Thanks to web site visitors, Luz Arriaga and Dora Antillon, my Reading Comprehension Posters and Bookmarks arenow also available in Spanish.
Reading Comprehension Posters (English)
Reading Comprehension Poster (Spanish)
Reading Comprehension Bookmark (English)
Reading Comprehension Bookmark (Spanish)
Larger versions of the Reading Comprehension Bookmarks (not yet translated) are also available here.
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
- 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
- Find a voice recorder
- Find out more about these techniques through Escondido Unified’s iRead Project
Comprehension
- 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.
OK, I don’t like the name (iTablet or iSlate are much cooler sounding) but I think the iPad bashers have got it wrong and that this new device has the potential to change education. While many journalists are complaining about the $499 price tag, I keep thinking wow, only $499, that’s half the price of laptops!
Reasonable Expectations/ Reasonable Price Tag
First, you need to understand that the iPad is not a laptop. You will need a traditional laptop if you want all the functionality of a laptop. The iPad is a cross between an iPod touch and a laptop lite. The iPad is sufficient for 90% of classrooms who need a computer only to do word processing and internet browsing. In a perfect world, classrooms will still have at least one MacBook or iMac somewhere in the room but at $499 you can put more Apple computers in the hands of students at the half the price of what it would have cost you yesterday (the entry level iBook is about $999).
Advantages In Addition to Cost
1. Battery life is much longer than existing laptops and more akin to the iPod battery life.
2. Many of the shortcomings that analysts point to in terms of lack of complexity in the operating system are advantages in the classroom. Unlike a traditional computer, the iPad should require very little setup, troubleshooting, maintenance. Like your iPhone, the iPad should just run. In classrooms without tech support, this is fantastic.
3. Tactile computing. Students now just touch need to touch the screen to select what they want. This is intuitive and satisfying. It would be as easy to touch an English Language Learner or my grandmother as it would be to teach a computer scientist.
The Future
There are some features missing that are already on my iPad wishlist. This is a typical 1.0 version of the iPad. Remember when the iPhone came out it didn’t have third party apps, voice activation, or turn by turn navigation. I didn’t get an iPhone until version 3. I’m not really an early adopter. I personally would wait for future versions of the iPad before jumping in. However, if you’re ready, none of the missing features are a deal breaker for the classroom.
No camera? Does every student need a camera at his/her desk? Would every student be videoconferencing simultaneously?
No multi-tasking? Do students really work on two assignments at once? Applications like Safari do save your place when you switch out of them and then come back for purposes of research. People who have never used the iPhone don’t understand how you can live without multi-tasking, but trust me, you can.
No 16X9. This is a bummer if your watching a lot of high def movies but in the classroom, who cares?
No Adobe flash when visiting web sites. This is too bad but there’s no Flash on the iPhone and it hasn’t really bothered me. I suspect it’s coming to Apple’s mobile devices if you can be patient. Most sites will run fine without Flash.
If you need any of those things then you still have the option of getting a laptop. Again, temper your expectations, this is a netbook and not a full-fledged computer.
If money and lack of tech support have been holding your school back from adopting technology. This is a great first step in a positive direction.
Your Thoughts
What do you think of the new iPad and its potential in your classroom?
I write this post at the risk of being nicknamed Scrooge. Let me preface this by saying that in my classroom, I have always bought the kids presents which they unwrap after lunch on the last day of school before the winter break. Every year there is one student who tells me something like the art supplies I gave her, “were just what she wanted” or that “this is the only present I’ll get this year.” I like bringing a little magic to school and building good memories with my class.
Some years I have had a party in addition to the gift giving but I got discouraged after buying the students pizza and having them tell me that they were serving pizza in the cafeteria that day. It was much more fun and healthy to go out to P.E. and burn off some energy after gift giving than to hype up on sugar. I still would get requests for parties or hear that “Ms. So and So is having a party, why aren’t we?” However, I just point out all the things we’re doing that Ms. So and So’s class never does. You have to resist that kind of student guilt because it can easily extend to logic like “Ms. So and So’s class doesn’t have to face forward in the auditorium, why do we have to?”
At schools I’ve worked at we’ve always had holiday performances and these do take time away from regular class work. However, I’ve always felt that the act of practicing for our performances and the experience of being in front of an audience taught things like discipline and perseverance and allowed some students who were less than stellar in their classwork to shine onstage. My schedule in those performance weeks is cramped and hurried but when your time management is effective you can incorporate those kinds of extra-curricular events without them being a hassle or taking time away from the core subjects.
In contrast, as early as Monday or Tuesday of this week I’ve seen several classrooms shut down their academics to build gingerbread houses, color pictures of Santa, and make reindeer hats. And it seems that it’s often the classes who need the instruction most who get it the least…the ELL class, the intervention students, the low-income district. It’s not a coincidence that more time goes wasted in these schools. (I refer you to my favorite blog post ever, Why Can’t Inner City Kids Learn, by City Teacher for more).
I realize that when working with disadvantaged students we want to give them more…more love, more happiness, more good things. But I would suggest that giving a student confidence by nurturing a strong reader is longer lasting happiness than a sugar high. I would also suggest that there’s a certain amount of laziness on the part of teachers. I realize building gingerbread houses takes a lot of preparation but certainly there’s a lot less planning involved than an academically rigorous lesson.
I don’t want to take holiday celebrations out of schools, I like the Halloween/Fall Festival Parade as much as the next pagan teacher but I do suggest that coloring turkeys, reindeers, skeletons is a waste of time (to be clear, I see this as often in grades 4 and 5 as I do in kindergarten and first grade).
If you must do this kind of busy work, at the very least can you relegate it to the last hours on the last day of school before the vacation? Can we stop complaining that we don’t have enough time to fit in things like technology integration, reader’s theater, and student led discussions when we have time for coloring and parties? Can we avoid giving in to students’ desires for candy and fun?—we’re the adults.
Your thoughts? Have I gone too far?
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
Here are all the myths with visuals from my presentation at Western Avenue Elementary…
Myth #7: Where’s the beef?
I’ve written about this before as well. Focusing on structure before starting to write can lead to bland, generic paragraphs and reduce writing to formula instead of communication. Instead, I recommend just writing and then molding that writing into a structure through revising. By frontloading too much information in the beginning, some students will be overwhelmed and shut down. Let them get their ideas out first.
Myth #8: Revising and Proofreading are the same thing…and students can’t do either.
Many teachers are students are still confused about this. Revising is about ideas and not about mistakes. If there’s an error that impedes meaning then by all means take care of it in the revising but proofreading is the stage that is about conventions and making the writing correct. Students can do both independently with your guidance as long as you are modeling how to do it and not just lecturing about it (see Myth #1).
Myth #9: Students can’t follow prompts.
Students don’t need prompts but sometimes they will have to write to them. They can learn to follow directions if you teach them how to read them and figure out what’s being asked. However, following a prompt is almost a separate skill from writing. The good news is that if you teach students how to write well then learning to write to a prompt is easy. If you do too much at one time then it’s harder for students to learn anything.
Myth #10 We write because the teacher tells us to.
We sometimes do a good job of teaching students that we read for pleasure but we rarely teach students that writing is about authentic communication and that it is sometimes done because someone wants to do it. This is why some students (some of whom eventually become teachers) hate writing. Students need real reasons to write. Let them write a presentation, a letter, a blog and write something that they care to write about.
Myth #4: Drawing is for babies.
I wrote about this already. Drawing is a valid form of prewriting and writing (see cave paintings). By allowing students to transition from drawings to labels and then sentences, you make writing relevant. Bringing visuals into the writing process also sparks imagination and allows non-writers and English Language Learners to participate in the process
Myth #5 Good writers don’t change their minds.
I have several blog entries that have never seen the light of day. I have a box of unfinished scripts. And most of my finished pieces have gone through tons of different iterations before being published. However, in many classrooms, whatever students start writing on Monday, they must take through the entire writing process. By having a publishing deadlines and not requiring students to move at the same pace within that structure, changing your mind is part of the process. Students can go back to their brainstorming list at any time and choose another idea (again, as long as they publish by the deadline).
Myth #6 Stories need a (traditional) beginning, middle, and end.
We were all taught that stories need a beginning, middle, and end but teaching that students often leads to a laundry list type of writing. Take for example, a story about visiting Raging Waters.
I went to Raging Waters with my mom. We parked the car. We bought tickets. We ate a hot dog. We rode many rides. We had fun. We were tired. We went home. I played video games with my cousin. He slept over. The next day he went home.
What is this story about? There are several possible stories in this piece of writing and few details. How about focusing on a small moment instead. How about focusing on just one ride and really noticing sensory details of the experience.
I could smell sunscreen all around me and heard the sound of ladies screaming as they rode down the slide. There were butterflies in my stomach as I climbed the steps of The Terror waiting my turn to slide down the one thousand foot drop…
Sometimes you have to just start writing and find the structure within what you’re writing. As per Lucy Calkins, it’s easier to revise a smaller, focused piece of writing then a long string of ideas.
Before teaching a writing lesson, I introduce myself to students as a writer. I tell students that I like to write. I tell them I write outside of school just because I want to. (Insert audible gasps here).
Since I have a sense of myself as a writer in the “real world” it bothers me that the way we teach writing is often artificial and bares little resemblance to real writing. Here are my problems with writing instruction, spelled out with ten myths. This is a three part series.
Myth #1: Students can write without modeling.
Without showing students how you write, they have no guidance as to how it can be done. In order to do this, teachers must be writers themselves. You don’t have to be Shakespeare but you do have to allow yourself to be vulnerable and actually participate in the writing process in front of or along with your students. If students don’t see you writing, it’s hard to believe that real people write.
Myth #2: Writers write at the same pace.
Instead of everyone revising on the same day, my students and I set deadlines for pieces to be published. Within XX amount of weeks, students may spend multiple days on the same stage of the writing process as long as everyone meets a deadline set by the class. In other words, a student might spend three days on drafting and half a day on revising but not everyone has to be working on the same stage at the same time. As we get closer to the publishing deadline, students need to commit to one of their drafts and publish.
Myth #3: Students can’t come up with their own writing ideas. They need prompts.
I used to be afraid that my students couldn’t come up with their own ideas. They can. And they do. It’s teachers who often can’t come up with their own ideas. If you model how to come up with ideas, students can do the same. A lot of times their ideas are more interesting than what they did last summer. Give them a chance.
