Week 4- Transcript Interview

I am still waiting to hear from the teacher I will be observing, all my paperwork and fingerprinting was completed over a week ago, but with schools being off last week, everything was put on hold for me. I am hoping to be in to observe hopefully later sometime this upcoming week. I will complete this assignment as soon as possible.

Week 4- Podcast

This podcast "Creating a home reading program, the R4 reading program" is basically about how teachers should educate students on independent reading, to make then better readers. The term  "R4" stands for read, relax, reflect and respond; these are the four things that students need to be doing in their home reading program. I really enjoyed watching this podcast. It helped me acquire important strategied on how to help my future students with reading. Basically, this reading program requires that the teachers, parents, and students are all involved to successfully achieve the reading goals, which are to identify and understand the big idea or theme of the given reading selection. 

First, it is important for the teacher to select the appropriate reading material for the classroom to ensure that the students are engaged in the text and are interested to learn more about that topic. Next, it is important that students find a quiet place at home to read every night and log their minutes into their reading log. Parents need to be involved in this as well; they initial the log to confirm that the reading was done. For the reflect and respond part, students are given a list of reflection topics called prompts once a week. They choose a prompt and reflect on what they have read in a journal. The teacher then works with students to achieve high quality responses by modeling and reviewing examples. To keep students motivated, it is important for the teacher to comment in the journal entries, and give the students feedback. 

Once again, I thought that this podcast was extremely helpful to me as a future educator, because it provided me with specific strategies that I can use in my future classroom. It also helped me to realize that parents also need to be involved and work with the teacher to help the students learn.

Article: Article - Response to Intervention (RTI): What teachers of reading need to know

In this article the authors offer understandable definitions and processes of RTI in the method of identifying and supporting struggling readers. RTI signifies a key change to the Individuals With Disabilities Act (IDEA) by changing the process of which students are identified as special education and providing early intervention to those students in need of special instruction. This law is designed to encourage school districts to provide additional support for struggling students within general education. This support should be provided as early as possible, for example when students show the earliest signs of difficulty. While schools have attempted many ways to help struggling students, including those with disabilities, the current focus is on an improved, research-based process, Response to Intervention (RTI). In this article the authors discuss RTI's five step process  and then validate how the RTI process is used to

 help a struggling second grade student. This student is given initial intervention, assessed and monitored, then individualized instruction. At the end, the student responded to the individualized plan by meeting the benchmark, reading instructionally at grade level with comprehension, and reading. The RTI process was effective for this student, had the student not received RTI, he would have had to fail before receiving additional support. The beauty of RTI is that it removes that it really doesn’t allow the student to fail because he/she will receive proper instruction problem by providing instruction as soon as a student displays signs of difficulty.

Article - The assessment of thoughtful literacy in NAEP: Why the states aren’t measuring up.

In 2005, numerous states reported students achieving proficiency at an average rate of 40% higher than NAEP standards. This article states that these exaggerated levels of achievement are perhaps due to states “lowering the bar” due to the stress of the No Child Left Behind Act. In this article, the authors conduct a study in an effort to figure out the differences between the state achievement tests in reading comprehension and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Framework.

It is assumed that these state achievement test are fairly comparable with the NAEP since the educational community agree that reading comprehension involves the reader to use prior knowledge to attain thoughtful and logical answers, thus becoming mature readers. However, this is not the case. Researchers have observed several teachers who were  teaching to the test, and results showed students are in fact memorizing and reciting details instead of thinking and responding to text. In 2005, many states have reported students achieving proficiency at an average rate of 40% higher than NAEP standards.

This article states that these exaggerated levels of achievement are possibly due to the states “lowering the bar” due to the stress of the No Child Left Behind Act. The authors then determined that there is a substantial difference between the NAEP tests and the state test. NAEP assigns more open-ended items for reading assessment, higher order thinking responses, and less genre and vocabulary items for comprehension. Furthermore, the authors propose that teachers who encourage and support students to reach a mature reading level will better prepare them for state and national accountability assessments.

Week 3: Question for my classmates

Hey everyone!!! Schools’ use of RTI tends to be focused on the early elementary grades and limited to the academic area of reading, with some focus on early math. Why do you think that is so??

Video Summary: Using Assesment to Guide Instruction

Hello Class!!! I really enjoyed watching the video “Using Assessment to Guide Instruction,” because it helped me to gain a better understanding of what we have been learning and reading about in class. The video demonstrates how teachers measure student performance through the use of assessment.  In the video, Dr. Jeanne Paratore leads a workshop of practicing teachers. In this workshop, they discuss assessment strategies that they use in their classrooms. The teachers make known of how, when, and where they assess their students, while on the other hand, Dr. Paratore shares how these assessments direct instruction.

This video taught me a lot about how assessments should be performed. First and foremost, it is vital that assessment is done in formal ways, such as running records; however, assessments must to be done throughout the day during daily classroom routines. Second, assessments should indicate how students are learning. Assessments should give teachers information about their students on the following:

How they are interpreting and using language.

How they understand language and meanings of texts.

Which word level they are on? Do they read alone or with their peers? Are they utilizing reading narratives and expository texts?

Finally, these assessments should be collected during the lessons, so therefore they need to be ongoing assessments which must be used to dictate what is being taught in the classroom.

During my observation of an ESL elementary school teacher last semester, I noticed how she did assess her students throughout out the lesson. She would have about 5-6 students during any given class period. She would first present the lesson give them activities to do, and while the students were working on the activities she would go to each student, sit with them, perform (informal) running records where she would ask them to read a paragraph or a few sentences for her, ask them questions about what she was teaching to see if they were on task and if they were understanding. I thought this was wonderful. I guess for an ESL teacher who only has a handful of students each period, this would be much easier to do and manage, in comparison to a regular classroom teacher that has anywhere between 22-25 students, where it would be more difficult to manage time and be able to control the classroom while trying to sit with each student individually.  Do you guys agree?

Observation Update

Hey everyone!! Looks like I will be observing in Roslyn elementary school. I am going to get fingerprinted on Friday. So hopefully, I can start observing in a week or so. I will let everyone know how it goes!