Proposal

I am creating an Action Research Project while taking "Comprehension Cognition Content Area Reading." I will describe my plan and that strategies that I will utilize next.

                                                                      




                                   The Plan:

              I currently teach at Parkside Elementary School in Naples as an Exceptional Education Inclusion Teacher in fifth grade and kindergarten. This is my second year teaching. I previously taught at Pinecrest Elementary in Immokalee grades second through six. As a new teacher, I believe my talents in teaching are the passion I have for educating children, high expectations for all my students including those who struggle the, and the fact that I genuinely care for my students’ learning and development which allows me to build great relationships with them
             I teach reading comprehension in Core which consists of the entire class and small groups for guided reading. Additionally, I teach small groups of students during reading intervention for 30 minutes every day.  During both whole group and small group I model how to critically think about what I am reading and how to make sense of the text. Then, I encourage my students to practice good readers’ behaviors such as predicting and questioning during their independent practice. Most of my students are not aware of the significance to interact with a text; therefore, they need to be “taught” how to think aloud, how to make inferences based clues from the text, and how to fix up their thinking as they read. My students are not able to create pictures in their head while reading due to the lack of background knowledge. They need a lot of scaffolding; hence, the need for think aloud and guided reading. 
            Some of the comprehension strategies I have found to enhance my students’ comprehension are debating critical themes such as bravery and survival through class debates. My students very passionate about speaking what they believe based on their experience. Besides, this a great opportunity for my students to take the lead in talking to the class and having them listen to their own voices.  I have also modeled how to “fix up” my thinking when reading a complex text through think aloud.  I usually allow 30 minutes for my students to practice the reading comprehension strategies that I introduce in class, but I realize this is not enough.  

                      Big Ideas I want to Change in my classroom and current practice

The biggest change I would like to make in my classroom is to create life-long readers. My goal is to make my students fall in love with books and literacy. In order to do this I will teach my students comprehension strategies such as Visualizing and Inferring so they can really comprehend and make sense of the text. These strategies will deepen my students’ understanding as they will form pictures in their minds about places, characters, and events and then draw them in paper. Moreover, I want to enable my students to become metacognitive and think about their reading process. I will buy picture books to teach my students how to think about their thinking while reading. I will ask specific questions about the text such as: what are you seeing right now while I read?  What words or phrases in the text makes you think of that? The biggest obstacle in achieving this is my students’ lack of background knowledge so I will ensure my students read a variety of texts such as magazines, picture books, fictional and non-fictional books. 

 

        Strategies I will Implement and How I will implement them

I will utilize a reading intervention program, which is required by my school, “Leveled Literacy Intervention (LLI).” Last year LLI helped increase our reading scores in the standardize test FCAT, especially the scores of our lowest 25% students. This reading resource includes daily fictional and non-fictional books at the students reading level, writing prompts based on the text, word work (phonics and phonemic awareness), and teacher-prompt comprehension questions. LLI targets and successfully scaffolds reading comprehension skills such as Predicting events, Synthesizing, Identifying Critical Information in the text, Inferring big ideas, characters’ motives, traits, and feelings, and others. Although LLI is scripted, I can incorporate “Visualizing and Inferring” (Harvey & Goudvis, 2007) in this program to improve my students’ reading comprehension and thinking.

Leveled Literacy Intervention requires students to infer about main characters of stories as a person. In order to scaffold this process I will implement “Inferring from the Cover and Illustrations as well as the Text” which utilizes a two-column chart headed Quote or Picture/Inference. Students will look at the illustrations and read sentences from the text to make inferences. This strategy organizes students’ thoughts before inferring. Additionally, each lesson in this reading resource contains vocabulary words that students need to define by context clues. “Inferring the Meaning of Unfamiliar Words” will enable my students to achieve this task as students will create a chart headed Word/Clues/Sentence/Inferred Meaning to find the definitions of these unfamiliar words. This chart explicitly teaches students the steps in defining unknown words by looking at the clues (reading on, picture, capital letters, commas, etc). Then reading the sentence in which the word is used, and finally inferring the meaning. Moreover, this resource provides opportunities for students to discuss big ideas or themes. I will utilize “Recognizing Plot and Inferring Theme” to assist my students in identifying big ideas from the text. First, I will remind and explain what themes are, discuss recently-read texts, as a whole class, that allude to Bravery and Survival- which are big ideas. Lastly, I will add them to the theme chart headed Hey, what’s the big idea? This chart will remain visible throughout the lessons to refer back as needed and continue to add themes as we read. In addition, LLI focuses on explaining how authors help readers understand descriptive scenes. This is a great opportunity to encourage students to “Visualize from Vivid Pieces of Texts,” “Visualize in Nonfiction Text: Making Comparisons,” and “Create Mental Images that go Beyond Visualizing.” I will read the text aloud and then ask questions such as “What does it feel like to be Miles? What does it look like when Carrie Water’s dad hauled up the lobster trap?”  Afterwards, students will draw pictures to depict their thinking. These strategies will enhance students’ comprehension and thinking about the text as they will form pictures in their minds and later sketch about characters, setting, and plot (Harvey and Goudvis, 2007). My purposel is to incorporate all the strategies named above in each lesson as I am teaching LLI. 

 

                                                          Research Indicates ...........
         Being able to Visualize and make Inferences is vital in becoming a proficient reader. Laura A. Rader (2010) explained that Visualizing is creating pictures in our minds that represent the content of what we read. Rader also stated that Visualizing is generating ideas and drawing conclusions to explain what they understand by turning the pictures or images back into words (p. 127). Most of my students present deficiency in oral language skills due to their learning disabilities; fortunately, Rader (2010) determined that visualization and oral skills increase with the usage of specific set of nine questions which I am planning to include in my practice (p. 128). The following are the set of nine questions that Rader used:

1.       What is it?

2.       What size is it?

3.       What shape is it?

4.       What color is it?

5.       Is there any sound?

6.       How many are there?

7.       Where is it?

8.       Is there any action?

9.       What time is it?

While Visualizing is critical in becoming a good reader, Inferring is crucial as well. However, students struggle to infer big ideas when reading nontraditional texts as well as traditional texts. If students fail to see or visualize what they read, then they will not succeed when making inferences about a text. Jeffery D. Nokes (2008) utilized an Observation/Inference Chart (OI) to scaffold students when inferring. Nokes provided three reasons why the OI works for children; “first the chart helps students learn to make inferences, second, it helps students think deeply about a text, and third, it helps students learn to be metacognitive” ( Nokes, 2008 p. 540). Such chart can be utilized in explicit instruction in reading comprehension. Explicit instruction means to make the instruction visible for students in which teachers first introduce and model the strategy. Then provide students with guided and independent practice. According to Nokes the OI Chart generates a dialogue between the teacher and students by “breaking down a complex task into two simpler stages, making observations and making inferences” (2008 p. 540).

 

                                       How will Data be Collected?

I will explicitly teach and model the strategies mentioned above daily during reading intervention. Thus, Data will be collected on a daily basis to successfully monitor students' progress. I will also utilize writing responses, graphic organizers for inferring and visualizing, and drawings. Finally, I will record observations to effectively change or adjust my practice as needed.