Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Q & A

Some of the feedback from a classmate caused me to reflect and further explain some key points that I had originally made in this journal. I am going to post the questions and responses below.

I found several interesting findings in your report. I was struck by the differences in the results for the first essay and thereafter. You explain that the first essay is 5-6 sentences, and the rest were 5 paragraphs. It is not clear that the directions were different; what accounts for the very poor essay scores on the first assignment? If the assignments ARE different, why did you include it with the others?

The first essay is a baseline. The kids come back after summer and are told to write as much as they can about something they did over the summer. It's purely a baseline. Then after several months of instruction they were given directions and explicit instruction on writing a 5 paragraph essay. One thing I definitely need to add to my inquiry is to say that MANY if not MOST are still not 5 paragraphs but they are drastic improvements from the first essay and I think that is to be expected since they would have at that point received several months of teaching. I included the assignments that I did because that was what I had to work with. I wanted to do a comparison of data and ideally I'd have time to do another essay but it can take several weeks and I've got other curriculum I need to teach before I can do another essay.

Also, did your first group have 10 returning students, too? The students that I have known who flunked a course the first time were able to frequently get an A the second time because it just took them hearing and doing it twice to finally do the expected work and get it. Maybe that also contributed to your improvements in 2010?

I always have about 20 kids and always about half are returning but NOT because they failed. Please don't take this the wrong way, but I know I get confused when I read everyone's inquiry about their context so I'm just saying this to remind you that I work in an all special ed school. We are ungraded. In my department the kids usually stay for 2 years-- It's kind of like Intermediate 1 and Intermediate 2. Now if a child stays for a 3rd year then we may consider that being held back but that's only happened once and it wasn't for either group of children in the inquiry. Since there are always about the same number returning I don't think it played a roll in the data differences. I'd have to look back and check I want to say that last year's group had 11 returning from the year before and 24 total so about the same ratio. I thought I'd mentioned this in part 1 but I can't remember now. I'll go back and check.

Finally, did you really mean that you "wrote large portions of their speeches for them", and was that factored into the final essay assessment score? With all due respect, if this is true, how can your comparisons be valid since you are grading yourself in the first group, but not in the second group?

Ah yes, this. I know. It's hard to explain and I need to word it better. Again, they are special ed so I did allow students to dictate the entire thing in some cases. I guide them all a little differently depending on their needs but in the end the guidance is usually the same from year to year. So for example, in the first group I may get a speech that is 5-10 lines written on a paper and not a lot of details. So I sit down with them one on one and I start with what they have and then I ask, "so tell me more about ___" and I make them elaborate. If they are lost for a word I might give them 4 choices or refer them to several tools I have provided for them. Is this me doing it for them or is this them telling me what to write? It's a fine line that becomes easily blurred. All I know (and what I tried to report but I see I didn't do a very good job) is that this year, when I got the essays/speeches there was much less of me helping them fill in the gaps. They took the effort to improve their own language, include research and details.

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

So much I have forgotten to say

Well I didn't mean to ignore my blog here but so many things have happened, not the least of which me being sick... but I'll get back to that.

I've been analyzing my data for my inquiry assignment and I figured I'd make it easier on myself and give myself a stopping point so I could evaluate what I had. So I took a little blogging break.

But I've been keeping some notes on things I wanted to mention. The first and most exciting thing is that one of my students won first place in the speech contest! He was up against, get this, 3 former first place winners! And he beat them all! I could not be more thrilled. He had an amazing speech about what he'd do if he were president-- he earned my vote! I'm thinking of trying to find a way to send the finalist speeches to Mr. Obama himself!

I am trying to reflect on what made J's speech so awesome. He definitely had the drive to win. He was a finalist last year but didn't place so I know he really wanted it. He also is very into politics so this was a great topic for him. But if I could really point out one thing that made this one different from the last was the passion he showed. If you were wondering by the way, he was the one who, after watching the video clips from The West Wing, told me that he felt like he got it. So lots of things combined to help make that an incredible essay and speech but I'd like to attribute at least a small amount of that success to the SMART Board.

Another thing that happened was that speeches ended and we went back to regular instruction. Phew! I love speeches and all but I do think it gets to be a bit much after a while. I started on Adjectives which is always a review for everyone because lets face it, by the time you get to the 4th grade curriculum you've already had adjectives for the last few years. So how could I make it different? Well of course with the SB! There was this one activity I found that was kind of a cross between a cloze procedure and a mad libs. It was this story about a haunted house (they didn't seem to mind it was out of season) and they had to fill in the blanks with words that meant "scary". So I pulled up thesaurus.com and showed them how to search for words which they thought was insanely cool (they seem to have forgotten that I showed them this at the beginning of the year). Then we filled in the blanks of their story. They came out incredibly well and the kids were once again very enthusiastic about participating.

I did notice that we are back to our old behavior problems with regard to the board. The first problem came with writing words in the blanks. It is just not easy for them to write. Some of them don't press hard enough, some put their hand down on the board and that messes up their writing and some write so poorly that the kids can't read it, I can't read it and the board can't interpret it to turn it into print. So I decided after about 15 minutes of letting them write that I would instead have them pick a word from the thesaurus page and I'd write it, turn it to print and then let them drag it into the blank that they wanted and that went much more smoothly.

So finally, we get back to this week. Well I have not been to work the last 2 days because I'm sick. Unfortunately for my students that means no SMART Board for them. You see, there are not many of us at work who are comfortable with the board and the people who graciously filled in for me in my absence were definitely not going to do anything using the board so my poor kiddos had to work in the textbooks which I know they hated and almost made me show up sick just to keep them from that. But I guess they will also appreciate the board that much more when I return. We need to solve this problem either by me training my potential subs on how to use the board or me providing alternative lessons that are more fun that the textbook. Or hopefully I can just not be sick anymore and then it won't be a problem :) So there you have it! Now you're all caught up!

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Fourth Participation Log

Lesson: Introduction to using adjectives to improve writing. Adjectives.notebook

First Count: 8/10

Second Count: 10/10

Third Count: 9/10 (Same student as one before)

Notes: This is my least engaged lesson so far. Could the effect of the board be wearing off? I am not ready to say that just yet. It has been an odd couple of days. The students are still enthusiastic about it but are also more misbehaved. The first student was messing with his pencils and the second student was not engaged because he was distracted by the first student.