Results

Professional Development Results

School Context and Classroom:

 Parkside Elementary School is a Title I school that has not met adequate yearly progress under No Child Left Behind (2008) for more than two years despite numerous changes in curricular and personnel changes. Parkside Elementary has a total of 725 enrolled students. The school is 78% Latino, 18% black, and 2% white. Approximately 97% of the students are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch. Additionally, 73% of the students speak Spanish at home, 15% speaks Haitian-Creole, and 10% speaks English. The school does not have a bus as every student lives nearby and arrives to school either in car or walking. The families are from a variety of countries such as Haiti, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and United States of America. The majority of women stay at home taking care of their other children while the men work in construction or fields.   Although these families are not privileged, most of the parents are very involved in their children’s learning and help teachers improve students’ academics.

                I taught fifth grade students who I serviced for reading intervention 30 minutes per day. There were three boys and four girls all from different countries. The students’ reading and writing skills were at a first grade level. All of my students had learning disabilities in both mathematics and reading. In addition, some of my students had Language and Speech Impairment as their second exceptionality. My students were also English Language Learners and their primary language at home was not English. Moreover, these students had free or reduced lunch due to their social economic status. Many of them lived with more than one family in the same house and sometimes they lived with their parents and multiple siblings in one room. Two of my students had delicate situations at home as their parents had been in jail for domestic violence. Others lived with friends because their parents were not able to migrate to the United States.

I taught reading comprehension in Core which consisted of the entire class and small groups for guided reading. Additionally, I taught small groups of students during reading intervention for 30 minutes every day.  During both whole group and small group I modeled how to critically think about what I was reading and how to make sense of the text. Then, I encouraged my students to practice good readers’ behaviors such as predicting and questioning during their independent practice. Most of my students were not aware of the significance to interact with a text; therefore, they needed 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 were not able to create pictures in their head while reading due to the lack of background knowledge. They needed a lot of scaffolding; hence, the need for think aloud and guided reading. 

Description of Big Ideas:

The biggest change I made in my classroom was the fact that my students now view reading as a way of thinking. My goal was to make my students become life-long readers; however, this is still a work in progress. In order to do this I taught my students two comprehension strategies: Visualizing and Inferring. These strategies broadened my students’ understanding as they were able to form pictures in their minds about places, characters, and events, find the definition of unfamiliar words by using context clues, and inferred about characters feelings and traits based on clues and illustrations within the text. I generated anchor charts and bulletin boards to depict the process of inferring, steps in making inferences, defining vocabulary words in the context, inferring themes, and characters personalities. These boards became handy in my daily instruction as I constantly referred to them to scaffold strategies and ultimately, my students’ understanding of reading.  

Another change I made in my practice was providing my students with a classroom conducive to active literacy. I ensured my students had time to share their thinking about what they read through group discussions and writing prompts. Some of the prompts I utilized to promote student active engagement in literacy were: What words or phrases in the text makes you think of that? What is the character of this book like as a person? What are some big ideas one can infer from this book?   . The biggest obstacle I faced was students’ lack of background knowledge so I had to scaffold a lot of my instruction by providing students with word banks, anchor charts stating some generic themes in literacy, as well as character traits.

Reflection:

Visualizing was one strategy I attempted to utilize in my instruction to deepen my students’ reading skills. However, after the first small assessment I conducted with my students I decided not to implement it as they were successful. The assessment consisted reading a small paragraph- taken from one of their books- to students so they could draw what they were thinking about as they were listening. Students were able to draw lots of details mentioned in the reading showing excellent comprehension. While not all the students showed adequate comprehension by visualizing and picturing their thinking about the text, the majority was able to convey their understanding. The other two students chose not to do the activity. Therefore, I mainly focused on teaching students how to make inferences to:

·         Describe characters’ traits and feelings

·         Define unfamiliar vocabulary words within the text

·         Infer the Theme of Big Ideas/Most Important Information within the text (nonfiction and fiction).

During whole group instruction I used the think aloud to model inference making. I specifically said: “I can make an inference about the main character based on this sentence” in order to reveal my thinking to students. Then when we broke into small groups for reading intervention, I asked students to make inferences about characters, big ideas, and unfamiliar words on their own. At the beginning, students were confused about making inferences; they were not sure how to even begin to make inferences. Thus, I used many ideas from my textbook as well as other websites such as Pinterest to make this process “visual” to students. In order to assist students define vocabulary words I created a chart headed: Word/Clues/Sentence/Inferred Meaning. Such chart was very helpful as it guided students’ thinking of new words. They focused on each tab at a time allowing students to arrive to a close definition of words, many times, the right definitions. This is a methodical way to teach context clues and inferring to students as it organizes the thinking process of students while defining words through context clues. Some words my students have learned through this strategy are: bolt, display, invent, competition, donate, structure, invention, and others. Although these are “easy” words for most fifth graders, my students read at a 3rd grade level; which is why they have reading intervention in small groups.

Inferring about characters’ feelings and traits was difficult for my students at first as they did not possess enough vocabulary. I utilized an anchor chart for making inferences about characters headed: Quote or Illustration/ Inference. While this was a very straight forward chart because it showed the student what to focus on at a time, it wasn’t enough assistance to enable students make inferences. Each time I asked: What can you tell about this character? Students were not able to answer in complete sentences using precise adjectives or traits. As a result, I created another anchor chart explaining what character traits were as well as providing examples for my students such as: loyal, humorous, passionate, kindhearted, jealous, foolish, among others. This chart really assisted my students as they were able to refer to the chart when making inferences about characters. We also utilized the chart to find synonyms and antonyms of words. For instance: generous and selfless or selfish.

Finally, inferring Themes or Big Ideas is one skill all fifth grade students at Parkside struggle with. The way I taught this reading skill was through a variety of nonfiction and fictional books, especially when reading fables and folk tales. I generated two anchor charts related to Themes. One was headed: So What’s the Big Idea? And the other “Themes in Literacy.” The first chart was to be filled in with students as we read books. The second was a list of most generic themes such as: freedom, kindness, survival, family is important, among others. I placed them right underneath of each other to help my students understand they were related. We read books and then talked about the lesson or big idea implied in the text. Students became so proficient they often reminded me to add themes to our charts. Not only were they able to utilized themes that were already added to our charts, but they were able to brainstorm big ideas on their own. And students were able to support each theme by citing quotes or evidence directly from the books.

At the beginning of this action plan, students and I practiced the strategy using sticky notes; however, after they became comfortable with all the strategies, they performed on their own. While fifty percent of my students in small group instruction were successful in making inferences to understand the story, others were not due to either behavior issues or the severity of their learning disabilities. Those particular students completed the activities and utilized the strategies but with a lot of prompting and guidance by me or classmates.  For instance, I provided them with sentence starters such as:

The character is____________ because on page__ says______________. The Theme of the story is _________________________ because________________.

Although this course reached its end, I will continue to implement these reading strategies. I found the anchor charts extremely successful as it reinforces students’ reading skills. Anchor charts are a concrete reminder for students about steps in reading as well as becoming a proficient reader. 

Evidence of Change in Action and Responses of Students to the Change:

This is the anchor chart I used when defining unfamiliar vocabulary words by context clues. Students and I used sticky notes to write the words, sentences, and inferred meaning. Students took turns in defining their assigned vocabulary word.

This is the anchor chart I used when making inferences about characters. Students and I utilized sticky notes to write the quotes and the page number as well as the inference about the character.

Character Traits Anchor Chart I utilized to assist students when making inferences about characters from their text.

Theme or Big Idea Anchor Chart I used to help students infer the big idea or theme in their non-fiction and fiction books. At the beginning of this action plan the chart on top (Hey what’s the Big Idea or THEME?) was blank. Students and I added those themes such as: Survival, Bravery, Courage, Inspiring Others, among others as we read books. The second chart was a framework of most common themes in Literacy to help students infer the Theme.

Students defining unfamiliar vocabulary words found in non-fictional books.

These are some pages from the journal I kept during the implementation of Inferring strategies. Each day I reflected on my instruction as well as the students’ response. Overall students emphasized inferring was hard; however, they felt more comfortable as they knew “to find context clues by reading on” or “reading the words around the vocabulary word.”