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ELLEN
BERG
Diary #2
An
In-Depth Reading Assessment
Leads
to a New Diagnosis
This past May my husband was diagnosed with a heart condition called Supra
Ventricular Tachycardia, SVT for short. People with SVT have an extra
node conducting electrical current in the heart, giving patients double
the number of beats they should have.
One day when
my husband woke up, his heart began racing, and he could not get his pulse
down. When he finally went to the emergency room at the local hospital three
days later, his pulse was uncountable. When I arrived, it was at 177. The
doctors prescribed calcium channel blockers to slow the arrhythmia. He met
with a cardiologist a few days later, and he was diagnosed with SVT. He
had a choice: he could take medication for the rest of his life, or he could
go through a surgery called catheter ablation to correct the arrhythmia.
Last Thursday
he had the surgery. He is fine and feeling home, enjoying his first cups
of caffeinated coffee since May.
There are several
forms of SVT, and Greg was initially diagnosed with one particular form
of the disease. Doctors told us they thought it was AVNRT but they would
not know for sure until they operated. During surgery, they found that it
was actually a different form of the disease and adjusted the procedure
accordingly.
Now, to relate
this bit of recent personal family history to my classroom!
Changing
my original diagnosis
In my background
entry this year I explained that one of my goals was to zoom in closer
to what is going on in my classroom and with my students. The macro was
in check, but the micro needed to be boosted up. This past week I began
to do just that, and I found out my original diagnosis of my students' reading
problems needed to be adjusted.
I have a wonderful
Americorps worker this year who is becoming as gung-ho about helping my
students become better readers as I am. When I asked him if he would mind
administering individual reading assessments for me, he took over the task
completely, even making notations of specific behaviors and strategies he
noticed the students using.
The week before
he began, I gave my students a comprehension and writing assessment. We
have an assessment folder for each student, and every score and assessment
will be recorded in the student's folder. At the end of the year, we plan
to do a post-assessment. After we collect the data, the idea is to pass
the folders on to the seventh grade teacher so she can use the data to plan
as well.
Noticing
the nuances
This weekend
as I was entering the data into a database that will be distributed to my
whole team, I began noticing the nuances of my students' reading strengths
and weaknesses in a way I never had before. While I knew many of my students
were reading below level and had difficulties with comprehension, I believed
they were also having trouble as a group with decoding. Not so. I do have
some students who have decoding issues (mostly my special education students),
but the majority do not.
Here's how I
uncovered the lack of a decoding problem. While looking at the data
I noticed the comprehension scores did not match the scores on the San Diego
Quick Word Assessment or the oral fluency test we administered. My Americorps
worker also noted, based on the two individual assessments, that students
seemed to have strong problem solving skills when it came to reading words.
When decoding was a problem at all, it was with suffixes.
I would have
guessed that decoding was a bigger issue than it turned out to be. In the
past I have spent a significant amount of time trying to build these skills,
and while there was some improvement in their reading scores, I suspect
there would have been larger gains if I had hit the comprehension aspect
relentlessly.
Now that I have
made a second diagnosis, it is time to change my tactics. My students are
not understanding what they read, as they read, though they recognize grade
level words for the most part. I see now that reading workshop and all the
mini-lessons, guided practice, modeling and individual reading time it involves
is crucial. It is just a matter of giving my students the keys to unlocking
the meaning in all of those sentences strewn together.
Comment
on this diary entry
Read
next week's diary
Read
last week's diary
Sally
wrote this response to Ellen:
I'm so happy
you were able to conduct informal reading inventories. I haven't yet discovered
a way to do so for my 164 students. Where can I recruit assistance?
Sally,
I cannot imagine
teaching 164 students! I only teach 104 at most. We are fortunate enough
to have Americorps volunteers in our building. Perhaps your principal can
contact Americorps to see if you can start the program at your own school.
Another wonderful source of help might be parent volunteers. Do you have
5-8 parents you could recruit to come in for a full day each to do the inventories?
The individual inventories don't really take a lot of time for each student
(we did word lists and an oral fluency assessment), but all together they
take a lot of time. At the beginning of the year I can't afford management
wise to be sitting to the side with one student as my new students need
lots and lots of supervision and guidance. Now, in January, it's a whole
different story!
Could you recruit
support staff? As I go through this process, I realize ever more clearly
how important it is to have a clear picture of each child's strengths and
weaknesses so we can adjust our teaching. Enlist every person you can to
help you out! (Librarian? Counselor? TA's? Principal? Lunch lady?)
Good luck!
Ellen
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