. She started out as an eighth grade Civics and Economics teacher but realized she wanted to shift her path in education to help with students’ literacy skills. She concluded that the students in her class who struggled the most with the content had poor reading skills. Luckily, she had a mentor in the Media Specialist at her school who recommended that she get her master’s in library and information science, so she did. Once she had that degree in hand, she became an elementary school media specialist because that is where the foundational literacy skills start. Eventually, she returned to the middle school level, and it is where she will finish her career.
When
asked about the standard to discuss, she stated that INCLUDE is a great one to
think about for middle school as the students are all at such a unique stage in
life where inclusion for them is important. She creates lessons and activities
with all learning styles in mind and makes sure there are opportunities for
student collaboration in each lesson. She also displays a variety of genres and
reading levels and includes diverse books to represent all perspectives. In lessons,
she also makes sure there is movement for the students by working at different
stations, a mixture of sources from print and digital, and always has Hi-Lo
books available. One of the biggest successes is using the Breakout EDU boxes
in lessons in each content area too so they see the connections between
literacy, problem solving, and teamwork in all their classes.
Collaboration
with the teachers in the school is essential in Mrs. Adams’ eyes as she sees
that as how to make her lessons/activities a true enrichment for their content
curriculum. To do this, Mrs. Adams attends PLC meeting when needed and works closely
with the curriculum coach to implement the lessons/activities. Some of the activities
have been with science to learn about research, ELA classes to understand
credible resources and citations, and social studies have done Breakout EDU
boxes to review the three branches of government. There are also activities that
involve every student, such as book tastings that really make the students aware
of all the great books that are in the collection and usually the checkouts
after the lesson are high. Mrs. Adams also works with the Special Needs class
so they can have library time and appropriate books for their levels.
The greatest challenge faced is time. It is hard for
teachers to give up classroom time for this to work, and it is hard to cover
everything in a class period for a lesson, however, it always is a success and
the students benefit from it the most.
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