Teaching as Inquiry

 

28/06/2012

With Term 2 coming to a close, now is a good opportunity to take stock of how my inquiry is going, and what changes need to be made for Term 3 to ensure that my target students can reach their reading goals.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that my two target students are developing at different rates and it has now reached the point that their needs are so disimilar that it is no longer feasable to keep them in the same group. The basis for this decion stems from assessment data in the form of running records, observations made during guided sessions, and conversations with the students.

Student One has applied for and has been accepted for additional support from a specialist reading tutor. This students needs are centred around the mechanics of reading and the difficulty he faces decoding words, particularly in the area's of vowel sounds and word endings. Further slowing up the reading process is Student one's limited bank of words that he can call on at an automatic level. The resulting effect is that the students brain capacity is almost exclusively absorbed by the decoding process severly limiting the mental capacity available to make meaning of, and remember what he is reading. This being considered, Student One has a good general knowledge of a broad range of subjects

I believe the key to seeing an improvement for this student is to continue to explicitly teach decoding strategies, coupled with a comprehensive, repetative rote learning of high frequency words.

Making reading fun/exciting and motivating is somthing that needs to be carefully considered. The more the student reads, the more fluent the reading/decoding process will become by enabling the student to develop a greater bank of automatic sight words. To achieve this the student will be given flexibility to choose areas of interest that they are passionate about. Student One will also be encouraged to read more at home by signing up to reading rewards which adds an incentive for achieving a pre-definied reading goal. Helping the student gain access  to interesting books that are at his level will help with this.

Student Two has progressed measureably in her ability to not only decode what she is reading, but remember/comprehend it as well. This has had a positive flow on effect to her fluency, and overal confidence with the reading process. It is now time to move this student to another group with other students of similar needs. Standadised testing highlights the need to build on this students ability to comprehend what she reads on a sentence/paragraph level. The aim is to achieve this through direct acts of teaching and a focus on comprehension strategies combined with closed activities to re-enforce what has been taught.