Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Works Cited



Just click on the sheet to enlarge it, and then click on it again to zoom! :)


Sunday, November 22, 2009

Reflections

November 20, 2009

As I look back on this digital audit trail journey I have a mixture of emotions. True, I did indeed get all the work done and got the project completed on time, which is a sweet relief. However, even though it was out of my control I would have much preferred us not missing those three weeks' worth of conferencing time because I think it seriously affected how much she retained. The meetings were spread out so that we could always meet once a week and establish a set routine, making it easier for her to remember what we talked about. Missing some weeks and meeting more than once a week during others seemed to make the conferences less effective, but like I mentioned in a previous entry I'll have to be ready for situations like that as a future teacher.

If I were to redo these reading conferences to make them better for my students, I would try to make sure they were as consistent as possible and that I might already have some ideas laid out for common areas requiring growth. For example, if I already know that several students are struggling with giving their sentences any expression and not pausing between sentences, I might research different approaches to teaching the subject to reach all of the students. Also, the Tricky Word Card seemed the most effective so chances are that i would reuse that one and maybe even teach it to the whole group.

Now that the audit trail is complete, I can move on to the "L" column of my KWL chart from the beginning of the project. This means that I can answer the three questions that were listed in the "Want to Know" column, so here goes!
  1. How do you go about "fixing" whatever problem a student is struggling with? "Fixing" a student's struggle is not necessarily a one-time thing; it will take time, practice, and review, so you can't just mention it to them and then let it go. Also, research about common reading struggles students have could help a new teacher find different approaches to handling difficulties.
  2. How do you make the student feel comfortable and not nervous? The key to this is being honest with the students to a certain degree, because they actually like it when you are honest with them because they feel like you trust them. Also, they generally don't feel too nervous if you're their teacher because you're already familiar to them.
  3. How do you choose one specific issue to work on in a conference if it seems like the student needs a lot of help? I can't really say that I'm exactly the expert on this since my student was a fairly advanced reader and not severely struggling, but i think you might just focus on what they should already know in their grade so that they can at least be at grade level. At least, that's what we discussed in class with each other during class with our partners.
Overall this has been a completely new and very useful experience as I have journeyed into the unknown and tried something I will have to become familiar with as a teacher. Although it may not have turned out the way I may have preferred it to, it was still a rewarding experience that I can look back on and use the knowledge I gained in future reading conferences!


So by now you're probably wondering why, at the end of each entry, I included a picture of a book cover. If you are familiar with the books, you may have also noticed how the complexity of the books got progressively simpler over time! These books represent my feelings at the end of each blog entry regarding the entire reading conference idea and process. A downhill slope might seem like a strange representation of anything, but I actually have a reason for this!

The first book I included was the book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. This book is over 1200 pages long and is not a book for the weak of will; complex text and incredible length turned me off to reading past the first chapter. Atlas Shrugged is at the top of the steps and the first book because when I first learned about the reading conferences and audit trail I honestly wasn't sure where to begin, what to do, or even if it would be possible for me to continue on, much like trying to read that book. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a small step down in difficulty from Atlas Shrugged because it is less than half the length and overall seems slightly easier to grasp. I felt like after my first real meeting with my student where we had our running record, reading inventory, and first conference it seemed like I had more of a foothold and comprehension of what I was supposed to do. Harry Potter and Judy Moody Gets Famous are, in order, progressively easier than the previous two, which is how the conferences seemed to go as I became more comfortable with them, until at last I came to Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Eric Carle's book shows how I have finally arrived at a stage where the conferences are not so unclear for me now that I have the experience. It's not a one-word-per-page book, but it is much, much simpler than Atlas Shrugged and much easier for me to read and follow from page to page. Being at the bottom of the steps leaves me more secure and on stable ground, which is exactly where I wanted to be. =]


Response to Third Conference and Final Running Record

November 17th, 2009

Kate's final conference and running record both came from the Magic Tree House book again. She had a few words that she struggled to pronounce but kept being repeated in the text, so she kept pronouncing them the same way even though they were slightly off. When she reached a word she wasn't familiar with she kept looking to me to tell her what it was, but since I wouldn't tell her she just read it as she thought it said.

ALG:

A: Each time she made a miscue with a word she knew, she always went back and self-corrected herself. Obviously she didn't self-correct with the words she struggled to pronounce, but she did with basic words like "the" and "with."

L: For this conference we focused on breaking down "tricky words" to attempt to decipher them- to do that I utilized a tool that Candace provided from another source. Kate appreciated the "Tricky Word Card" because it gave her other ideas of how to approach figuring out an unfamiliar word instead of just sounding out individual letters. She especially liked using the context!

G: The goal was for her to use the Tricky Word Card next time she encounters a difficult word in her reading and try to find one method that works the best for her.

Response to the Second Conference

November 16, 2009

If there's not one huge thing this project has taught me, it's flexibility. I have to say it has been rather frustrating trying to get a weekly meeting in with Kate with both of us being sick off and on for quite a while. These conferences are now off by two weeks because one week I was sick and then the next week she was sick! Technically I should already be done with my final running record, but I just finished my second conference so I will have to come in tomorrow to do both the third conference and the final running record.

This reminds me of the fact that as a teacher there will be many unpredictable moments in my career and I will have to be ready to change my plans at any moment. It is highly likely that students will be absent when I plan to do their reading conferences much like Kate was.

Since Kate is still working on her Magic Tree House book for her leveled book group she just read another excerpt from that for me. Since it has been so long since the last time I met with her she could not even remember what the goals were from the last conference, so I had to refresh her memory. During the entire second conference she was incredibly antsy and couldn't sit still, plus she had a very hard time focusing and staying on task, making it terribly difficult to get across the lesson for the conference. This was unusual behavior for her, but after talking with Lizzie I found that the student she worked with was behaving exactly the same way, doing such things as rolling around on the floor and completely not paying attention to/arguing with her suggestions.

The ALG for this conference was:

A: She did a great job with pausing at the periods this time and adding emphasis on exclamation points and question marks.

L: Although I asked her to practice using her finger to guide her eyes for the next time we met she chose not to do so, so I showed her how to have it move slightly ahead of what she is reading when she transitions lines so she can read more smoothly. She admitted that she normally does use her finger but she said "I love reading without my finger under it." It was here that I stressed the importance of using the finger as a guide for better sentence fluency.

G: Her goal was to practice using the finger to lead her eyes and also to practice breaking down unfamiliar words into recognizable clusters that she can pronounce so we could work on it at the next conference.

Overall I walked away from this conference feeling pretty defeated and frustrated because I didn't feel like we accomplished much. Kate didn't seem to absorb anything because she was so busy playing around, but maybe she'll surprise me tomorrow when I come back for the third conference and remember what we covered.


Response to the First Conference

October 26th, 2009

Coming into the first "real" conference where I would have to come up with something to work with Kate on was unnerving; I didn't know if I could actually come up with a particular issue to work with her on in a split second. The end of the Calkins chapter we read, "Coaching and Conferring with Readers" was good to read and know that I'm not the only one who feels this way, "Coaching and conferring takes courage... But we musn't be too timid to try... Our children deserve our bravest selves." (p. 117)

I was completely taken aback by the change in Kate's fluency from her running record to her first conference. This time, I brought in the book Trixie the Halloween Fairy by Daisy Meadows.

After listening to her reading the beginning of this book, I was able to utilize Candace's approach to guiding conferencing and create an ALG for Kate.

A, which stands for accomplishment or what the student did well on, was Kate's use of inflection in dialogue such as in the line "Are you sure?" She also did an excellent job with pronouncing words she was unfamiliar with; every time she found a word she didn't recognize she would ask me what it was but for the most part she got almost all of the words right when I asked her what she thought it said.

L is for learning or what the teacher teaches the student during the conference, which in this case was having Kate pause at the end of each sentence when she reaches a period. I modeled the act for her, and then I asked her to show me how two of the sentences she read would sound if she had paused at the period between them.

G stands for goal, or what things the student should try to focus on for that week after the conference. In this case the goal was for Kate to practice pausing at periods, and it was also a goal for her to practice letting her finger find the next line before she starts talking so that what she reads out loud makes sense.

Last time I worked with her, Kate used her finger to guide her eyes while reading but this time she didn't, so I asked her why this was so. Her only response was "Because I didn't want to use my finger this time." I made sure to explain to her the importance of using the finger right now to keep the eyes where they should be, and she seemed to understand. This made me wonder: what should we do if a student absolutely refuses to cooperate for a day? What do you do?

I asked Mrs. C these questions during some of our free time, and she explained that it is normal for the kids to have much better days than others. She said that on the days where they would not work with her, she just accepted that she wouldn't be able to make them budge and would instead just wait patiently and eventually they will change their minds. Mrs. C has several students in her class that tend to have negative attitude swings and she shared with us that she has just learned how to pick her battles carefully because otherwise the students just shut down. Hopefully Kate will have practiced her goals for next week!

Parent Letter, Reading Inventory and First Running Record!

October 19th, 2009

This is the first real week that I will be meeting individually with Kate and we will begin our conferences. Last week, the week of October 12th, I was sick and unable to go into the classroom so this week I had to do both the first running record and the reading inventory. Also, I e-mailed the letter to Kate's parents to her teacher so she could take it home before I worked with her today, which definitely helped! Here is the letter I sent to her parents (and all names in this document have, again, been changed):


I was very nervous going into the whole thing because I had never had any of these types of interactions with a student before. Not only that, but I still wasn't completely sure what I was doing and was afraid that shine through while I was trying to work with Kate.

When I talked to her teacher (I'll refer to her as Mrs. C), she told me I should have absolutely no problems with Kate, which alleviated some of my concerns. At first when I mentioned to Mrs. C that I would like to conference with Kate she asked me if I was supposed to be doing the audit trail with a struggling student or not, and when I said that was not a requirement she said that if that wasn't an issue that I would love working with her.

Mrs. C, Lizzie (my classmate sharing my field experience class), and I all discussed how Mrs. C goes about assessing what reading level all of her students are at, and it turns out their school actually uses a special program installed on Palm Pilot. All teachers in the school have it, and the teacher simply has the student read to them and they conduct a running record on the Palm Pilot. The program computes their final score and it is saved in the system. These scores tell the teachers what they need to spend more time on in class and what they should work on individually with the students. She told us that the students become so used to the assessment that they aren't anxious or uncomfortable with doing it.

Now on to the meeting! I began with the reading inventory and asked Kate about her experiences with and knowledge of reading. These are the questions and the answers she provided (you can click on the image to enlarge it):


It was great to know that she is an active reader at home, because that gives her a lot more opportunity to practice what she learns in her reading conferences.

After this, we then moved on to our first running record. In one of our readings for class, Serravallo and Goldberg explain how running records help the teacher establish "what levels students are able to read with high degrees of accuracy, fluency, and comprehension" and also helps the teacher "develop ideas about ways to work with students in conferences to figure out what skills and processes to reinforce and what to teach." (p. 37) These are both exactly what I hope to encounter in doing the running record with Kate so I can develop the best personalized conferences I can give her. Currently her leveled reading group is reading the book The Magic Tree House: Dark Day in the Deep Sea by Mary Pope Osborne, so I just had her read from the last spot she stopped at in the book.


There were very few miscues in her reading and I was highly impressed overall with her proficiency for her age. This is the running record:

After she finished reading the section, the first question I asked was what happened in the part that she read. This was just to help me feel out how developed her comprehension is, and I was surprised when she said she could not remember what she had read.

I had her look back at the text she just read and try to pull out some of what seemed to be the key points, and she said, "They were trying to tell him that it was lunchtime, but he wouldn't listen." At that point, I tried to help guide her and asked what was discussed regarding the wardroom, so she looked back at the book and read the two sentences next to each other that included the word "wardroom" and the sentence immediately after them to answer me. To help her build off of that, we looked back to the first sentence and I asked her what they were talking about. Since she wasn't sure, I told her when certain sentences don't seem to make sense it helps to keep looking back further to make connections. She became very excited and gasped when she went back a few paragraphs and discovered why Henry had said "'Silly to think that way, I know'" (p. 51).

Even though this was only my first reading conference with my student, I learned a few very useful concepts that I will keep in mind for future reference. First and foremost, it doesn't matter how good a student's graphophonics are if they don't comprehend what they're reading. Also, a point that I already believed but was reinforced through our conference was even though a student might appear to be an amazing reader, there is always something they can improve upon, you just have to find it.

Audit Trail Beginnings

This first post marks the beginning of a long journey of conferencing with many successes and many frustrations. All of these entries will be on the same date because instead of doing blog posts over time I wrote out what I would type after each conference.

October 5, 2009
Today in class we completed a KWL chart, which helps us determine what it is that we know, what we want to know, and what we have learned about audit trails. Since we have not actually done any audit trails before, we obviously can't complete the third column of the chart about what we have learned. Instead, I will answer that question at the end of my audit trail!

The questions I ask in the "want to know" or middle column will serve as guiding questions for the rest of the audit trail, so I will refer back to these questions as time goes on. As the above sheet shows, my three questions I have are

  1. How do you go about "fixing" whatever problem a student is struggling with?
  2. How do you make the student feel comfortable and not nervous?
  3. How do you choose one specific issue to work on in a conference if it seems like the student needs a lot of help?
Although I do not have an excessive amount of questions, I certainly feel incredibly nervous and completely unprepared for this. I'm not totally sure what I'll be doing or how exactly I'll be going about doing it, which is not something I'm used to doing during an assignment. I feel completely lost with this whole project, which Candace says is how I should feel. However, I know this whole process is going to be highly beneficial in the future because I need to come to terms now with the fact that I won't be able to plan everything from start to finish.

The student I chose to conference with is a wonderful girl who I'll refer to as "Kate" for the duration of the audit trail to protect her identity. To guide my kidwatching, I looked through the questions provided in Owocki and Goodman's book Kidwatching: Documenting Children's Literacy Development on pages 12 and 13. Such questions as "In which contexts does the child work alone; seem to prefer to work with others?", "When is the child successful in getting things done?", "When does the child seem confused?" and several others helped me know what to look for while observing her for my very first week of the audit trail. This is what I observed:

She is a very bright second grade student who loves to read and is in the uppermost group for her grade's leveled reading groups. From what I have observed, she is very respectful towards the teacher and her classmates and is excited about learning. During class she is always attentive and quiet when the teacher is talking to the class, plus she enjoys working with others in general but seems to prefer reading alone. Kate does not hesitate to ask questions when she is confused about what the teacher has assigned for the class and if still uncertain she will ask for clarification. I figure that she will be a challenge because there are always ways for a reader to improve their skills but sometimes those ways aren't as obvious, so I will have to learn to really be on the lookout for any possible areas of improvement.