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.

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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 some resources to help elementary school parents support their children in learning to read at home.  Please feel free to use if this is of use to you:

Links for Parents
(for any reading series)

Links for Parents Using Open Court Reading
page 1 |  page 2

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

Dr. Seuss’s birthday, called Read Across America Day is coming next week.  Here are some activities to do for it…(by way of Doug Yonce’s newsletter.  Subscribe to his newsletter here).

NEA – Read Across America
The National Education Association annually sponsors Read Across America. Now in its twelfth year, the program focuses on motivating children to read

Seussville Read Across America
READ ACROSS AMERICA. “You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.” What better way to celebrate Dr. Seuss’s birthday

Read Across America Games and Activities
A collection of activities for Dr. Seuss in celebration of Read Across America, a national reading day/week promotion

Education World: Special Reading Fun for Read Across America Day
Read Across America Day is celebrated each year on the first Monday in March. Education World offers five new lessons for recognizing this important day

Read Across America | CTA
The theme for Read Across America 2009 is “Reading is Cool!” Serving up some frosty fun for your reading delight are playful snow people created by award-winning illustrator Will Terry.

Reading Rockets Read Across America Page

Downloadable Dr. Seuss Books

Additional Dr. Seuss Resources

The librarian at one of my schools this year is published illustrator, Diane Greenseid, who has a great web site herself.  She also recommended the following sites that were new to me:

Just One More Book
Audio interviews with authors and illustrators compiled.  You’ll find almost any author on this site.

Guys Read, a site created by Stinky Cheese Man author,  Jon Scieszka.
Trying to motivate boys to read, this site makes suggestions for books that appeal to boys and even adult males.

Planet Esme, from author Esmé Codell
Engaging format to expose you to Esmé’s books

Mrs. P, in a hilarious format, Mrs. P. shares stories with you
thanks to Angele Maiers for the link

For additional storytelling resources see:

Literacy Blogs

Sharing Stories Links

Reader’s Theater

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.

Here are the slides from a parent workshop I led for parents on how to help your child learn to read at home.  This was for an audience of several English Language Learners and so there is some Spanish and references to Spanish mixed in.  I tried to keep the slideshow as visual as possible.

Additional Publications

Reading by 9 Parent Guide

Put Reading First

Organizational Support

Reading by 9 Child Literacy Initiative

Reading Rockets

Federal Government Help Your Child Learn to Read

Reading is Fundamental (RIF)

Here’s an interesting page which gathers literacy movies, blogs, lessons, etc that are contained on Google’s Pages: http://www.google.com/literacy/

It also asks you to share what you are doing.