Response to Intervention (RtI)

This week I had to post to our online discussion about Response to Intervention (RtI).  I got really into the post and so I thought I would include it here.  This is what the third grade at our school (OC) is doing for RtI, in addition to individual interventions:

Our school is implementing an initiative this year called Walk to Success, or Walk to Intervention.  The goal of this is to work as a grade team to give students the extra help they need with reading and writing, whatever that may be.  The students are divided into groups based on their needs and each teacher in the grade takes a group.  For a half hour on the days of W.T.S., the students go to another classroom with another teacher and the other students from their grade that are at their level.  During this time, teachers do activities with their new group of students to meet their needs.

In our third grade, the teachers divided the students by RtI tiers.  We put all the low-level kids in "Tier 3," the middle-level kids in "Tier 2," and the high-level kids in "Tier 1." 

The students meet for W.T.S. Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays from 8:15-8:50.  My CT and the other bilingual teacher are taking "Tier 3," which is 24 students.  The other tiers are between 25-35 students, as well. 

Walk to Success started this week for us.  Monday was an introduction day so we did a very basic phonemic awareness activity to gauge the students' levels, participation, behavior, and needs.  I showed the students the letters of the alphabet (uppercase and lowercase) and they had to tell me the name of the letter and the sound it made.  There were a few third graders who could not do this successfully with all 26 letters.  Then we did some activities from Heggerty.  For example, the teacher would say, "base" and then "ball."  The students had to then combine the words and say, "baseball."  Or the teacher would say "baseball" and the students had to separate the compound word.  The students did fairly well with these basic, first- and second grade level activities, but there were some areas where they were completely confused.   

Today was the second day of W.T.S.  We started again with the Heggerty activities and they did much better than Monday.  Then the students were divided into 4 groups by reading level--Group 1 did guided reading with the other dual language teacher, Group 2 did an activity with my CT, Group 3 did an activity with the aid, and Group 4 worked on Moby Max on the computers.  The activity our group did was cut out words and pictures with short vowel sounds and sort them into the short a column, the short i column, or the short u column.  This was a perfect activity for these students because they knew the words and they understood what they were doing, but it was definitely a challenge for them.  Many of the students literally cannot hear the different sounds, so this was a great exercise for them. 

Tier 2 is focusing on finding the main idea in a story.  On Monday they listened to the teacher tell a funny story and the students had to tell him what the main idea of it was.  The teacher reflected with us on Tuesday during lunch to say a lot of the students missed the main idea.  So that sounds like a great place for these kids to start. 

The teacher for Tier 1 is treating the students like 4th graders.  She is giving them 4th grade level reading and comprehension questions, assigning them homework, and holding them very accountable.  This is a great challenge for these higher-level students. 

This is the first year that W.T.S. is being implemented.  Many of the teachers are extremely stressed out because they are having to plan additional activities and find additional resources.  For our group that is doing centers, that means at least 4 activities each day for the students to work on.  Additionally, this cuts into other learning time.  It means we have about half the time we normally spend on math and we do not have time to review the students' morning work.  The students are also very thrown off because of the new routine.  They are walking through the hallways unsupervised to get to their new classroom, and they are being placed in a completely different environment to learn.   

I really think this will prove to be beneficial for the students, though.  Despite the extra work, we have a great team of excellent, hardworking teachers and students.  Each student will be able to work on specifically what he or she needs to move forward, while being taught by someone with a different perspective from their classroom teacher.  They are also with other students at their level.  The low-level students are stepping up their game because they have to.  There is no one ahead of them they can rely on.  I imagine the higher-level students are also stepping up.  They are used to being the smarter kids but now that they are with other kids at their level, there may be more competition.  These students are also being held more accountable.  The middle level kids will also have an opportunity to thrive because they are receiving the attention they need.

Unfortunately I only saw 2 days of the implementation of W.T.S. and now I have to leave to Phase 2.  But I am excited to see the strides the students will have made by the time I come back!

Other students who are receiving individual interventions are using Moby Max, an individualized online program that works with students on math, vocabulary, language, reading, and more.  Some students are doing Moby Max every day instead of morning work or independent reading (specifically PU and JZ), but all students do Moby Max while we have the Chromebooks on Tuesdays.  Students in Tiers 2 and 3 are also working on specific Reading A-Z books, which they take home to read at least 2-3 times.  They also are practicing their sight words on flashcards, which they are supposed to do twice a day ever day.

Made My Day

Made My Day Monday:

• Walked down the stairs to the copy room and saw my entire class walking in and they all said hello with big smiles on their faces.
• DR asked to stay in for recess with XM, who was in the hospital all last week.  Warmed my heart <3

Made My Day Wednesday:

• JG and DR were partners—Jack Daniel(s) omg we were cracking up
• Simon Says at the end of the day—side note, none of my kids know who Elvis is.

Summer Vacation!

Well, I have been home from college for 11 days now and the weather is finally starting to feel like summer!  Last Friday morning it actually snowed here but today we enjoyed 85 degree weather on the boat!  I guess that's just how Illinois is....

Last Monday I had the wonderful opportunity to meet my cooperating teacher for the 2014-2015 school year, see the school I'll be working in, and meet the former interns who student taught this past year.  I will be working in a 3rd grade dual language classroom next year and am very excited!  My cooperating teacher seems really great, too.

This coming fall I will be helping my CT set up the classroom in the beginning of August, attend institute meetings, and aid my CT with the third graders Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday for six weeks.  Then I help another teacher at another school (1st grade) Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday for six weeks.  After that, I return to the first 3rd grade class, where I take over as a student teacher following winter break until graduation.  On Thursdays and Fridays during the first semester I will be taking classes at the district office.

I'm really looking forward to relaxing this summer and prepping for the year to come.  There is not a whole lot I can do, since I won't be really teaching, but I'm reading some books along the way.

These are some books I just got yesterday from my library:

Teach Like Your Hair's on Fire: The Methods and Madness Inside Room 56, by Rafe Esquith 

Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College, by Dough Lemov

Everywhere all the Time: A New Deschooling Reader, edited by Matt Hern

In Brown's Wake: Legacies of America's Educational Landmark, by Martha Minow

Feel free to visit my goodreads account, as well, to find out what I'm interested in reading.

Learning Showcase!

This semester I have had the awesome opportunity of working one-on-one with a third grade student for my teaching class.  My student and I have met twice each week to work on his reading and writing skills in the context of learning about the deep sea.

Today and last Thursday we had our Learning Showcase, where all the third graders were able to display what they have learned with their mentors this semester!  A lot of other students designed and created posters, games, SmartBoard games, and sorting activities.  My student compiled all his work from the semester into a portfolio that he explained to his classmates during the showcase.  Here is some of his work:

Making Predictions
I compiled a list of deep sea creatures from the National Geographic website.  Then my student had to pick a creature, look at the name of the creature and the picture of the creature and predict why he thought that creature was named what it was named.

New vocabulary words!

Interacting with the Text
My student and I made a graphic organizer to display all the ways we could think of to interact with the text while reading.  Then we read A Director's Deep Dive, by Kelli Plasket of TIME for Kids.
While reading, the student was to underline anything in the text that reminded him of the graphic organizer.  He recorded this in his Interacting with the Text worksheet and made connections.

Summarizing
We also used A Director's Deep Dive to practice writing good summaries!  The goal was to read each paragraph and write a 1- or 2-sentence summary for that paragraph and then we would combine all the summaries at the end to create one big summary of the article.  We only got through two paragraphs but the student loved going back to check his work and proofread!

 We also used books and other resources to create our own book of deep sea creatures.  I created this page template which we each filled out.  My student and I would each separately choose a creature to research in one of the resources available.  We wrote the name of the creature at the top and the reference at the bottom.  Then we read the information from the text and listed 3-4 interesting facts about the creature.  Finally, we traded papers and "graded" each other's work based on grammar, spelling, punctuation, using our own words, and writing complete sentences that showed the most important facts from the text.  By the second day of doing this, we were able to write full paragraph summaries instead of just bullet points!

 Context Chart
The activities and lessons I did with my student this semester were guided by Improving Reading, by Jerry Johns and Susan Lenski.

This Context Chart is adapted from page 375 of their book and it was a great way to record my student's new vocabulary words.

 Vocabulary
This was a cloze vocabulary exercise where I photocopied a chapter in a book about megamouth sharks and whited out every 5th-7th word.  Then the student read the text aloud and filled in what he thought the blank word was.  He did great on this exercise!  Even though he got less than half of the words exactly correct, he was able to fill in words that made sense with the context and meaning!

So this semester we worked on literacy strategies like making predictions, interacting with the text, using a dictionary, and summarizing.

The teaching experiences I have had in this class have been wonderful opportunities for me to grow both as a teacher and as a learner; I am so grateful these opportunities have been available to me.  I learned a great deal about working one-on-one with a student and trying to meet his needs.  While all this was happening, I still had certain requirements I needed to meet, certain guidelines for teaching, in order to pass the class.  I feel that this part was the most genuine aspect of the experience because it reflected the reality of having to teach to meet many students’ needs while also meeting certain standards and other requirements in order to maintain a job as a teacher.

The most effective instructional strategy I learned was simply being excited about the lesson.  At first, the class was overwhelming because I was entirely unsure of what my role was and what my duties were.  I am afraid this may have come off in my tutoring sessions.  Yet soon I became more confident in what was expected of me.  Following this, I became more confident in my own instruction.  I knew that even if I was unable to address the course requirements, I was spending valuable teaching time with my student and that was the most important thing.  From here, I was able to develop more meaningful activities that responded to my student’s greatest needs, I was able to participate in the activities with him, and I was finally able to be genuinely excited about our lessons.  I could tell that my enthusiasm thus led to my student’s success in several academic areas.  I was able to show him that looking up words in dictionaries, discovering new information, and creating a book to track our knowledge is so exciting, and he responded positively to this.

In the future, I would like to improve my instruction by incorporating more modeling into my lessons.  I am currently working to improve my understanding of when is an appropriate time to model and when it is more beneficial to let students figure things out on their own.  I also plan to improve my instruction by setting clearer goals for my student and myself.  I would like to encourage my student to set clearer goals for himself.  I am becoming more and more goal-oriented myself, and it has proven to be successful for me.  I believe that having my student set a personal literacy goal is very meaningful because they are allowing themselves to achieve on a level that is not determined by someone else.  Furthermore, I look forward to improving my instruction in the future by studying other teachers and learning from their successes.  I plan to watch videos online of successful literacy instruction and read books (such as The Book Whisperer, by Donalyn Miller, which I loved) that can inspire me to try new instructional strategies.

Language Learning Methods

Today in one of my TESOL classes, the title of which is TESOL Methods and Materials, we were talking about our reading preparation for class. To kick off the semester, we are studying the history of language learning methods all the way from the 1800s. We are using the textbook, Teaching by principles: An interactive approach to language pedagogy by H. Douglas Brown (third edition).

We had a really great discussion today about the first two chapters, which included a brief history of several language teaching and language learning methods over the last two and a half centuries, as well as a play-by-play of an EFL (English as a Foreign Language) class lesson. One question that is still bothering me, though, is when to use the L1 in a lesson. When addressing this question, we started out saying that if the teacher recognizes that students are not understanding instructions (such as for an academic activity) in English (the L2 or target language) the teacher should rephrase the instructions again, or maybe two times more so that the students better understand, but they are still understanding the directions in English. Some of my other colleagues started to argue that there's no reason the teacher shouldn't use the L1 to explain instructions after trying it in English and recognizing a lack of comprehension on the students' parts.

So then, when is it okay to resort back to the L1 in a class where the teacher is aiming for the students to learn a new language? I have come up with a bit of an answer, but I am still hoping for more contributions.

First and foremost, it is important to define the lesson and course/unit objectives. If the objective is to learn a specific grammar skill in English an use it in context, then perhaps explaining an activity in the L1 is appropriate. In this case, it is important that students know what they are doing in order to make the activity most effective for accomplishing the objectives. Therefore, since understanding instructions in English is not the objective, then it shouldn't matter whether the instructions are explained in English or the L1. If the objective is to do the activity so that the students learn the grammar skill, isn't it most important that they fully understand the activity? This way, they know they are doing it right and this makes it much easier to judge whether they learned the grammar skill from the activity.

Additionally, there is a time and a place for using each language. Sometimes it is really necessary to focus on the new language and the new concept at hand. Yet other times, in order to avoid complete silence due to fear of misspeaking or lack of vocabulary, it is appropriate to use the L1 to make a point.

Finally, the goal of all language lessons is to learn the language! Being exposed to a language is the most logical way to learn it, of course. So first explaining instructions in the target language is great because it is further exposure to the language. Perhaps it would be more beneficial if a teacher states the directions in English, then the L1, then English again. Any excuse to use the new language is worth it.

Any other thoughts? This is just what I came up with today, and it's almost midnight so some of my ideas might be off!

Fall 2013 Week 1 Almost Complete!

Well, I'm almost done with my first week of my senior year of classes! It's been a very odd week, but I am excited about the upcoming coursework so far. My professors are really knowledgeable, helpful, and enthusiastic, which is such a blessing.

This semester I am taking a literacy class, two TESOL classes, a math class, and a bilingual education class. My bilingual education class is a once-a-week, 3-hour night class that starts tonight, so I am still waiting to see what that holds for me. What I am loving so far is the way everything seems to be coming together at last. In the past, all my classes have been incredibly knowledge-based and theoretical. Now I am getting the opportunity to actually apply what I have learned to real-life clinical experiences and hypothetical classroom experiences. I think I only have one exam this semester--the rest are all projects. This is exciting because although I like studying for tests because I have learned how to "play the game," it means my coursework is more applicable now, not something that can be assessed simply by papers and tests.

One thing that is challenging for me in particular this semester is the reading and responses I have to do. A goal of mine this semester is to really interact with my readings so that I can benefit the most from them. Several of my classes require a weekly "reading response" assignment, which will help me to interact more with the texts. However, some of this stuff is really dry and I am having a lot of trouble relating to it. I am hoping to use this blog as a way for me to discuss my assigned readings and other experiences I encounter along the way. Hopefully, maintaining this blog will further my understanding of and interaction with my classes so I can really gain the most of them.

I am off to my math class now. Syllabus day was on Tuesday, so we are jumping right in to coursework today. Very excited to see where this goes!