Reflection
Challenges Experienced
During this Capstone I had initially faced challenges with motivating and encouraging my students to annotate. At the beginning most of my students kept asking me "Why do we have to annotate on every test, can't we just do it during our practice". It took a lot of practice for them to understand how important it was for them to make there thinking visible. When they annotated and communicated with their text more they were better able to understand the question they were asked. They weren't able to realize this themselves however, until they started seeing their grades improve. This was reinforced more after they took their summative benchmark tests. When we annotated together as a class all students followed along, however when they were expected to annotate independently for their test many students annotated very little and would not annotate by choice. By the end of the project this improved as they saw their scores improve, but in the beginning we struggled.
I also faced challenges finding time to teach the notice and note lessons. Since the stories I used to teach annotating were not apart of our curriculum I had to find the time in our schedule to add these into our lessons. This was not as much of a challenge for annotating and text dependent lessons as I was able to use stories that we were already using to annotate and find evidence with.
Successes experienced
I was very proud of the successes my students had through this project. I saw that my students became much more engaged in reading while we did our notice and note signpost lessons. We read stories such Crash by Jerry Spinelli, Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, and A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park. Students loved these stories because they were either relatable, dramatic, or realistic. We had rich discussions when talking about these stories and asking the key questions that aligned with each signpost.
My students were also successful in using their annotating skills to find evidence of their work. Rather than just using a highlighter to find information students learned skills to communicate their ideas while reading. Annotating text is a skill that they can carry with them through their life. While we struggled initially, I do feel that as we continue to annotate students were able to use more of the annotating strategies.
Students were very successful in improving their summative assessment scores. These summative tests can be intimidating for students as they are weighted and emphasized more than their weekly formative tests. Students took this test midway through learning to annotate and read with notice and note signposts. Every student improved their benchmark score from their pre-test and all were able to use the annotating skills taught on their test.
Action research impact on teaching
This project helped me really focus in on where my students were struggling the most. I have to be consistently thinking about what I am already doing and what I could do differently to help meet the needs of my students so that they can be successful. Once I see where they are struggling I know that my next step needs to be researching; what does the research out there say works to help students be successful? Once I have done the research I need to implement strategies and plan out how I will collect data to show that what they are doing works. I can't just stop after that. I need to be analyzing and reflecting on that data to see how I can continue to help students grow. I also see the importance of having multiple sources of data to analyze. One test or one survey doesn't show every aspect of a strategy or the growth students can make with it. Strategies can impact students in many ways and it's important to understand how those strategies are impacting students.
Through this project I also saw the importance of connecting with my students. If my students are not engaged from the beginning then what I am teaching them probably isn't going to be meaningful to them. They will not own the work if they are not interested in it or have no connection to it. When I first noticed my students struggling I realized that they were not engaged. They asked "when will we learn something new, we have been working on this since third grade". I knew that my students not only needed, but wanted new strategies to learn. If I know what they are interested in learning and what they want, then I can use that to help them learn.
Action research impact on future teaching
Reflecting on this project there are some things that I will take with me into the future. I will continue to research evidence based strategies to find ideas and strategies to teach my students. In using evidence based strategies I can ensure that what I am doing with my students has shown to be effective, and increasing the change that my students will succeed and make meaning from these strategies. I will continue to analyze what opportunities for growth my students have and what strategies have been shown to work for those opportunities. I will also make sure that not only am I implementing those strategies but I am also tracking the success students have (or don't have) and analyzing the effectiveness in my own classroom.
In the future I plan to continue to use the beyond the text strategies of annotating with close reading, notice and note signposts, and asking text dependent questions. After reflecting on my teaching and my students results I do think that I need to find more nonfiction strategies to tie in to, and use with the notice and note signposts. Students found meaning in the fiction strategies for notice and note signposts as they thought that they were new and interesting strategies to work on rather than the same ones that they have been doing for years. However, they did not get any exposure to new ways for analyzing nonfiction text so I plan on searching for new ones in the future. I would also use the notice and note signpost strategies and annotating strategies in small guided reading groups. This may allow me to further differentiate reading passages for notice and note signposts.
I want to continue to teach students to close read and annotate in my future teaching. I believe that annotating is one of the most important skills that students can have to use while reading a piece of text. Students conversations have more depth as they discuss what they annotate. They are also able to connect, infer, generalize, predict, and analyze a text as they annotate their thinking on paper. I think that annotating is a skill that is not just applicable to one grade, but one that they can continue to use as they move through school and text gets increasingly more challenging.
Collaboration with other professionals and community members to transform student learning environments and improve student learning
During this capstone I collaborated with other building professionals and community members to help my students grow. I first worked with my CADRE associate to analyze different areas of instruction that my students could benefit from. We analyzed student work and scores to determine where did my students need immediate support. Once I had decided on what area I wanted to focus on I met with my building reading specialist to discuss current strategies being used, evidence based research strategies I had found. She suggested strategies that I could use to teach my students ways to answer text dependent questions. My CADRE associate also collaborated with me by assisting in finding leveled pieces of text to annotate.
With the help and support of these professionals I was able to choose strategies that not only research supported, but other staff members in my building had experience with to ensure the strategies that I chose to implement were effective.