Yesterday morning I managed to meet for about an hour with Sylvia to discuss this project thing. Our discussion covered a lot of ground, but I do think by the end that the we were starting to drill down to a focus for our project. The overall topic, as you can probably guess, is huge, and one thing I kept looking for was a particular focus within it all that would lend itself to an interactive multi-media solution. Here is a summary of some of Sylvia's main points:
> ELL students are being given the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) 3 times a year, in addition to other standard reading assessments. These are individual assessments that provide data about a students' reading strengths and weaknesses.
> Many teachers are then not applying the data from these assessments to target a students' instructional needs, either because they don't choose to (not much we can do there), or because they cannot interpret the results and convert them into useful, practical classroom application.
> Beyond the simple reading level conclusions of the DRA, there is an additional layer of interpretation that involves understanding what type of mistakes are being made by the students. For example, in oral reading tasks, an error can happen due to reasons based on meaning, syntax, or visual miscues.
> A teacher really should be understanding the type of miscue happening in order to effectively address a students' learning need in the classroom, and particularly in the case of the ELL learner since they often have unique language interactions due to their multiple languages.
> Teachers finally have a need for some concrete activities they can apply in the classroom once they have determined the specific miscue to individualize the instruction for a given student.
O.K. - so what does it all mean for our project? I could see one approach as follows, and please feel free to make your own suggestions.
Title: Differentiating primary reading instruction for Second Language Learners in grades K-2
PART I: The Big 5 of Reading Skills
> This section would be a review and a refresher of the 5 reading skill types: comprehension, fluency, vocabulary, phonics and phonemics. These are the skills tested in the DRA and other standard assessments.
> Material could be presented in a combination of media types, for example an instructional page on fluency could contain text descriptions, audio clips of examples and counter-examples of fluent reading, and perhaps even video content of the same.
> Part I is designed not so much to instruct from scratch, as the teachers should already have knowledge of the topic, but to review and deepen understanding, particularly as applied to the standardized reading assessments.
> Each of the 5 skills can have an assessment piece that asks our users to Identify or Classify different reading behaviors into these five categories. In fact, the program could be designed so that a given user could pre-test out of any of these sections if they already know the material.
PART II: Determining miscues
> This would be the core of the program, as here is where we would be presenting our main tutorial content. The idea would be to take the different types of miscues that can cause problems on the Reading Big 5, explain them, instruct our users on how to identify them, and then provide practical, in-the-classroom, approaches for addressing each.
> Special attention would be paid to those miscues that are a particular challenge to identify due to the student being an ELL.
> The instruction again can take on an interactive multi-media approach, with each miscue being given a page or two to provide program content such as text analysis, audio and video examples, and suggested solutions
> Assessment of the user can be provided at the close of each miscue to test for comprehension of the material, and users would be able to explore the various miscues in whatever order the wished (random access). Users would be asked to Identify, Recognize, and Employ their knowledge.
> Real-world, in-the-classroom activities would be suggested for each miscue type that the user could then apply in their classroom on students with a particular need. Included could be worksheets, etc. that the user could print out and use if they wished, or other activity suggestions.
PART III: Program assessment. The final section of the program would be an assessment piece that would present the user with random scenarios based on DRA-type information, and student classroom observation and ask the user to Identify and Apply the knowledge gained from the program to suggest appropriate strategies and activities for that scenario.
> Each scenario would include text-based data (such as DRA info) and audio / video samples of a student performance for the user to analyze.
> This evaluation information would be primarily for the user's own use, and could be used by the program so suggest additional review of any of the parts of the program if they still need further practice.
I know this is an adjustment to the course we were discussing last week. Rather than focusing on "Misconceptions" we would be focusing on "Miscues". Reading instruction is still the focus, as is the particular challenges of the ELL student. What we would be hoping to achieve would be to alter the teacher's behaviors in the classroom, allowing them to more clearly target a given student's reading issues, and to give the teacher some specific tools to apply with that student.
As always, I feel I could better explain myself in person, but I hope this gives a bit clearer idea of a specific direction. Please PLEASE ask me questions, make comments, let me know what you think. I am sending Sylvia an e-mail as well with this post, as well as a couple questions I have a day later. As I said at the start of this post, the real challenge is drilling through this enormous topic to find one focus that fits the scope and requirements of this project.
I look forward to your feedback, and will see you guys on Tuesday...
Dave M
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