Welcome to READ 509 Practicum—Last steps

Hi,
Most of you will be taking this class as your last one in the ReadOregon endorsement program. I'm looking forward to all of your participation; we always learn so much from each other in this class.
I was surfing the website:http://englishcompanion.ning/group/teachingtexts/forum/topics/schoolwide-read when I came across a question that I wish every teacher would be asking or administrator: "We have money for a schoolwide book reading, would love to have some suggestions." Below is one of the replies:

"We have done The Glass Castle, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and A Long Way Gone: Memoir of a Boy Soldier. So far, the latter has been the kid favorite, although we did offer an alternative title, The Book Thief, for those for whom the gruesome violence would be an issue. (I had only 1 student out of 130 who chose the alternate title.) It is probably the one best suited to a cross-curricular purpose. We are considering People of the Book for next year."
There was a number of other suggestions replete with schoolwide activities to go with the book selected.

As you get ready to write your proposals and write-up your curricular findings, I would appreciate your thinking about the trade books you can include as well as the assessments and instructional activities you will implement. Some of you will have bins of books to use; backpacks of books for students to take home as well as classrooms or situations where these books are limited.

In this month's Council Chronicle, the President of the National Council of Teachers of English writes: "We know that schools in high-poverty areas have inferior school libraries and inferior classroom libraries." I would hope that this is not the case in our area, but we all know that media specialists are being cut and money for library collections as well.
Whatever we can do to make trade books a powerful entity in our classrooms helps all students realize the value of authentic reading.

Classes start at PSU -READ 509

Here it is another quarter. It seems they come faster than ever. I'm reading a great book of essays called The Right to Literacy in Secondary Schools. One of the essays is " Self-assessment of data: Empowering students to plan and own their own learning in Language Arts" by Lesli Cochran.

This teacher was tired of students just blowing off the standardized tests they were taking so she came up with a curriculum that was highly individualized based on the results of the standardized test results. She herself was not as excited about this testing as well but decided to try something that would motivate them all.

This was not her only curriculum and she didn't write lesson plans to meet each students' results but she included time for conferencing with students about their results and then in addition to their required Language Arts work they were given three 30 minutes blocks to work on their own needs. She put together materials that focused on the state standards that students needed to personalize their own work and could access themselves.

For the entire class, she posted a summary of class results and had the students do a gallery walk through the data posters to see what the class's strengths and weaknesses were. One student remarked " Man, Mrs. Cochran, I feel sorry for you. You have a lot of work to do. We're not good at anything." She used that comment to segue to what they were good at and what they needed to work on.

This all took some work in planning, getting materials that students would be interested in and showing students how to read data.

As a result, students scored 8% higher, and individual students raised their scores over 100 points, whereas in the past year they realized maybe 25 points.

Whatever works! What I appreciated is that her Language Arts curriculum didn't suffer, in fact it became richer as students provided more personalized feedback.

Enjoy the term!