New Final Test

Click King Macbeth
At yesterday's PLC meeting, our group worked on developing a new Final Test for our regular Seniors.We have been working on adapting last year's Honors Test which we feel would be quite overwhelming for our regulars and ESE students.

We intend to coordinate our selections for our test using samples of literature studied in Mr. Corwin's and Mr. Hudson's classes. Next week we will all bring in at least two selections with comprehension questions. For instance, it was suggested that a typical sample might be Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech or a sonnet by Shakespeare. With these kinds of examples, the teachers can assess their students skills at understanding what they read.

An Epiphany

Our group has been attempting to establish greater uniformity within our Senior classes.

Mr. Corwin has created Think Aloud materials on Joyce's "The Sisters", including an Anticipation Guide and comprehension exercises on transparency. We can all use these.

Mr. Hudson will develop CRISS exercises that will hopefully improve comprehension of the Romantic Poets.

Ms. Alcantara will write a lesson plan involving seat-based student movement to better comprehension.

We also noted that we are truly communicating with our comments posted on our blog.

An Epiphany: We have come to the realization that we don't need to teach exactly the same texts in our Senior classes (although most of them are). As long as we are using similar techniques to aid our pupils' understanding, we will be serving them well.However, we also know that to be equitable, we must carefully select example texts for our Final Test that reflect the skills we've taught. In that way we can use the exact same Final. We assume that it is actually more effective to use example texts that our students have not seen before.

New Meeting

Click the grad for help
At our latest meeting, we discussed our efforts to promote our Senior Exit Projects which require our students to produce a multi-media report on a career of their choice. Once again, we have been working on aligning our separate efforts into uniform expectations for all of our classes.

We discussed some of the excellent,positive proposals created by our students.At the same time, we deplored the lack of response from a few students. A major portion of this project is a 1500-word MLA research paper on an issue related to their career. Successful completion of this project is prerequisite for graduation, as well as a preparation for further study. Our group also examined the propriety of such a mandatory requirement for all students.

Wednesday Meeting-Early Release

James Joyce
Our group of three met today to proceed with our study.

First, we brainstormed some ideas for our Physical Exercise Strategy. Patria located some more positive research and suggestions on the Web at Focus2learn. This site was essentially designed for students younger than ours, but it did present further successful research in this area. We would like to prepare a routine of manageable movement to stimulate reading responses in class - but nothing too wild. Tom suggested simple yoga stretches that could be done while seated. Jim suggested some adaptation of Tai C'hi. We thought that perhaps we could adapt some of the exercises shown at this site, Everyday Yoga.

We also shared our efforts to provide a more uniform course of study across our classes. We told of activities and works that had been received well by our students. Tom offered to provide some materials on Joyce's "The Dead" using Think Aloud. He also informed us that he will soon begin class work on Joyce's story "Araby". Finally, we discussed ways that we could make our Exit Projects more successful by requiring similar goals from our Seniors.

At the end of the school day, Mr. Bucich added an entry to our school's Wikispace that explained how to access this blog.Go to English IV.

Update: We've already received some spam comments from what is apparently a Portugese gambling site, so we'll start up Word Verification on our Comments. This means that to comment, one must type in a few nonsense letters as shown in order to post. Don't let that stop any comments - we'd love to get some more feedback.
Everyday Yoga

Best Practices Proposal

Test Tips (Click the kid)
Our group is Patria Alcantara, Tom Corwin, and Jim Hudson.

For our study, we will explore the effectiveness of three types of reading strategies.These are Think Aloud, Criss Strategies and Physical Exercise. Our group has done some research on the scientific basis for each type of activity as shown in previous posts on our blog, Best Practices. Since we are all using similar techniques, we assume that instruction given to our Seniors will be more fairly uniform.We will use a pretest-reading activity- post test model to assess improvements in comprehension.

We have begun our investigation by giving a pretest on Poe's "The Black Cat", then conducting a careful reading of the story in class-while stopping to employ Think Aloud methods. Next, we will follow with assessment items we have included in our Midterm Tests.We hope to see generalized improvements in our follow up testing on Think Aloud stories, more so than teaching done with other methods.

In the coming weeks, we will focus on appropriate Criss Strategies using such stories as "The Dead" by James Joyce. We will also devise an experiment with physical movement or mild exercise to see if that heightens interest and understanding.

Today's Meeting

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Tom, Patria, and I met after school today. We wanted to work out what we would say in our written proposal for our study. We decided to keep it to a simple paragraph or three explaining our intentions (and hopes) for our three areas of concentration, Think Aloud, CRISS Strategies, and Physical Reading Exercises.

We also noted similarities in our upcoming Midterm Tests, especially on the Think Aloud methods we all used on Poe's "The Black Cat." We had all used a pretest devised by Tom. Now we will test our student's comprehension on next week's test.We expect that they will perform better on this story than on other test items.

Ms. Alcantara has been searching for studies that show that a small amount of physical exercise before class, or in class, can improve outcomes. I found two web items that encourage this:

BPS Research

The Innovation Unit

It appears that we're a ittle late with a written proposal, but we'll surely turn it in this week.

CRISS Strategies

CRISS stands for Creating Independence through Student-owned Strategies, and is drawn from cognitive psychology. These methods do three things: (1)they use effective self monitoring, (2)they integrate new information with prior knowledge, and (3) they invite active involvement through discussion, writing, and organizing. From Project CRISS.

Other links on CRISS:

CRISS Forms

Reading Strategies for Special Populations

Ms. Wheatley's Class

Links to Think Aloud Sites

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The Think Aloud Protocol comes from cognitive psychology. It is a method of examining any kind of complex activity by breaking it down into manageable steps that can be noted and expressed aloud at various stages of the process for greater understanding. Of course, this can be done during the process of reading a novel, story, poem, or even difficult technical materials. Typically, the Think Aloud method involves Previewing, Predicting, Visualizing, Inferring, and Paraphrasing. These sites are just a few that show examples:

1) Think Aloud Protocol

2) Building Reading Comprehension

3) Think Aloud Lesson

4) In the Classroom

Think Aloud methods are widely used, even if the teacher doesn't realize this is their strategy.

Today's Meeting

Click the Picture, Please
Our three team members met today. We carried out these activities:

First, we went online to set up our IPDPs. We chose items that related to our PLC Group Study, "Best Practices."

Secondly, we searched the web for information that indicated the research basis of the Think Aloud program.We found several well done sites that prescribed the use of this method and showed positive outcomes. We made preparations to examine our own Think Aloud results with Poe's "The Black Cat."

Finally, we agreed to investigate other "Best Practices" including Criss Strategies and a technique that uses physical exercise to prepare to read.

Think Aloud

Click Edgar
Our group has decided to begin our study of various successful reading strategies with "Think Aloud". an umbrella method for many specific skills. This method has a history of success.

"As the title implies, a think aloud is a great strategy to use to slow down the reading process and let students get a good look at how skilled readers construct meaning from a text. Many of us developed our skills as readers implicitly, by simply doing a lot of reading of all sorts of texts; after all, reading is a passion for us. Therefore, when we teach reading at the secondary level, we need to keep in mind that we must take what we know and do implicitly and make it explicit for our students, especially for our struggling readers."

Mr.Corwin and Ms.Alcantara have recently had some good results using Think Aloud activities with Edgar Allan Poe's short story, "The Black Cat". Mr. Hudson will will be teaching this story next week to his Junior Class (with some extra emphasis on Poe's difficult vocabulary).

Opening Post

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This posting is meant to present our account of our PLC group's investigation of successful reading strategies. As suggested by Ms. Dyer, we will call all our examinations "Best Practices." I suppose we may try some tasks that don't supply good results, so I don't think everything we try will actually earn the title "Best Practices", but that's how we'll learn.

Our group is Ms. Alcantara, Mr. Corwin, and Mr. Hudson. Our first efforts will employ several strategies applied with Thinking Aloud techniques.