Aug 31

Today as I saw another day of full-class activities, I thought about how important it is to be sure every child is engaged in full-class instruction. The sped teacher I'm working with is creative about this, and often combines it with physical movements too, such as: if you're listening, put your hand on your head; if you have your homework away and your paper in front of you, stand up; etc. I wonder how whiteboard responses would work with this class. Actually, the class seems remarkably well-behaved, even though the paraprofessionals don't really take much of an active role. We need to do something to increase engagement and not just listlessness. They're pretty good at just sitting, which is good and not good. It's sort of a false sense that they're learning just because they're not acting up (well, it appears that way to me). I've been really itching to introduce the vocabulary words. I always think of a lot of connections I want to share, but I'm certainly not going to interrupt the teacher to try to do something I think is creative. Not a great way to make friends.

I again enjoyed my reading group. I try to ask comprehension questions that incorporate other subjects. For example we were reading about golf, so we discussed why lower scores are better and how to calculate how many strokes it took the golfer per hole. The story takes place in the same state in which we live, so I'm bringing a map to class tomorrow. I've been reading about how even college students have absolutely no idea how to read maps. They're very engaged in this group, in discussing details about the story. I'm also working on summarizing paragraphs after they're read. The book is very well-organized in that paragraphs are numbered and generally stick to the topic, so it's easy to summarize. I tell my students that summarizing written material is the #1 study skill that students need, or #1 writing skill, to succeed in higher grades.

Aug 27

Left for school before 7:30 this morning, only to find the student I was to observe was absent. So typical. Today we did "skills bank" in the computer lab. This pretests students on grammar and usage skills, then provides lessons and quizzes in different areas, such as nouns, verbs, etc. I'm wondering whether we ever use this to complement what we've done in the classroom, or whether it's just an activity that is supposedly individualized and works in a computer lab with a group of any size.

We didn't get to reading groups at all today, so I'm wondering about the use of all the parapros in our classroom. Even when we do get to read, it's only about 1/4 to 1/3 of the class time anyway. We have so many adults in there, I feel like we should be really shaking things up, getting the children involved in their learning in many different ways. At the very least, small groups!

I started thinking about grammar today, and teaching grammar. Why do we teach about nouns and verbs? I assume we do it so students can learn correct sentence structure. But I'm not sure we ever make it that far. We just want them to be able to identify the different parts of speech, and not how they go together to make grammatically correct sentences. Of course, this is not really a strength of mine either.

Aug 26

Very exciting! Today I was asked to come early tomorrow to do a student observation. Like we have so many times in special education, there's a new student from another state who has some serious emotional issues, who's between doctors, between parents/guardians, and who has already had an outburst before we received any paperwork. I sure hope I can help.

I also enjoyed working in my reading group. We're reading some true stories, and our first was about a man who was lost in the Maine wilderness as a pre-teen. One of my group members was finished early, so we looked him up on the Internet. We found new pictures of him as an 80-year-old, old newspaper clippings, and even a recent video clip of him. The students were fascinated. It's amazing how easy it is to add geography, history etc. to our usual assignments and how motivating that is. It seems like a "teachable moment," but I'm not sure I always have faith in them.

Speaking of teachable moments, I took a minute to tell students about the research in student outcomes; that is, students who have better work and life outcomes are the ones who know their strengths and weaknesses and are able to ask for help where they need it. I can't imagine a one-minute lecture took hold too much, but I tried. It came up when the teacher was modeling how she's good at writing, but would take longer to work on math. I don't think it hurts to walk students through things like this. Additionally, a student asked me point-blank whether this was the lowest-level reading class. I made a split-second decision to tell him the truth. I told him that it was, but it wasn't a contest, and that all of their reading skills were better than we thought. All true. He didn't seem to be discouraged, but I still felt guilty anyway. I do believe in telling students the truth.

Aug 24

While driving to school this morning, I started thinking about data. We think our data points accurately describe a child's reading, or at very least, in, say, fluency, but then we group these children into small groups and their reading varies quite widely. I have to say I'm not sure I'm doing what I should be doing with this small group. We've been reading interesting true stories, high-interest, low-vocabulary as they're called, and then I ask comprehension questions. I had a good time looking up some background geography and showing the students where our latest story occurred (on a mountain in Maine). It was neat to see them make the connection and see what the mountain actually looks like. When the story mentioned the boy walked 90 miles, we talked about how far that would be from the school.

So here are four readers, and supposedly I'm in charge of teaching them to read better. Will reading stories round-robin really help them, in reading fluency or otherwise? Perhaps. I always say that just reading on the child's level will be helpful. Will answering questions about the story help with comprehension? Maybe I need to get them to ask the questions. We did try some summarizing, which I think is a nice start.

Of course I realize the types of ability-grouping we're doing is really looked down upon by many education professionals. However, I think we're coming to terms with some kind of agreement that it may be necessary for readers who are way behind.

Aug 24

Today it occurred to me that we really need to focus on how to speak politely to students. I feel like we bark orders at children, ridicule them in minor ways in front of their peers etc. on a daily basis, and they're expected to comply with whatever we say. Even though the students were compliant and nobody talked back, a bit of courtesy would have gone a long way in class today.

What else do we tell them? We won't grade their papers if they have their name incorrectly, they'll get a detention if they're standing at their seat instead of sitting, etc. I'm definitely not for leniency in most things, but really -- what kind of learning goals are we accomplishing here?

I was totally thrilled this morning to be given my own reading group. I have the next to the lowest readers, four of them. We began reading a true "lost in the wilderness" story. I helped them situate it first -- it took us awhile to discover it was set in 1939. We were all talking about how cell phones wouldn't have worked etc. We also talked about where Maine was on the map. I might just bring in a map next time and maybe look up some stats for the mountain we were reading about. They all seemed quite willing to read and answer questions in the small group.

Aug 21

Yesterday I started thinking about syllabi, and how at the college level we're always so careful to put in how students will be graded, points for this and that etc. In K-12 we just seem to randomly throw out points, this will be graded, this won't... students are confused. Even though I work with students the majority of whom tend to not care about grades, I think this courtesy should be extended to them as well. Yesterday the students (and I) were surprised when they found that a homework was worth 50 points and something else was only worth 5. It didn't even make sense to me, but they have no way to track their grade. It's tough enough to encourage low-achieving students to care about their grades, although it seems like some of these students do.

Again more of a struggle to determine reading level. This weekend I've taken all the data home to try to organize students into ability groups by their scores. We now have four one-minute fluency timings for many of these students, so we should have some good data. I have also graded Friday's the D.O.L. quiz, and results are abysmal. How do we teach capitalization, punctuation, and grammar to children who haven't mastered it yet? I'm pretty sure it's not the same thing we've been doing with them. I need to look up the research for this. The sped research says direct instruction of grammar conventions, but not sure how to accomplish this. Right now it's hit and miss, and we're clearly missing.

Aug 20

Who ever thought giving a spelling test would be so much fun? I thought we should give a "practice test" so students know what to study for tomorrow. Students seem to be really interested in the fact that I'm a teacher at the university, which is nice. We'll see how they do.

We've been doing the D.O.L. thing every day, and I'm beginning to wonder about that. Of course we assume that if children can do that well, they should be able to edit their own writing well, but I'm not sure that's the case. I think about all the D.O.L. done every day across the country and wonder whether it can be done better. It's the old debate about whether we teach skills in isolation or have them all put together. Of course, a combination is best, but when you take a look at even one of these, you realize all the grammar and spelling rules that have to be taught and learned.

We also gave everyone another one-minute fluency timing, because the rest of the class did so much better on their second timing than on the first. Hopefully we can get a handle on this data. I'm planning to take everything home over the weekend to give a solid look at each student's individual score on each of our assessments. They're far from perfect, but hopefully all together it will give us a complete enough picture that we will be able to assess the students' needs and figure out who needs the most help. I'll be taking those students out (I know, horrible, ability-grouping, bad, bad) with the special educator in order to give them some more focused reading instruction the second half of class.

Aug 19

When the principal comes in the room everyone gets nervous! Even I was thinking how lucky I am that she found me actually doing something helping students. I want her to be pleased that I'm there, not like I'm looking around to find something to pick on or to write about in that "research" those professors do.

Today I began questioning why we're doing spelling and vocab together. Especially for students who are this far behind, their spelling is atrocious. Students with LD or students who are just behind without the label might not have a vocabulary that is on-grade-level (in fact, we know they don't), but I would say their vocabulary is way above their spelling. So we're having children study the spelling of, let's say, fourth grade vocab words, when they can't tell the difference between "right" and "write." Maybe we should start with those in a systematic way, but I'm not sure we do. Individualized spelling lists may be the way to go, but again, do these lists add up to anything when all is said and done? We need to find a way to review and keep children actively involved in these.

I also had the opportunity to watch the special educator do her thing. There's something about watching a special educator teach that's different from watching a general educator, and I'm trying to put that into words. She's direct (or he, I should say), watchful, knows who's doing what and not afraid to discuss what's going on, lightly humorous, getting down to business quickly. There's something about the type of humor I can't pinpoint, but something that doesn't put children down for not knowing, automatically reinforcing children who are doing the right thing. I need to get in there and do some full-class activities.

At this point we're not using our personnel well. We have four instructional assistants aside from the two teachers and myself, and we continue to do full-class activities that are the same for everyone. We're also struggling with the testing. This is very helpful for me as a teacher educator, since I think we tend to believe that one one-minute fluency timing tells us all we need to know. We did the fourth grade passage, and 4.5 for those who did well with 4.0. Because all the students we retested did so much better on the 4.5 I suggested testing everyone on 5.0. We have to start that tomorrow.

Meanwhile my grammar assessment showed that the class average was about 50%, but we did have some students who scored fairly well. There were two 14/15s and two 12/15s. I was really glad I took the time to write little notes to each child's parent -- they clearly felt proud they did well.

I also noted that sixth graders aren't too old to have all the hands in the air to answer a question Also they're not afraid to read aloud, a common issue for children with reading problems. It's easy to see all the hands in the air and assume everyone's engaged, though, and clearly this isn't the case, even with all the adults in the room. Makes me feel we should be doing something else-- planning small group activities at very least! I suggested a practice test tomorrow; I'm not sure if the students really understand they'll be tested Friday on vocab/spelling for a grade.

Aug 18 cont'd

Another thing that occurs to me is that we're starting to count fluency as the only measure of reading. I myself am guilty of this. Clearly, these students have been timed before and are used to it, but I realize as they're reading that I'm taking no measurement of whether they're understanding what they're reading. Of course fluency and comprehension go hand in hand, but ... some of the mistakes they're making show that they might not comprehend, when they don't go back and self-correct.

Aug 18

The first thing we did today was listen to a "rap" to assist in vocab learning. I can understand why we think this is a good idea -- because it's motivating and gets more senses involved. BUT... we have to do more with it. This one is particularly convoluted and I don't know what child in his/her right mind would think this one was "cool." We have to engage children in using the vocab in multiple ways, not just receiving it passively. So maybe we could have the words on the walls, have them practice spelling and covering, saying the words in a sentence, or maybe performing parts of the rap in front of peers. Small group work might be helpful, something non-worksheet-oriented. Making your own rap would be hard; maybe we could find some kind of poem outline.

We took children outside individually to retest those who needed testing on a higher level. We were shocked when every single child did better; one went from 100 words on a 4.0 passage to 140 on a 4.5 passage! How could this happen? We profs tell our students that this is the way to go -- test children on a one-minute fluency timing, and that's their level. How could this happen? I'll tell you, the children seemed a lot more relaxed this time; maybe, as one instructional assistant said, they went out with us last time, nothing bad happened, so they weren't actually in trouble as we said. So maybe you have to do multiple timings with passages at different levels. I'm recommending that everyone be retested at the 5.0 level.

Then there's this issue -- these children were put in this particular class because they were reading at 4.0 level, or two grades behind. Now we're wondering why some of them are here. Of course we're assuming they have fluency issues, but maybe they don't. I'm planning a comprehension assessment, but my guess is it's more likely to be class behavior, attitude, perhaps very poor spelling, etc. I believe these children were placed in this class as a result of one test score, from a standardized test taken last year. So now I'm wondering whether the classes are going to be shuffled around, and as always, I'm wondering what we're going to be doing for them.

First day of school!

Great, my first day back and I make someone cry. I was reading an assessment too quickly. I must have lost that feel for how slowly you need to read to a group of low readers. I gave them a 15-item fourth grade grammar inventory, and the results were a dismal 9/15. I wonder whether these actually correspond with writing and speaking ability. We teach grammar all the time, but does knowing nouns and verbs, and being able to select the correct plurals on the multiple-choice quiz actually mean anything?

Also, as we're going to be spending a fair amount of time each day studying vocab and spelling words -- how can we individualize this? Surely some children already know these words, and some don't. Here we have an ability-grouped classroom, which many people would condemn just because it's all low-achievers, but I can already tell how tough it is for the low-achievers here, even with seven adults in the room. How can we give each child a spelling list and vocab list? and do we even want to do this? Spelling tests are ubiquitous by now, but we don't know whether the students retain what they're learning beyond Friday. And if they knew it before, why are we spending time on it?

I know I still drive my college students crazy by spending every minute of class time learning. It was a criticism on my student evals. It's my punishment for trying to practice what I preach. But how much time are we wasting shuffling around papers? with waiting for a few children to catch up to the large group? And we haven't even explained to students WHY they're taking all these pretests. I must get on that.