Now that I'm a classroom teacher for this year, I use a program for my planning and marking on a website called Chalk.com. I like PlanBoard and MarkBoard, part of the Chalk suite, because I can see at a glance what I've done for the week (which helps me when I compose my Highlights of the Week newsletter for my students and their families) and I can examine what assessments I've gathered for a subject and the class average.
I've been a bit worried about my class' guided reading results. My students love to read, both during silent independent reading time and during read aloud time in class. Despite this affection for the activity, many of the answers I notice that they submit for guided reading tasks are insufficient. When I first noticed this, I revised my instruction sheet, so that it would be clearer on where marks were earned for each question. I ran lessons on the difference between a summary and a main idea. I also have been coordinating my guided reading tasks to the media texts they are writing and hearing, so that, for instance, when we were writing letters, we read letters and analyzed letters, and hopefully the immersion would help. We officially finished writing comics a while back, but reading comics is still happening, with our read aloud of Class Act (compounded with my observation that they needed more time on reading and analyzing comics on their own - anyone who says that comics are "easy reading" or "easy to write" need to revise their opinions!).
I declared that my goal was to try and have every student obtain a 10/15 or higher on their more recent guided reading tasks. 66% would be a reasonable goal, I thought.
I tried to figure out what I could do differently with my teaching approach to help them improve. I ran a series of three teacher-directed mini-lessons to model how to attack the questions. I invited our special education teacher in to watch part of one of these lessons, so that she could supplement my instruction with strategies that she found useful with the students she services. She offered graphic organizers, sentence starters and mnemonic devices. In addition to this, I was able to borrow the special education teacher to sit with one of my three guided reading groups to provide coaching.
This weekend, I got caught up on a lot of my marking, and that included the most recent guided reading assignment. If I just look at my class average, then there has been some improvement, from 45.8% on the first comics-themed guided reading to 53.7% on the second to the most recent results of 64.2%. This is technically a jump of two letter grades; I should be elated. However, I don't think this means that everyone is earning a 10/15 score; I suspect that those with higher marks are boosting the average. If I have time, I might like to create a graph with the three scores for each individual student and look at it that way. Then, I can target the specific students who have not yet made it to a 66% and work just with them.
I was discussing my dilemma with my husband and wondering aloud if my target was too ambitious or unrealistic. He asked me if I thought the issue was around reading comprehension or expressing ideas. This is a very good question. Do some of the students just not understand the reading samples? Or do they understand but are unable to put into words (written or oral) their thoughts? This is now also making me reconsider my next steps. After our unit on writing reviews (product, book, and movie) ends, we were going to move to a horror theme, based on what the students requested. I found a fantastic list from an article called "Fifteen Frightful Favorites: A Fifth Grader's Horror Booklist" from School Library Journal that I had students select possible upcoming read-alouds. Based on the even distribution of votes, I was going to do literature circles instead, with 3-4 students per book. I think it may be better to provide horror short stories for small groups and keep a novel for whole group consumption. We can also adapt these short stories into scripts (more reading and writing) and create mini-movies (oral and media). My mind is spinning - and this is just for the Reading strand of Language Arts, which is a subject I myself have affinity and comfort! You can imagine the mental gymnastics occurring as I figure out physical education, or math!
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