I may not understand all of the answers yet to all of my questions, but I do have a what and a why. Having a what and a why puts my engine in gear..time to do something!
With our WHAT being "make two year's growth", and our WHY "because our kids need to leave us reading on grade level", there isn't a teacher in the world who wouldn't think that something needs to happen right away. Eventually, I'll work on the proactive piece. Right now, kids need something. What can I do, reactive or not, to make the WHAT happen.
What's happening so far?
A LOT!
Thank goodness I team teach with an ahhh-mazing teacher and person who is willing and (most importantly) ready to go on this crazy journey with me. We have changed everything about our reading block. When I started talking to her about my plans and my what, and my why she was totally on board. Immediately our brains (almost) exploded with ideas.
First, re-assess. After 8 weeks of instruction and our new drive, we immediately took time to do a basic reading inventory. With new data, it was time to analyze. We decided to look closer this time, meaning that we wanted more than "just a level" by asking questions like "what exactly is this one student missing?" "what could be the one changing factor?" "what patterns do we see overall?", etc. When you ask so many questions...surprise surprise...you get a lot of answers. Here are the results:
This is different than our first data analysis with the first assessments, which only showed student name and which reading level they were on.
Now, with lots of information, comes lots more questions because once we teachers knows the information we teachers wants to do something about it all! We narrowed down patterns, discussed what's most important. After we decided we couldn't "do it all", we focused on the 80/20 principal of creating goals. We narrowed down our groups like this:
What I'd like for you to notice is that now we have two types of groups: guided reading and skills. Students are fluid through guided reading, and may occur more than once in a skill group. My team teacher focuses on guided reading and I focus on the skill instruction. To do this all within our reading block, our reading block schedule had to shift. We needed time to meet with all of these small groups, conduct whole group lessons, and have time to conference one on one with each student each day. Based on our data, our students need all of these every day.
So here's what we came up with:
This is a sample of one day's lesson plan for one focus lesson. We repeat this same process 5 times (except the flashback only occurs during this rotation) during our reading block of 2 hours. Another note, while the guided reading time is set of 20 minutes, the skill group is set to 10 which frees me up to do 2 conferences. If you do the math, that means we are counting every...single....minute. We and our students are strapped to the clock. There cannot be any loss of instructional time.
My team teacher and I are exhausted at the end, and planning for all of this makes our brain hurt. BUT, we both look at each other every day that we've switched to this schedule and say..."wow, we got a lot done today. I know what I need to do next." I've never felt more intentional or more reflective than I do with this system we have put in place. I feel like we're looking at EACH student every day.
How does this relate to my project?
The immediate action that I felt as I put the pieces together of my questions and discovering my what and why is first and foremost how this relates to my project. Now, I see what intentional planning looks like. Now, I feel what it is to look at individual results and set goals. Now, I have experienced a new level of coplanning and coteaching.
With all of this action, I still have many many questions to my project. I still want to know the initial problem and how to address it. I think that the system we've created now is a higher level of the systems that were already in place, and will help the answer to the problem but are not the answer.
So....more reflection, more research, more action. We're moving in the right direction...I think.
With all of this action, I still have many many questions to my project. I still want to know the initial problem and how to address it. I think that the system we've created now is a higher level of the systems that were already in place, and will help the answer to the problem but are not the answer.
So....more reflection, more research, more action. We're moving in the right direction...I think.
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