Fishtank Teacher Spotlight: Matt Ennis

As a team of former teachers, we love not only spending time with current teachers, but also celebrating the incredibly hard work those teachers are doing every day. Fishtank Teacher Spotlights give us a chance to highlight how our curriculum, combined with deep knowledge of content and student needs, can lead to engaged, exciting classrooms for students. One of these classrooms is at Ellison Parks Early Education School where 3rd grade teacher Matt Ennis has been using Fishtank ELA. 

We recently had the chance to sit down with Matt and talk about his experience using Fishtank over the past few years and the impact it has had on his instruction, his students, and his collaboration with his team. Matt teaches an inclusive class that has many multilingual learners, students with disabilities, and general education students. If Matt’s name look familiar, you may have seen our previous spotlight on his virtual classroom during the 2020-2021 school year.

 

Building Knowledge Across Units

One of the first questions we always want to ask our Fishtank users is, how did you find Fishtank, and what made you start looking? When we posed this question to Matt, he had no trouble recalling why he wanted to find a curriculum like Fishtank; he wanted an engaging curriculum that built the background knowledge his students needed to tackle complex texts. When he first began exploring Fishtank ELA, he loved how “engaging the units were and how the literature and science and social studies blocks were aligned. It felt very developmentally appropriate for kids.” 

He told us that he’d seen a lot of curriculums that claimed to be knowledge-building, but didn’t truly provide enough resources or context for students. Fishtank, however, was different: “I love how it doesn’t assume kids need certain background knowledge.” He shared that he appreciates how everything students need is included in the units, and the units intentionally build on one another so students can apply what they learn throughout the course.  He had “never seen another curriculum use units in that way to build knowledge across the curriculum with units that align so well.”

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Inspiring a Love of Reading

As an elementary school teacher, Matt understands the importance of getting students excited to learn and setting a foundation for a lifelong love of reading. From the first unit of the year, Matt’s students were developing “a love of literature from launching the year with Dyamonde Daniel.” His students had never before read a book with a main character that they could relate to so easily: “Dyamonde Daniel got them hooked. They were like, wait I could read books that are about third graders that have flaws, that have personality just like me.” 

Beyond the unit texts, Matt also got his students interested in reading on their own with Fishtank’s recommended independent reading list. He had a group of “pretty fluent readers, but reluctant readers” that he was able to get excited about reading using those recommended texts in his classroom’s book club. Now, those once reluctant readers can’t get enough of the Planet Omar series!

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Seeing Student Success

Not only have Matt’s students enjoyed learning with Fishtank ELA, but they are making significant progress in their reading, writing, and speaking skills. The “holistic approach to language instruction that is centered in Fishtank” has helped his multilingual learners use more complex sentence structures after reading them, using sentence stems to write them, and hearing them used aloud in class. Matt credits Fishtank’s focus on sentence-level instruction as “pivotal for our multilingual learners in helping them express their thoughts more clearly. Now, it's not uncommon to hear students in our classroom say, while or although as they engage in discussions.” Additionally, the Cold Read Assessments have allowed Matt to quantify this language growth as his students engage with unfamiliar passages in each unit. 

Matt has also seen his students’ test scores reflect their in-class growth. After just one year of using Fishtank ELA with his 3rd grade students, 82% of his class met or exceeded their RTI score on the MAP assessment. Additionally, his class showed a median conditional growth of 91%. Matt shared that he and his 3rd grade teaching team were “seeing the fruits of our labor, which was incredible.”

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Supporting Collaboration and Planning

In closing our conversation with Matt, we wanted to turn our attention back to the impact Fishtank ELA has had on his planning and collaboration with this teaching team. Matt shared that the Fishtank Unit Launches were a key component of his team’s collaborative planning process: “We used the Unit Launches as our [collaborative planning time] agenda. We went through this 5 to 6 week cycle, and it was so powerful and the units that we were able to do together, we feel so confident in.” 

The intellectual preparation resources they had been using from previous curriculums were “giving information that didn’t necessarily help us teach.” With Fishtank, it was different: As his team worked through the Unit Launches together, they were able to watch and reflect on the various text complexity videos and spend time planning how they could support their multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Because Fishtank provides the core lesson, his team could “focus the planning time on those students that need it the most.”

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Many thanks to Matt for sharing his experience using Fishtank ELA! Ready to give it a try in your classroom? Unlock thousands of free K-12 lesson plans with a free Fishtank Learning account.