Module 7: Text Reflections

Opitz Chapters 13 & 14, see Module 5

Module 7: Slideshow Presentation Reflections

Perspectives of the Learning Process

This brief slideshow states the importance of talking to the student to get a clear view of what skills they believe they need to learn as a reader and writer. This can be done informally through conversation; a quick conversation will help you get an idea of how the student thinks they are doing and where they think they need help. This will help the student to set individual goals and take ownership of their learning. It is also extremely important for you to talk to the parent and teacher (if that is not you). Knowing how the child reacts to work at home and school and their learning behavior will help to paint the full picture of the student’s motivation and ability level. It also helps to notice any discrepancies between different environments.

Comprehension Evidence and Strategies

This presentation illustrates reading comprehension and explains what the difficulties students have and the related problems with comprehension of different types of texts look like. This text details every aspect reading comprehension and the possible problems with that area may look like, offering strategies for each possible issue. This presentation gives a lot of information but the most interesting to me is the bullet point that mentioned that reading comprehension involves more than 30 cognitive processes. I find this fascinating because of the unique needs of my students and their highly varied cognitive abilities and how it affects their comprehension (which is what I am completing my action research on).  For each of the slides presented, I just kept thinking of a particular student with that specific difficulty.

Classroom Instruction that Works: Nine Best Practices to Improve Student Achievement

This slideshow presentation details Marzano’s nine best practices that affect student achievement and strategies that can be applied to support each. Because I enjoy learning about how the brain processes information, my favorite of the practices mentioned is finding similarities and differences; showing students the connections between new concepts and ideas and what they already know will greatly increase the likelihood of new information being moved to long term memory. The strategy recommended is the Most Important Point strategy, this asks the students to identify what is most important and make a connection to prior knowledge. Finding similarities and differences in new concepts or information can increase student achievement by 45%. This point really stood out for me because we work on a lot of concept building in my classroom. The presentation goes on to introduce 8 best practices and outline their impact on student learning and recommend strategies for each.

Module 6: Text Reflection

Opitz Chapter 14: see Module 5

Module 6: Video Reflections

Why I Flipped My Classroom

I do love this idea for many reasons: this use of home time to introduce content and the use of class time to apply their learning would be more effective than lecturing a class that is not listening and then sending them home to practice the concepts learned that day for homework that they have to ask for help with anyway because they either were not paying attention or were not ready for the concept presented. I think this really pushes students to take ownership of their learning and makes them the responsible party for taking care of their work independently. I do have one very big problem with this kind of instruction: accessibility of the necessary technology. I work in a Title 1 school where most of the students would most likely not have internet access in their homes and could not access the videos prior to class. However, if it is possible because of student accessibility, I think this is a great idea.

Using Assessment to Improve Instruction

This video expresses the importance of assessing learning for the purpose of driving effective instruction. I found it interesting that the beginning segments of the video introduce assessment as something that some teachers feel is not worth doing. Then I thought that maybe they are thinking of assessment as the large, summative assessments such as benchmarks and EOCT’s. I feel that formative assessment, as we discussed earlier this semester, is not only how you can assess students’ learning, but also how you assess your instructional design and methods. Assessment in its most basic form is really done daily by observing and interacting with the students and having them show you their understanding of the content.

Module 6: Slideshow Presentation Reflections

Reading Strategies: Reading in the Upper Grades

This particular presentation gave explanations of different kinds of reading strategies appropriate for students in the upper grades. It expressed the importance of having a word wall available and implementing activities so that students interact with the wall regularly to solidify understanding of vocabulary. This is a strategy that I use in the classroom with my Kindergartners; we have an illustrated word wall that features sight and past vocabulary words. Our current words are with our EQ on a concept map that stays at the front of the room until we move on to the next topic.  I have modeled KWL charts in my classroom but most of the other strategies such as QAR and 3-2-1, I have not used since I began working with the lower grades. I was impressed with an interactive online vocabulary web I saw during our last professional learning day; it could be modified by grade and difficulty level. I found the last couple of slides on the 80-15-5 Rule very interesting; I wonder how those numbers would be represented in my classroom of students being served by special education.

Differentiating Instruction with Multicultural Literacy

This presentation specified what differentiated instruction entails. It stressed the importance of properly diagnosing the needs and interests of the student as well how specifically you can differentiate instruction and assessments. This is something that I currently have to re-visit in my classroom. Instruction in my classroom is differentiated in many ways already because it is a small group classroom of four students. Most of my students are engaged in the whole group instruction that I implement because it is interactive, I rely on literature and songs, and prompt the students as necessary taking into account their individual goals and objectives. I have one student though that has an incredibly difficult time when he is not in direct control of the lesson and he has to share attention with other students. I have recently placed him at a desktop computer near the group so that he can follow along at his own pace and complete all of his work independently.  This has tremendously cut back on the frequency of negative behaviors that we have seen; this illustrates to me how important differentiation is.

Assessment of Cognitive, School, and Home Factors

This last presentation was related to cognitive functioning and the assessments that measure verbal comprehension, processing, perceptual reasoning, and working memory. I am familiar with some of these examples from working with school psychologists, speech language pathologists, and diagnosticians for the purpose of evaluating and providing students with special education eligibility. In my classroom we administer the Assessment of Basic Language and Learning Skills (ABLLS), that assesses more than 20 aspects of a student’s functioning including receptive and expressive language, visual perception, reasoning, literacy and math skills, and gross and fine motor skills. I think it is so important to have a clear overall picture of where your students are functioning in every domain; this will help to guide instruction and provide a framework to support their needs.

Module 5: Video Reflection

Rubrics- an Introduction

The Rubrics video introduces the concept of a rubric for assessment by giving examples of rubrics as they could relate to the assessment of a cookie. Because I am familiar with rubrics the concept was not new to me but I do need to use them more often in my classroom. Usually when I have used them in the past, I have assessed using specific point values but I do like how the rubrics presented used a percentage of possible points so that it could be applied to any point value.

Module 5: Slideshow Reflections

Teaching Phonics, High-Frequency Words, and Fluency

This slideshow relates how students learn phonics to learning high-frequency words and how it improves fluency. It offered specific instructional activities for building word pattern knowledge. This comes at a great time for me because I was beginning to feel that I was running out of ideas for teaching word families. We quite often make flip books and do sorts to learn the patterns. As we read we make lists of rhyming words but it was getting a little boring. I believe next I will have the students make little  books, where a different word from the same family is on each page and they can illustrate. The computer program that we used for Shared Reading in my classroom already involves word building and memory games but we always do an extra activity or two to supplement. The most important point made in the presentation was that you have to match the skills to the texts that are currently being used. If students don’t have the opportunity to apply the skills, it will not be useful to them.

Linking Phonics and Vocabulary Development

This short slideshow reiterated that phonics is not a stand-alone skill in regards to literacy development; it is meant to give the student the necessary skills to be able to read independently and read for meaning, increasing vocabulary at the same time. Phonics instruction must be made meaningful by aligning the texts being read to the skills being taught. I find this true and have caught myself in the past just throwing lessons together without taking the time to align all of the components. It is so much more meaningful when thoughtfully organized in such a way that students are able to make connections between the skills and their application. If opportunities are not provided, they will not be able to make the connections independently and learn by analogy as a result.

Vocabulary Development

This presentation gave several examples of word-analysis strategies. I hate hearing a student prompted to “sound it out.” This tells me that the adult who is working with them does not have a sound knowledge of the different ways students analyze new words; decoding should be a last resort. I enjoy letting students come back to a word after finishing that portion of a reading passage if they need to so they can think about what makes sense using semantic and syntactic clues; they need to be able to look back at what they are reading anyway to monitor comprehension.

 I enjoyed the portion of the presentation on direct/indirect methods and strategies for teaching high frequency words. In my classroom the instructional methods have to be fairly predictable and routine because of the specific learning needs of my students but I like to add in a new and fun activity once a week or so to make sure they are mastering the skills and not just the routine. Some strategies that I may incorporate are the Carbo Recorded Book Method (because I feel the books on tape do move too fast for younger students) and making Little Books; we have made little books for content areas before and the students really enjoyed looking back at them later.  

 Assessing Vocabulary

This particular slideshow explains the different levels of new vocabulary, key points for instruction, and suggestions for assessment. I found the samples of vocabulary assessments to be the most useful part of the presentation; this section has made me think about how I might modify these assessments to use with my students. Our vocabulary assessments rely on the students’ receptive language skills because of their delays in expressive language; usually by identifying a picture or word from a field of 3 or matching. I think I would like to use an adapted version of the vocabulary rating scale to assess knowledge of words on the 2^nd and 3^rd tiers of vocabulary words.