Final Project

For my final project I created a pintrist account called "Reading Foundations". In this pintrist account I created five boards focused around some of the big ideas in our class;  Motivation, Fluency Phonological Awareness, Comprehension and Vocabulary. My goal for this project was to collect examples on how to incorporate each of these topics into a classroom when teaching. Often, we as students, get caught up in how to define these topics, but neglect incorporating these ideas once we actually begin to teach. All of the activities I posted are fun, easy and cheap so it would not be hard for any of us to use these when we are student teaching. Below I have included a link to my pintrist as well as my thought process behind each board as it connects to the readings we have done this semester.

http://pinterest.com/hatcher1539/

Motivation- As with all my boards, I tried to find a variety of activities to help motivate students to read. On this board I included lists of recommend books such as "100 best chapter books", and "Books for Boys", my idea behind this was to help teachers find a wide range of books for their students to choose to read that fits their interests. On pg. 56 Graves writes "Students need to have choices about what they read and how they respond to their reading. This does not mean that you never assign text (...) It does mean that you structure regular opportunity's for students to choose their own readings materials." Offering students choice is a great way to motivate students to read as well as inspire future learning and you don't even have to have an intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation debate!

Fluency- Graves defines fluency as "the ability to read rapidly, smoothly, without many errors and with appropriate instruction." pg. 224. Fluency is extremely important because of it's a affect on a student's reading comprehension. The majority of students who struggle with reading comprehension do so because they are not fluent readers. Their minds are so busy trying to decode and sound out words that they forget what they are reading. On my board I have included multiple activities to help improve students fluency in the classroom, which will then, in turn, improve their reading comprehension.

Phonological Awareness- Phonological Awareness is an umbrella term that covers Word Awareness, Onset and Rime Awareness, Syllable Awareness and Phonemic Awareness. I picked Phonological Awareness because I could include activities that cover all of these smaller skills. Most of my activities pinned focus on phonemic awareness, "the ability to hear somewhat separable phonemes in spoken words" Graves pg. 92, because I felt this was the most fundamental skill needed for building fluency skills, thereby, building comprehension skills.


Comprehension- Comprehension, the ability to understand what is read is the ultimate goal of literacy. Each of these boards, Motivation, Fluency, Phonological Awareness all lead to the end goal of helping students understand what they read. According to Grave comprehension strategies should be, conscious efforts, flexible, widely applicable, overt or covert, lead to higher level thinking. On page 328, he lists the key comprehension strategies to be establishing a purpose for reading, using prior knowledge, asking and answering questions, determining what is important, summarizing, dealing with graphic information, imagining and creating graphic representations and being metacognitive. The Comprehension board includes different activities to meet each one of these skills. I also included a pin on how to determine what is important in a text book book for older students, as well as pins applying these strategies to nonfiction texts.

Vocabulary- Vocabulary is tremendously important to a student's success and affects not only their reading comprehension, but also their reading fluency. Graves writes, "words that are not recognized automatically-not established-will thwart the process of comprehending text" pg. 254, and comprehension, which we know, is the ultimate goal of literacy. Some vocabulary words need to be directly taught, while many do not. I have included activities on the Vocabulary board, that use both as well as examples of how to incorporate vocabulary across content areas.

Creating Classrooms Where Readers Flourish

"Creating Classrooms Where Readers Flourish", served as a perfect example of offering choice to motivate students to read. The author of the article, a high school language arts teacher, admits she does not assign class-wide novel units anymore, instead allowing students to choose from a wide range of books to read that meets their interest and reading level. This serves as an incredibly inclusive strategy as it allows students to read books that interest them as well as meets the diverse needs of readers in her classroom.

I also like how she created time in her class for independent reading, which her students loved. When I taught at a summer reading program my students loved our 15-minute DEAR (Drop Everything And Read) Time, where they spent 15 miuntes reading silently of any book of their choice. They would get mad at me when I would cut it out of schedule if we were running behind or had a special assembly.

Some questions I had when reading this article is how this "choice reading" fits into the Common Core. When teaching history I had very specific events I had to cover as well as they fit into larger thematic areas, is this similar for language arts? Do teachers have to teacher specific books or is it more of larger, themes with more vague content standards that can be met through an array of books.

I was also wondering how one can measure student learning during silent reading. I have heard Dr. Konrad, a professor in the Special Education program, argue against silent reading because students who struggle with reading could sit and pretend they are reading, without actually reading. While I disagree with her in using silent reading, as I have seen in be a massive motivator for my students (all of whom were considered "at risk" readers) how can silent reading be used as effiectenly as possible to help, not only motivate special needs students, but also improve their reading skills?

Clay Chapter 5: Running Records

Running Records are a great tool to use as a classroom teacher when trying to pin-point a student's reading level, as well as a student's strengths and weaknesses when reading. When done correctly, a pattern can easily be indentified in what types of errors the students are making as well as what kind of decoding skills the student is using. I have found Running Records are extremely helpful when analayzing self corrections. Often I have been caught up in simply, counting a self correction as a correct word, without looking at what initial mistake the student was making or what clues the student used to correct.

I was surprised when reading the procedure section in Clay that Running Records are not a speed test, but simply a power, not having a set time the student has to read the passage in. It seems it would be helpful to do running records in one minute timings in order to establish the rate of words per minute and measure oral reading flunecy. For example, I have a student who I work with, who when I administer oral reading CBMs he does not error, ever. However, he self corrects A LOT and reads extremely slowly, sounding out many words. If I were to administer a Running Record to him, at first glance, he would look like he is reading at grade level, even though he is clearly not flunent. Also his gains on flunecy could not be as accurately measured because I do not have a set calculation to compare his speed, any information on that would be qualitative.

Is Being Wild About Harry Enough?

I think I have heard "enough" more since I began the Special Education Program at OSU than I have in the previous 23 years of my life.  We are told "make sure students get enough practice before you expect students to complete work independently", "make sure you collect enough data before making a hypothesis", "make sure you build in enough review for mastery", but really, what is enough?

That question, "what is enough?", continued to run through my head as I read "Is Being Wild About Harry Enough? Encouraging Independant Reading at Home". The article argued the Harry Potter craze was not enough to encourage independent reading outside of school, citing reading for pleasure drops from 43% at grade 4 to 19% at grade 8. This statistic seems to corrleate with the switch in curriculumn from learning to read vs. reading to learn. In grades K-4, teachers are instructed to make reading fun, give children choice in what books to read to help motivate them to become fluent readers. Once entering the upper elementary and middle school grades it is expected that students read in order to learn the content. They are no longer reading funny Dr.Seuss books, or nonfiction books over any topic that interests them, instead they are reading science and history text books and complex word problems in math class; no wonder they don't want to put down a text book and pick up their favorite fiction book in their spare time.

I am not arguing against the emphasis of academic reading, or the increased rigor of curriculmn, but simply asking is it really that surprising that a 7th grader is choosing video games over to Kill a Mocking Bird? When surveyed for class, the many of us admitted we did not read for pleasure, is it fair to hold our students to a higher standard? My question to you is, how do we get older students to read for pleasure? Is it even nesscessary that students choose to read outside of school if they are already fluent readers? Is it our job to inspire a love for reading in our students or is more important they can read various types of texts with fluency and understanding?

Chopsticks and Reading Comprehension

Prior to attending class today I was avoiding blogging for this week; I had absolutely no idea what I was going to write about. My problem was I had read the two assigned texts for this week, Chopsticks and the Graves chapter on reading comprehension, as two entirely different entities. It was not until I began to work on the table in class, which connected how we used the key comprehension strategies to interpret Chopsticks. I found, as I went through the table and reflected on my reading that my answers varied greatly depending if I was focusing on the first or second time I read the book. Below I have included a table to show how my use of certain strategies discussed in Graves changed from my first time reading Chopsticks to my second.

Strategy	First Read	Second Read
Establishing Purpose for Reading	Purpose: Read this for class well enough to be able to discuss it.	Purpose: To answer all my questions from the first read.
Using prior knowledge	Using the back of the book which described it as a romance mystery.	Knowing that she descends into a mental illness and her father is abusive on SOME level
Asking and Answering Questions	Who are the main characters? How did they meet? Why isn’t Frank concerned for her mental stability? IS FRANK REAL?!	So many, but here are a few: Q: Is Frank real? A: Probably not Q: Is her dad sexually abusive? A: Maybe? Q: Was she a famous piano player? A: Probably not? Q: What’s the deal with the Crackin? A: No idea but it might represent evil Q: Why is Jo Ann Castle important? A: NO CLUE
Making Inferences	Her father might be abusive The couple’s relationship is unhealthy Maybe she is buckling under her father’s pressure	Frank is not real-she created this all in her head She is not a piano player-she is made it up as well Her father may be sexually abusive->Crakin is the abuse and some of those quotes are things her says to her, not Frank
Determining what is important	IMs, letters, quotes from conversations	Handwriting, symbols on letters, the back drop of one picture being The Bell Jar

Robust Vocabulary Instruction In A Readers Workshop

After going through our assigned reading for the week, I was excited to see vocabulary is the main point of discussion for this week. No matter what subject or grade level we end up teaching vocabulary will be the foundation of our curriculum and it is essential we are effective in teaching it.

I found the assigned article, "Robust Vocabulary Instruction in A Readers Workshop" particularly interesting as it was written by a teacher actually implementing vocabulary instruction in her classroom. What I especially liked about her vocabulary instruction is that she spent a week teaching the same ten vocabulary words using different modes of instruction. It has been found that a student with an average IQ requires 35 exposures to a new word for it to be registered in their long term memory, 40 for an at risk student (McCormick 1999). By dedicating 10 to 15 minutes of instructional time a day to the same words the students are getting this necessary exposure without being bored with five days worth of "drill and kill" direct instruction.

The only question issue I took with the author's procedure is the choice of vocabulary words being used. The shoebox activity is effective in giving students ownership over the words they are learning and the teacher specifically mentioned she made sure to pick a variety of tiered words, basic to complex, but how does the instructor ensure the vocabulary words being picked are used across subject matter? Are most of these words ones the students are encountering in their language arts lessons or math and science too? Vocabulary words of any subject can be taught in any lesson regardless of the setting. It would be extremely helpful for the students to incorporate words they are learning in science and math into this lesson as well.

Teachers refuse to give standardized tests at Seattle high schools

In class, on Friday, we read and discussed a Washington Post article in which Seattle area teachers boycotted giving the state required MAP test to their students. In this article the teachers listed multiple  reasons to not give the test including, questioning the validity of the assessment, claiming no benefit to ESL and Special Needs students and loss of valuable class time.

Of these listed the point that interested me the most was the validity of the test. How is it not valid? What is the margin of error at the high school level? It would be interesting to see the data that backs this. If it is true, that the test is not valid, then the teachers are completely within their right to boycott this assessment. Unless an assessment is valid, meaning it measures what it claims to measure, and reliable there is no purpose to it; the assessment is void.

Aside from reading the article, I enjoyed listening to every one's perspective in class. I liked how the adolescent group referred to standardized assessment as a "necessary evil" because, that's exactly what it is. Assessment is necessary to evaluate instruction, without it how would we as teachers know if our methods are effective? The issue that comes into play is, however, as of now our method of assessment is one high stakes test to evaluate the performance of entire school buildings and districts.

The question arises, are there other options? How do we prove effectiveness of instruction and standardization of curriculum without high stakes testing? Two options my group discussed were:

1. Finals given in each course subject are the same across the state, meaning everyone who took chemistry would take the same chemistry exam. Pros to this are, it would still serve to standardize the curriculum, even if teachers were teaching to the test they would be hitting all the standards in the Common Core and students wouldn't be tested on things they learned five years ago or have not yet learned. A con to this is something would still need to be done at the elementary grade level.

2. Teachers are expected to collect data on their students' learning progress through out the year and submit it to their superiors. I would like to note another classmate stated that if this would be implemented it would not be standardize because teachers would all use different measurements. I did not explain this example thoroughly in class. In this system teachers would all use the same data collection system, as they are doing now in elementary schools with the TRC data. Pros to this include teachers getting immediate feedback on their instruction early in the year so they can make changes if needed, puts less pressure on students because they are doing much smaller assessments and it shows student growth through out the year. The downside to this however, is it will take a lot more time and work on the teachers' part, teachers would have to learn how to accurately assess and track students' progress and this would end up being on somewhat of an honor system where we trust schools to not skew data and as we have learned from the Columbus City Schools attendance scandal, districts are not always honest, especially when there is funding on the line.

As seen there are draw backs to any system put in place. Does anyone have any other ideas on effective measures to replace high stakes testing?

Side Note: Many of us mentioned in class how pointless it was to take the OGT our sophomore year, because we still had two more years left of high school. This measure seems pointless to us because we all passed it without issue, however there are many students that do not, which is why it is given our sophomore year so these students get as many opportunities to pass it as possible.