No "implementation gap" here!

A recent Zone coach's PD focused on the so-called implementation gap, the typical distinction between those who are trained to implement a new technique and those who actually do so.

In the last three weeks, I've been trolling the classrooms of Everett, looking for evidence of implementation of our Writers Craft techniques (e.g sentence unscrambling, sentence patterning, sentence combining, and mentor sentences -- see below posts for more info), and I'm cautiously optimistic that we are on our way to defying the conventional wisdom on this one.  Earlier this week I got to observe Mr. Wright teach transitions through paragraph unscrambling, a smart and strategic way to get students to build their understanding of how transitions function as sign-posts in well-organized paragraphs, and today I observed Ms. Soto using sentence patterning (based off of her read aloud of The Boy in Striped Pajamas) to increase students' capacity to create their own complex sentences.  Check out her signage below.

Three key reflections the 7th grade team came to after a video share of this lesson in CPT today:

• sentence patterning requires scaffolding when introducing it to students, and one effective scaffold might have been to limit the sentence pattern to one noun until students were comfortable with the concept
• the ticker visuals make a difference (see Ms. Florita's in the "Writers Craft Part Deux" post)
• this activity is such a strong content vocabulary builder that it makes sense to use it with content that we deem most crucial (in this case, it might have made more sense to work on the students' Social Studies content, or the content they are using for their persuasive essays, rather than content from a read aloud -- though I can't lie, it was pretty cool to hear students recommend the far flung locales of Berlin and Auschwitz as the end of prepositional phrases!)