Remedial Plan Emily Freeth Education 519 Professor Johnston April 14, 2008
For my reading practicum, I worked with David* (not student s real name to protect identity) who is a 9 th grade student at Hamilton Central School. Before meeting him, my cooperating teaching described him as a very clever and good natured student, who sometimes had a difficult time focusing on school work, but overall was a decent student to have in class. After hearing the description of David, I was looking forward to working with him in reading and also in one of the 9 th grade global studies social studies class I would be teaching. Not only would I have the chance to teach him in class, I would also have the opportunity to meet with him one-on-one during our reading practicum sessions. The time that I would be working with David would be during academic lab, where David has been placed to receive extra help to work on subjects that were difficult for him. These subjects included mathematics and English. Having the class time already established for working on reading was perfect, for it helped David and I develop a regular meeting time for our sessions. I learned a great deal about David during our meetings. I tried to keep our meetings between twenty to thirty-five minutes long. I did not want our sessions to be too short where we would not be able to accomplish all our work or too long where he would become distracted and lose focus. As we worked together, I learned that David had a passion for drawing and techno music. David also liked to read mystery and action novels or stories. He has a passion for Japanese history, his favorite subject being samurai warriors. From our first meeting I knew that it would be a pleasure working with David. He was very willing to engage in my reading strategies that I suggested and understood that I was trying to help him become a better reader and more confident student in regards to the written text. My one wish for our sessions was that the work Freeth 2
David and I did together would carry over into his other academic content areas, especially social studies and help establish a life long passion of reading for personal development and growth. Our first meeting together was more of a get to know each other session. I wanted to make sure that David understood our purpose for meeting, as well as my role as the reading practicum instructor. I introduced myself formally and had him do the same. I wanted our relationship to be one that was built on mutual respect. I find that the best type of work occurs when people respect each other. I wanted David to understand that I respected him as a student and as a reader. I did not want him to think that I labeled him as a bad reader. I also wanted David to know me and respect me for being a student as well. I explained to David that I was a student teacher and that part of my job in learning how to be a more effective educator was to practice working with a student in teaching reading strategies. I explained that he and I would be meeting at various points throughout my ten weeks and that we would be working on reading strategies and techniques to not only help me understand the teaching of reading, but also to help David become a more proficient reader. To be able to better understand David s reading background, I planned to ask him a series of questions during our first meeting. I wanted to make sure that I had a good sense of David s perceptions about reading and what he liked to read. I asked him the following interview questions (Walker, 140). These questions and David s response helped give me an idea on how to proceed in developing my reading practicum. 1. Who do you know that can read? A very good school friend (whose name will not be revealed). This friend is a very good reader and is constantly reading a book. 2. What is reading? What do readers do? Reading is looking at words in a book and saying the words. Freeth 3
3. Can you read? Are you a good reader? Yes to both. 4. What makes you a good reader? I can speed read and have gotten through two series books in one year-harry Potter and Lemony Snicket. 5. Do you like to read? Why? Yes. 6. What types of books/styles do you like/read? Mystery and action. 7. Last non-school book you read? Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Based on David s answers I had the impression that reading was not valued at home and that reading was not emphasized or modeled. David looked at a peer he admired as his reading model. His answer to question number two was also interesting because it made me question his reading comprehension. David said that reading was simply calling words, he did not say it consisted of learning new things, understanding stories and gaining knowledge or meaning. His answer lacked depth and just skimmed the surface of the action of reading. With David s passion for Harry Potter, I hoped to be able to incorporate this series book into our reading sessions. I enjoy the Harry Potter books and hoped that our enjoyment of these books would help to solidify our working relationship. During our second meeting I wanted to get a sense for David s reading ability. David and I went to a private section of the library to conduct our reading session. David had his novel for English class, The Ghost in the Takaido Inn and I asked him to read a few pages of the assigned chapter out loud. I wanted to get a sense of David s oral reading to see if there were any miscues that I could assess. Before we started reading, I asked David to summarize the book so I could get a sense of what the novel was about. He gave me a summary that lacked specific detail and then began his oral reading. After our first and second meeting, I began to identify David s reading strengths and weaknesses. When David read out loud, his fluidity was not strong. There were some significant pauses and lack of grammar recognition. David mispronounced words Freeth 4
and added a few extra words while reading, yet kept going. I noticed that David did not have the ability to self-correct or recognize when words had been mispronounced. David s inability to check his reading creates a problem with comprehension of the written text. Since he is not checking to see if the words and sentences are making sense, he lacks in comprehension and is not being meta-cognitive. The mistakes make sense to David because he is not reading to make meaning. He is just calling out the words. After reading the passages out loud, David s summary was lacking. He was unable to tell me about what he read in great detail. After his bleak summarization, I asked David to predict what he thought would happen in the rest of the chapter and text, but he was unable to do so. Comprehension is a large weakness with David and this clued me into how to work with our reading strategies. One of my hunches regarding David s lack of comprehension was incorporating a book about something he liked and maybe he would have better luck with comprehending the text. One of my goals was to find a way to incorporate the Harry Potter text into our reading meetings. Since I figured out that comprehension was a weak spot with David, as well as miscues, inability to summarize and predict, I wanted to pick a strategy that worked on developing comprehension. Our third meeting entailed a Cloze Instruction (Walker, 212) where I picked a coherent story and deleted target words from the paragraphs. I was hoping that this activity would help David predict words, to work on his predicating and also to make him stop and think about the text to see if the words he chose made sense. I really wanted to work on his meta-cognition as a reader. As the instructor, I debated about which text to use and was trying to decide between an age appropriate novel or a children s picture/story book. I decided to go with the Freeth 5
children s story to make the activity enjoyable. I found a book that seemed to mix mystery and fantasy, so I thought it matched David s story type very well. I chose The Stranger by Chris Van Allsburg and it might have been too easy for David, but it worked well for the lesson. To prepare, I photocopied a few pages of the text and then took out key target words. As David and I were about to start our meeting, I explained to him what I was going to be doing and the process of what goes into developing a Cloze Instruction and what he was expected to do. David read the pages and when he finished, he went back and filled in the missing words. He took a few minutes and when he was finished, I told him that I was going to compare his words with the words of the author. For the most part, he did a good job of carrying out this reading activity. Most of the words that I deleted David filled in with the exact words or one that matched very closely. Out of the twenty-five words I deleted from the text, David had three that were incorrect. Based on his performance, I now believe the picture book was too easy and I should have been more thoughtful about the text I chose. This would be something to consider the next time I conduct a Cloze Instruction. Our meeting was productive and helped to give David the opportunity to pause and stop while reading. The Cloze Instruction made David think about the print-text and the meaning of words as they are constructed into sentences. I think by doing this activity, I helped show David that reading is more than simply calling words and that it involves thinking about words and trying to make sense of the print, while also involving prior knowledge in reading. Since I had two productive meetings with my student and had developed some definite perceptions about my student s reading ability, I thought I should conduct the Freeth 6
Informal Reading Inventory by Roe and Burns. By conducting this assessment, I would have a way to test if my initial perceptions about David were accurate or inaccurate, as well as see what appropriate grade level my student should be reading. This assessment would also help me in establishing what level of reading proved to be frustrating for my student. I knew that conducting the Roe and Burns Informal Reading Inventory would take more than one day so I made sure to plan accordingly during our academic lab class periods. Over three days, I conducted the IRI with my practicum student. My initial observation from our first meeting resonated with what I found from the IRI. I started the IRI first with the word list and because my student was in 9 th grade, I began with the level 7 word list. David read every word correctly on level 7, so we moved to level 8. As he read, I would read along on the master list and record any miscues. On the level 8 word list, David missed a few words, which indicated that the IRI needed to be administered at level 7. We began with oral reading and then moved to silent reading. As David started working through the IRI, I began to notice that oral reading was not easy for him, but he did do better on oral reading and comprehension than he did on silent reading. During the oral reading at the lower levels (7, 8, and 9), the student had very few miscues, but as the level increased, so did the number of miscues. Despite the increase in the reading level, the student was still able to answer most of the comprehension questions with success. However, the questions that were generally answered wrong, were of the same categories of questions-vocabulary and inference. I took this as a cue that David s vocabulary was not strong and needed to be something that we worked on during our reading meetings. I also assessed that working Freeth 7
on vocabulary would also improved David s reading ability in content areas like social studies. David s silent reading and comprehension was very different from his oral abilities. The comprehension questions that were answered incorrectly were more frequent and I feel this comes from him believing he is a speed reader. During silent reading, I have no way to gauge his reading speed like a diagnostic teacher can during oral reading. While David read out loud, his reading was not very fluid. He would go fast in parts of the passages and go slow during others, which means he is not a fast reader. During the silent reading portion of the IRI, David would read the words fast, but not understand what they were truly saying. He was unable to make sense of the reading and was unable to comprehend the main points of the passages. David s lack of comprehension ability during the silent portion of the IRI also pointed out another weakness that I did not notice prior to this assessment. David was very weak with sight words, which I think is another reason for his extensive lack of comprehension while reading. The easy sight words caused many of his miscues. The results of the IRI matched my initial assessment of my reading student, as well as giving me new insight to another weakness that needed to be addressed during our reading practicum. The IRI results indicated that David could independently read orally at level 7 and 8, however the results of the silent reading portion showed that David was at the instructional level for 7, 8 and 9. In both oral and silent reading, as the levels increased past 9, David started to reach the frustration level. There was a big discrepancy between the oral reading comprehension and the silent reading comprehension. Based on my initial assessment of David, comprehension has been a problem since day one and the Freeth 8
completion of the IRI showed that my original hunch was correct. Not only was my original hunch correct, I also needed to help close David s gap between the oral and silent reading abilities and help him work in making inferences about the text, vocabulary and constructing meaning. Conducting the IRI gave me great insight into the deficiencies of some of David s reading abilities. It allowed me to investigate what reading strategies I could plan that would be beneficial during our continued sessions. Our first meeting after the IRI was completed, I decided to try a strategy that incorporated my student s love for drawing and also one of his favorite books, Harry Potter. Since the IRI confirmed my initial assessment of comprehension problems, I thought incorporating drawing into our reading would be helpful and successful in improving David s comprehension. I chose the first book of the Harry Potter series; it had been some time since David had read this novel. I wanted to choose a passage from the beginning of the book that highlighted the newness of the wizard world to Harry. The paragraphs I picked to read out loud to David were about Harry s first experience on the Hogwart s Express. These paragraphs were filled with descriptive images and details of Harry purchasing candy and seeing pieces of candy he had never laid eyes on before. I thought these paragraphs would also be a good passage to draw because they were so detailed for the imagination. I read the passage out loud and David listened carefully. When I was finished reading, I gave him a pencil and paper and asked him to draw what the passage was about and what was taking place in this particular scene. His drawing captured the true essence and main idea of what I read. When David s drawing was complete, we talked about the passage and his work of art. It was important for David to see the purpose of this activity Freeth 9
and how drawing can be used to make meaning from printed text. Also, drawing was a change from reading silently and answering questions from the passage. I am beginning to realize that to help improve comprehension and to stimulate a desire to read, the diagnostic teacher has to really think long and hard about how to incorporate the student s likes and strong abilities into creative reading strategies. A reader that is struggling already feels isolated, so it is important to choose activities that make the reader feel respected, important, included and also valued. Many times struggling readers are left to their own devices and to fend for themselves. Since David had several easy miscues during the IRI assessment, I decided that it would be very important and beneficial to work on sight words during a reading meeting. I prepared for our work on sight words by going online and finding the Fry list of sight words using www.google.com. I found 300 words at http://www.usu.edu/teachall/text/reading/frylist.pdf, which were all at different levels. I put each word on a flashcard and had my student read each word. As he read each flashcard I had a master list of the words and marked which words he said incorrectly. The sight words he missed while reading the flashcards makes more sense to me now than it did before. When assessing him earlier in our meetings I was baffled as to why he would misread such easy and simple words. As David read, it became apparent that this problem was common in his reading. Sight words come up so often in reading, but David does not have experience with them or confidence. His sight word recognition is extremely lacking. His lack of confidence in reading and reading sight words negatively affects how he translates the meaning of the text, thus further promoting his comprehension problems. To help improve his sight word recognition I think my student Freeth 10
needs to keep working with labeled flashcards of high frequency sight words. By becoming more familiar with these words, he will become more confident in his reading and will make fewer miscues while reading. My next meeting with David focused on a strategy that helps with specific content reading. Since I am a secondary social studies teacher and David is a student in one of my social studies classes, I wanted to work with him using our textbook. I know for a fact that David did not read the pages of the textbook I assigned for reading homework. I figured this was because he struggled with reading and comprehension was a problem. When a reader is not strong, it makes content reading even more difficult. Content reading is very abstract and very detailed, making it hard for the reader to relate to the material and construct meaning. As our strategy, I wanted to use graphic organizers as a way for my student to make sense of the dense social studies material we were going to read and what he is responsible for reading on his own. We co-read the assigned pages together, alternating after each paragraph. After the reading was complete, I asked my student to identify what he thought were key vocabulary terms and concepts. After identifying some major themes and words, we organized them according to a graphic organizer that I was given by one of my professors. This graphic organizer was in the shape of a triangle and was divided into three sections and labled Essential Knowledge, Short Term Knowledge and Supportive Knowledge. I thought this graphic organizer was very appropriate in showing David that even thought social studies material is dense, it can easily be organized into a way that makes sense and is easier to understand. This graphic organizer helped David to pull out the major themes of the reading and not get bogged down with details that do not Freeth 11
pertain. David took the themes and vocabulary terms and placed them in the triangle where he thought they were appropriate. After he did this, I asked David to explain his reasoning. By explaining his thought process and seeing how he visually organized the material, David was able to grasp the importance of the chapter in the social studies textbook. David was able to learn a technique that allowed him to work on his comprehension of tough, content specific material. This graphic organizer could also be used when reading a novel as well. To continue our work on sight words, I developed another strategy for David. I wanted to continue working with sight words because of David s lack of experience with these very important, high frequency words. I understood that if David s sight word recognition did not improve, his reading comprehension would slowly improve as well. Sight words are such an integral part of reading, David needed to be able to build confidence in reading them. I decided to use the flashcards that I had developed for one of our previous reading lessons and use them to create a memory sight word game. I laid out the sight word flashcards into groupings of eight pairs or words. I set up a square with the pairs of words as the game area to begin our game. Since David s word recognition is lacking, I wanted to give him practice in reading and learning sight words. I believed that helping his sight words would lead to better reading and better comprehension of the text. This reading session was tackling a very important issue and I did not want to approach this lesson in a drill and kill fashion. Making the lesson into a game made it more enjoyable for David. David was already disenchanted with reading, I did not want to make the lesson tedious, but fun and engaging. Freeth 12
For the game lesson, David was asked to match up sight words. He did a good job matching and as the game went on, his matching abilities grew faster. After each game, I would switch the group of flashcards and a new game would begin. After getting through most of the flashcards, I realized that it would be more beneficial for David to practice mastering one group of sight words before moving onto another group. This change in my approach to the lesson made it more effective. This lesson was very fun and David and I had a good time during our meeting. The one downside to this lesson was that I found it hard to assess or evaluate David to see if he was making progress. Our last and final meeting focused on specific content reading for social studies. We had already worked on social studies content reading before, but I wanted to explore specific content vocabulary words and give David strategies on how to understand terms while reading his social studies textbook. My last lesson plan for David incorporated vocabulary word maps. Being a social studies teacher, it is important for me to make sure that my students understand the complex content they are reading. Social studies textbooks are incredibly detailed and often refer to vocabulary terms that are unfamiliar to many students. Also, David does not have a very extensive vocabulary word bank, so my job was to help improve his vocabulary knowledge. If David became more familiar with tricky social studies terms, his comprehension would also be on a path toward improvement. After the completion of the IRI, David s lack of vocabulary really stuck out and I knew that I needed to try and find a way to help him work with unfamiliar terms. I knew that if he was having trouble with vocabulary in the IRI, he must be having trouble with the dense terms in learning social studies. Freeth 13
I did a little research online and found some vocabulary word maps from www.readingquest.org and was very happy with what I found. These word maps were very simple and organized and I knew they would be a success in helping David become more confident in learning new words. Also, these vocabulary maps provided visualizations in learning the new word because the student is asked to draw a picture of the word. David loves drawing, so I knew this strategy would work very well. To prepare for our meeting, I printed out copies of the word maps and gathered the social studies textbook we had been working with in class. I asked David to read out loud the paragraphs from the textbooks where our key vocabulary terms were located. I wanted David to read out loud because his comprehension was much better orally than silently during the IRI. I wanted to ensure that David read the terms in the passage and could think about these words in the context of the text. After he completed the reading, I asked him to identify which key terms he thought were important to the passage and he was able to give me six key terms. Next we took our first term and used in on the vocabulary word map. David defined the work in his own terms, at my request, and then wrote in his definition. He then came up with antonyms of the key term and then used the term in a sentence. Lastly, he drew a picture of his meaning of the new vocabulary term. The rest of the meeting, David worked on the vocabulary terms and word maps. I viewed this strategy and lesson as very successful because it gave David a sense of confidence and comfort in learning new vocabulary terms. The word map allowed David to think about words in a new way, not as just printed letters in bold text. He began to see the importance and meaning of specific content words. I told David that the word map exercise did not have to be specifically for social studies words and that he Freeth 14
could use this technique for science, English, math, or any other word he reads that is not familiar. I let David keep the word maps he worked on because they are more beneficial for him to have as part of his notes than for me to keep. I also made sure he had a blank copy of a word map for future work. At the conclusion of our reading practicum, I was very happy with how our lessons turned out. The lessons I worked on with David were very successful and most importantly, I feel that David really enjoyed our time together. Our lessons were fun and engaging, but addressed the serious issue of helping to make David a more confident and proficient reader. In the lessons I completed with David, he was allowed to let go of his fear of reading and open up to new ideas on how to become a better reader. His ability to open up was very important in our sessions running smoothly. David felt comfortable with me and my suggestions on how he could improve his reading. Also, the lessons were fun and not the typical classroom style type lesson. Our lessons allowed for creativity and that tapped into David s likes such as drawing, mystery and action. I wanted to give David the opportunity to enjoy our meetings so I could highlight that reading is fun and not boring. From our first meeting to our last, I saw an improvement on how David approached reading and our sessions. He was always polite and very willing to participate, but towards the end, I began to see true motivation on his part. I could see by the end of our time together that David truly wanted to work on improving his reading. As our lessons progressed I could tell that David wanted to be successful and that he began to understand the importance of thinking about the text as it is being read. Freeth 15
If I could conduct two more sessions with David, I think one of the reading activities that I would do would be the Questioning the Author technique (Walker, 297). As I saw the improvement in David over our weeks of meeting together, I could see his willingness to understand. I think that it would be such a beneficial exercise for David to read a narrative or expository text and then have him question the author as he tries to understand the point and meaning the author is trying to make. I think that this would give David appropriate practice in learning how to develop questions about the text that is being read, as well as engage him even more into learning how to discuss the text. Another strategy I would choose to do with David would be to encourage him to participate in Literature Discussions (Walker, 271). Our meeting would consist of David and I reading the same chapter, passage or small book and then coming together to discuss it in our own version of a mini-literature circle. I think this lesson would follow well from Questioning the Author. The literature discussion would help David engage more fully into the text as he figured out how to make personal connects and responses to what he is reading. It would allow him to fully practice interpreting and thinking about what is being read, he would work on his meta-cognition. This lesson would also allow David to take new information from a text and combine it with previous background knowledge to develop new thoughts or points of view. After practicing this with David, I would highly encourage him to participate in class during discussion time and try and say one or two statements about the text(s) he is reading for different classes. As I developed reading strategies to work on with David, I also learned a great deal about myself as a developing diagnostic reading teacher. I learned that working with a student is often about trial and error in developing strategies and approaches to reading. Freeth 16
As a social studies teacher, I learned how important it is to not only work one-on-one with a student who is having difficulty reading, but also how to incorporate reading strategies as part of my content lesson plans. Especially with social studies, it is important students understand vocabulary and are able to make meaning out of the reading. Part of being a historian is the ability to critically read and related content to your own personal experiences. I feel very privileged to have of had the opportunity to work with David during our reading practicum. Tutoring him has taught me that learning reading strategies does not end in elementary school, but they continue on through high school and beyond. We should all be active readings who ask questions, relater background knowledge and critically examine the text. Freeth 17