Creating Lifelong Learners

Thank you to those of you who attended my workshop, “RTI:  A Complete Apple Workflow” at the CUE conference this weekend.   I spoke about using Apple Software to address your Response to Intervention program.  This post contains the links, resources, and ideas that I shared.  Rather than simply posting the keynote file (which is much easier) I prefer to recap and flush out some of the ideas so that it’s beneficial even to those who weren’t there.

What is RTI?

As I define it, rather than simply teaching everyone the same thing and assuming that if someone doesn’t “get it” that there’s something wrong with them, RTI assumes that there will be students who do not master a concept after whole group instruction and will need additional time and intensity (interventions) to master concepts.  This, of course, is very similar to the idea of Independent Work Time.

Alice Mercer, in her CUE presentation, also addressed RTI and went into additional detail in defining it.

Part One:  Dealing with Data

It’s very important to collect and analyze data in order to target interventions to specific student need.  ”Fluency” is to vague to be an intervention.  Focusing on short vowels, long vowels, or digraphs is a better intervention because it targets a specific student need.  Using Apple’s iWork (Pages and Numbers) or even Microsoft Word’s (Office and Excel) can help you to organize data by creating a spreadsheet, graphing data, and using the word processor’s mail merge functions to create parent reports about student data.  I much prefer iWork to Office because of its ease of use and the ability to create better looking documents.

Here’s additional information on graphing in Numbers and how to use the mail merge function.  I taught both these things in the workshop.

Part Two:  Prescriptions for Success ways of using Apple technology to address student needs

Fluency

• Use Garageband to record students doing Reader’s Theater and then add photos via iMovie or Final Cut Pro

Find free Reader’s Theater scripts here

See two of my projects done this way…The City Mouse and the Country Mouse and Tales from the Yard

• Use iPods with Voice Recorders to have students record their voices or have students record their voices directly into Garageband.

Find a voice recorder

Find out more about these techniques through Escondido Unified’s iRead Project

Comprehension

• iMovie projects which focus on unit themes and non-linguistic representations (as per Marzano’s Classroom Instruction That Works)

See our example for the Look Again Camouflage Unit

Read about how vocabulary is scaffolded for such projects

Behavior

While behavior tracking software is popular among schools with large behavior problems.  I saw office referrals eliminated in my classroom simply through working on these movie projects.  I gave the example of Joseph, a student who I knew would not be quiet if I was to call “Quiet on the Set.”  Instead of playing through that scenario and getting annoyed at Joseph ruining other students’ projects, I decided to make Joseph the engineer.  He called out “Quiet on the Set!” and he pushed the red Garageband button.  The rest of the class was dead quiet and Joseph experienced being a successful and productive member of our class rather than being the one who wrecked everything.  This is a behavioral intervention…intervening to improve student behavior rather than punishing students for bad behavior.

Evidence

Here are two slides that show some evidence that these techniques are producing gains although I am the first to admit that we need to continue collecting data on the subject.

In my classroom, I saw an 18% increase in the number of students reading at benchmark 12 weeks after working on the Reader’s Theater script, The City Mouse and the Country Mouse:

In Escondido Unified, they saw average gains of about 40 words per minute after six weeks of reading with iPods whereas normal gains are about 10 words per minute:

Bonus

Here are some incidental things I mentioned in my presentation.

HandBrake for ripping movies from commercial DVDs  you own for storing on iPod.

PWN Youtube and other ways of downloading Youtube movies.

BXMXM7FY39V3

Green is good.  Red is bad.

Here’s what they taught me in “coaching college” about how to read data.

Reading vertically indicates the teacher’s problem.  Reading horizontally indicates a student’s problem.

So, Harpo needs some additional help in all language arts areas.  However, in the vocabulary category, it appears that the teacher needs to examine his/her own instruction as its not succeeding for most of the students.  There’s all kinds of reasons why the teacher could say the students aren’t succeeding and there is validity to all of them…no help at home, trouble learning the language, poorly designed tests, a bad day in class.  This class in particular I hear is a bunch of class clowns.  However, the fact remains that the teacher’s vocabulary instruction with this group of students is not working and if he/she wants better results he/she must try something different.

Here are a few tools to use when assessing students at the beginning of the year:

The Basic Phonics Skills Test (BPST)
This is helpful in identifying specific areas of phonics need (short vowels, long vowels, digraphs, etc.)

San Diego Quick Assessment
It’s also important to know students’ knowledge of sight words which is an almost completely separate skill from decoding and an almost equal predictor of reading success.

Yopp-Singer
Test of phoneme segmentation

DIBELS
provides several free fluency passages as well as comprehension assessments

What pre-assessments do you use?

Kevin Hodgson lays out what he considers to be an ideal language arts curriculum.  Please read the entire post.  However, the tenets he puts forth are:

Writing to Learn

Including listening and speaking (as well as reading and writing)

A “Stakes Approach” (Moving from low-stakes like journal writing to high stakes like publishing and performance)

Writing Across the Curriculum

And including technology and multi-media

a guest post on using the Sound Spelling Cards by Ann Miani

Dear Teachers,
I wanted to share a life changing teaching strategy for OCR phonics.  You can print out the Sound Spelling Card mats (see links):

Link #1

Link #2

There are some cool new versions of the large long vowel cards to print out, but they would have to be run on long sheets of paper 14 inches or so.

Green Box cards are named (all short vowel sounds)
lamb, hen, pig, fox, and tugboat.

The blue box cards are diphthongs/diagraphs titled in order
armadillo, whale, (bird card er,ir,ur,) cow card, hawk card, hoot owl card (this may be the goo card in another version,) foot card, and toy/coil card depending on which version you have.

Here is an example of how to give spelling quizzes using this SSC mat
For the technique Riddle Me This, I say these out loud while the kids write the letters that go with the cards.
1.Dinosaur card(kids would write the letter d)
2.Long I
3.Nose card (n sound)
4.Long O card (they are taught to assume it is the first spelling unless otherwise indicated)
5.Sausages (s sound)
6 Hawk Card (second spelling = au)
7.Robot card r sound (when I don’t specify which spelling on the card again the kids assume it is the first spelling on that card)

I repeat each of the letter cards in the word, while they touch each letter sound on their papers to check to see that they haven’t left any out.  Then I ask them what did I spell?  They all call out with glee and a feeling of success that they hadn’t felt until I used this technique dinosaur!

Use this with your word knowledge boards if you wish.  I give the kids 12 – 20 words per day that come from their weekly reading passages in the text and they seem to really get very large words now.  What a relief to see them spelling, reading and now writing with far more enthusiasm and success!

Before using this concept, the kids struggled with 3 to 5 letter words with both long and short vowel sounds.  Now they are spelling, reading, and writing 10-12 letter words without help.  This happened in just a month and a half.

They wrote essays this week and nobody balked about having to explain why they felt the dinosaurs died out.  They were able to justify their reasons behind their theories based in the NF story they read this week.  Only 3 out of 20 kids (who were ELD) struggled with the actual theories behind the extinction of dinosaurs.  This is a far cry from January!

I hope this helps you as much as it helped my class. Up till the time I started using this, my class was the lowest on record and the majority of them were failing.

-Ann Miani

To paraphrase Chris Lehman in his five minute Ignite Philly speech on the Schools We Need:

Good data costs more than we want to spend in this country and the best data is the data that teachers collect every day.  The best data is the work kids do every single day.

I agree with this statement.  Teachers are constantly collecting qualitative data about their students that is just as valid as any quantitative data collected from tests and quizzes.  However, as valid data we need to treat it as such. While every teacher has a vague idea of the academic progress of his/her students, it is the skillful teacher who that data to strategically plan instruction and monitor progress.

I think the best way to use this collected data is to record it.  Speaking for myself, in the course of a particular lesson I notice that Sally has trouble with the spelling of long u and Tommy doesn’t know how to rhyme and it’s crystal clear to me in that moment in time.  However, by the time I’ve gotten home at night, unless I’ve written this down and made a plan, I’m just kind of praying that Tommy and Sally might practice these skills and come back to me tomorrow “fixed.”

I don’t have any elaborate recording system for these things.  However, what I’ve been starting use is a low cost program called MacJournal from Mariner Software.  This is a mac only program.  I’m sure there is a PC equivelant, please leave a comment if you know of one.  This is basically a journaling program (as the name implies).  It allows you to create mutliple journals and multiple entries.

What’s different from a program like Word is that each entry is automatically dated and collected with all the others.  There’ s a search box so you can search for names of students or particular skills (e.g. search for any reference to Tommy or any reference to rhyming words).

What’s different about this from an online gradebook is that a gradebook is for recording numbers.  Numbers have their place but they belong to the less useful category of data.  A journal allows us to keep track of what’s between the lines.

I use it very simply, just to make a few notes that are stored and recorded for me to find later to make independent work time groups or plan mini-lessons.  I don’t necessarily write in complete sentences and I don’t write about every student every day.  I just jot notes down when they occur to me on a post-it and then transfer it to the journal.  This is a new thing for me so I’ll let you know how it goes. I am open to suggestions and would love to hear how you keep track of data.

How do you keep track of student data?

Here’s a visual of a strategy for working with small groups during Independent Work Time at the elementary level.  This works if  you have at least a 20-40 minute block of time to work with students and can spend at least 10 minutes with two groups each day.

The idea is that you meet briefly with your students are lowest in a particular skill every day but you do not ignore students who need enrichment or those who need just a little bit of help to get to the next level.  It’s a mistake to spend much longer than ten minutes with your struggling students as the law of diminishing returns kicks in after awhile.

Let’s assume you’re working on fluency…in ten minutes with your lowest readers you can review sight words, do phonemic awareness activities (such as oral blending and phoneme replacement…change the sound /b/ in bat to /c/ = cat), phonics activities (like the phonemic awareness activities but with letter cards or white boards), AND  read some decodable text.

With your middle and higher students you can work on Reader’s Theater or something like literature circles/book clubs where the group is all reading the same book and you come together to discuss it.

However, this post is more about the management of your IWT/Workshop that I hopes makes it seem possible to both address struggling students and challenge/enrich others.

You will, of course, need to adapt the timing to the size of your class and groups.  Also note that you don’t want to keep the same students in the same groups all the time, their grouping depends on the skill that you’re working on at the time.

In California, our unit assessments which align with the Open Court Reading series aren’t from the publishers of Open Court but from the Sacramento County Office of Education.

The tests’ emphasis on timing students reading leads teachers to teach reading in a dibels-like fashion with reading passages typed with numbers of words written at the end of every line.  While a certain amount of practice with these passages might reduce stress level on the day of the tests, a steady diet of “fluency passages” will surely turn students off to reading for life.

In college did you ever try to read through one of your texts as fast as you could?  How much of it would you remember if you did?

Aside from turning students off to reading, research has shown that techniques like Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) and Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) are less effective at increasing students’ fluency levels because students are reading independently and not receiving any feedback on their reading.  More effective then would be partner reading or group reading where students are reading with others.  Fluency passages lend themselves to testing.  Even if students have partners, their goal is usually to see how many mistakes each other makes and to figure out how fast they’re reading (that’s the point of a fluency passage).  If you have taught your students to offer corrective feedback when reading fluency passages then why not teach them to offer corrective feedback when reading authentic literature or anything else that’s more interesting than a sheet of text with numbers?

While there are plenty of free fluency passages available (and again I say a little bit might be healthy if continue to assess using the same format), I would strongly recommend teachers using reader’s theater packets instead of fluency packets for daily fluency practice.

There is tons of free Reader’s Theater available and I’ve written before about how to use it. Reader’s Theater is generally more interesting, it demands that students read together, by nature it emphasizes prosidy, and it encourages rereading for a genuine purpose.

submitted by Ann Miani

A FREE at home AR-like Reading Program, go to www.BookAdventure.com

Cable in the Classroom readers: If you’re looking for examples of our video projects, see Video in the Classroom.com  Reader’s Theater is a fantastic way to increase reading fluency by providing students with an authentic reason to reread. It also benefits reading comprehension by placing students inside stories.What is it? Reader’s theater involves reading a play that is meant to be read—not memorized.But how exactly do you use it?

Find free Reader’s Theater online or write your own. Ideally the readers theater will align with a current story or unit. However, it doesn’t have to.

If you choose Reader’s Theater which has a little humor in it you will find students and you will enjoy it much more. It needs to be at an appropriate level for your students. They should know almost all the words on the page except for a few.

I pass out scripts to students and have them highlight their parts which I assign. Then we meet back together, sit in a circle and read through the script.

I make a rule that no one corrects anyone else who makes a mistake and I only correct on the first read if a mistake changes the meaning of the story. Do not direct the students as actors on the first read. Let them practice just reading the script this without having to worry about acting out the scenes—acting comes later.

At the end of the first read I give a mini-lesson on any common mistakes made my class e.g. reading contractions, colloquial sayings, etc. These mini-lessons are determined by specific mistakes your class might make on reading.

If the first read has gone really well we might reread it again right there and then but most times I don’t want to bore the students. I leave it alone and come back to it later.

Come back to it as a whole class first at least one more time and then leave it for students to practice during Independent Work Time.

Once students are able to read the script with few errors, then you can start giving them a little direction e.g. the troll needs to use a scarier voice OR the little billy goat needs a tiny high voice.

Perform it! You don’t have to perform every script but if you never perform any script then what’s the funny of it? Other classes are generally willing to be a good audience

Why is this effective? If you’ve ever heard your students groan when you say you’re going to reread a decodable book or anthology, you’ll appreciate that reader’s theater gets students to reread without groaning because there’s a real life purpose for them practicing. If they know they’re going to perform it then they are much more willing to practice.In addition, by having to follow someone else’s reading, students have to pay attention and follow what other people are reading to make sure they don’t miss their turn. Reader’s Theater is also fun, always a good thing to have in the clasroom.