Final+reflection

November, 2009 – February 2010
 * Individual Reflection on the Inquiry Cycle**

Name: Heidi Fessenden / Annie Shah

How did the action plan work for your students? For targeted students in Tiers 2 or 3?

//For Tier 2 students, it was quite effective. We have far fewer students in Tier 2 than we did at the beginning of the year, primarily because of improved Oral Reading Fluency scores.//

//For Tier 3 students, the action plan was less effective. Most Tier 3 students remain in Tier 3, although a few moved to Tier 2. There was some improvement in some of their Oral Reading Fluency scores, but not a great improvement, and some stayed nearly the same.//

What did you learn from this inquiry cycle about improving student fluency?

//We learned a lot about ways to instruct for fluency, something we had wanted to know more about before but had been sure of. We learned new ways to use repeated readings of shared texts, such as poems. We learned that having students document their own progress, in terms of how long it takes them to read a text, has a strong impact on their motivation to improve and, therefore, in the results of the intervention. We learned to couple classroom interventions with repeated reading practice at home, which we shared with families at conferences. Some families have really embraced this opportunity for practice. We learned that pairing students to work on fluency together, whether timing each other, or helping each other improve with expression, was highly effective, especially when routines were well-taught and the work was done in small groups. Finally, we learned that including performance, both of poems used for shared reading and of readers’ theater related to read-alouds and guided reading books, in our fluency instruction, has been highly motivating to our students.//

What instructional strategies/routines do you want to continue? Why?

//We have made many of these instructional strategies into routine parts of our Readers’ Workshop because they have increased student engagement with the work and seem to have resulted in the ability to read more words per minute.//
 * //Using Readers’ Theater in Guided Reading groups and / or as a center during Readers’ Workshop (linked to read-alouds and Guided Reading texts)//
 * //Studying one poem a week//
 * //responding to the poem in writing//
 * //illustrating what the students visualize of the poem//
 * //reading the poem daily, timing each student’s reading, and graphing the results//
 * //sending the poem home to practice each night at home (also with a graph for recording progress)//
 * //discussing the poem in a small-group shared-reading lesson, including comprehension questions, punctuation, expression, the meaning of the poem, and vocabulary//
 * //Playing Boom as a center during Readers’ Workshop and during entry time, using sight words and words related to our word study units, to increase word recognition skills//
 * //Using the same guided reading text for more days, especially with lower level groups, so that they have ample opportunity for repeated readings, fluency and expression practice, and readers’ theater//

What will you modify in the future as you work to extend student skill in fluent reading.

//We may begin to implement PALS (partner-assisted repeated readings) as a center or a guided activity during Readers’ Workshop.//

//We would like to think more about how to assess the fluency of students reading far below grade-level. We feel that the second-grade texts (and, in many cases, the first-grade texts) used by the MClass assessment are frustrational texts for these readers, and are therefore not a useful measure of changes in fluency. Using them has been frustrating for students and teachers alike.//

//We also need more instructional strategies to meet the needs of Tier 3 readers. Their struggles are not just around fluency; they have global struggles with phonics and decoding strategies that require intense intervention that we have not been able to administer, partly because of lack of resources (too few teachers) and partly because of lack of knowledge of what to do for them.//

Did you ask students to assess their own reading progress in fluency? If yes, how? Please share a sampling of responses (notes, written reflections, any rubric used).

//Students recorded how long it took them to read the poem each day during the week and saw that they increased in speed. They also are part of graphing their progress on the ORF assessment.//

Did your emphasis on reading with meaning and expression have any effects on students’ attitudes toward reading? What makes you say that?

//Students have been very excited about performing for each other, and have received feedback from peers and teachers on their performance. This has motivated them to increase both fluency and expression. Graphing their speed of reading has also motivated them to work hard on practicing a given text. It has been important to stress to them the importance of reading with expression, so that they do not read __too__ quickly in an attempt to decrease their reading to unreasonably tiny amounts of time.//

//As students have become better readers, they are also more enthusiastic about reading, as their confidence has grown.//