My topic dealt with the capability of teachers to integrate differentiated instruction seamlessly into a classroom with students of varying reading levels. My real-life inquiry involved two components: an in-depth interview with a fourth grade teacher in a full service community school program and a subsequent observation over the course of two weeks in said teacher's classroom. I garnered a conceptual understanding of how Ms. Rebecca teaches through her expressed viewpoints on reward systems, fluency measurements, and judging comprehension through classroom discussion, and followed up her perception of herself with how her classroom was structured and taught.
The interview brought up a menagerie of points covered thus far in our class instruction, including the accuracy of fluency measurements, the concept of comprehension vs. reading level, memorization, and the helpfulness of game inclusion into daily instruction. Theresa Deeney introduces this issue of the accuracy of "fluency" measurements in her article, One Minute Fluency Measures: Mixed Messages in Assessment and Instruction. Ms. Rebecca alludes to her utilization of two-minute, word-per-minute assessments, and decidedly uses such in order to characterize her fourth graders into reading groups B through E. She denotes that she herself doesn't have time to do a more in-depth study than these measurements, and even that she sometimes has her volunteers administer the tests in her absence. She administers the test twice a year, and allows her children an opportunity to move translationally through the reading levels. Deeney points out the shortcomings of using measurements such as these to characterize children, pointing out that fluency is made up of accuracy, rate, prosody, and comprehension, and that tests similar to Ms. Rebecca's focus solely on accuracy and speed. Although these tests do indicate which students are struggling, they are simply an avenue to testing endurance and making a more in-depth study. Ms. Rebecca also touches upon the ideal of comprehension vs. reading level in her interview, explicitly stating that children are more inclined to comprehend texts that interest them than those which are required but uninteresting. Deeney's, as well as Sharon Gill's The Comprehension Matrix: A Tool for Designing Comprehension Instruction, both touch upon the correlation between understanding and interest. Gill lists multiple factors affecting comprehension, including interest level, alongside specified purpose, lack of noise, font, and presence of illustrations. She also suggests that memorization is a key avenue to comprehension, which is a highly debatable viewpoint (that she recognizes as such). Finally, Ms. Rebecca cheerily adheres to a commonly known trick for engaging students at any age: make it a game! She understands that games, and competitiveness to succeed, increase students' interest in a subject and willingness to learn.
One aspect of Ms. Rebecca's classroom that has intrigued me since I began volunteering there is her use of a monetary-based reward system. She views such as an important avenue to the real world, a weekly reminder that attaining an education is just as important as maintaining a job post-education. She sees the system as a way to reinforce such topics as decimals and rounding, and cites parental approval as a reinforcement to continue. In her classroom, I have seen first-hand that the students work harder and longer, and seek out additional work on an individual, responsible basis due to their wanting to garner as many points as possible by the end of the week. The students are driven to succeed, and have allowed the system to become a personal challenge against their own past weeks, rather than a competition against their pees. Post-interview, Ms. Rebecca introduced to the children the suggestion of keeping track of one's own points, to which every child replied enthusiastically and impatiently. The students have learned to keep track of their own money, and many of the students, even as third graders, save their money from multiple weeks in order to buy something especially important to them. Although there are definitive positive outcomes of this system, I myself feel that introducing money could possibly undermine the internal satisfaction of learning new things and seeking out additional knowledge. I understand Ms. Rebecca wanting to reward her children for working hard, and wanting to give them concrete rewards that they can understand, rather than intangible "wisdom" or "knowledge", but I do think there is value in propelling children to learn for the sake of knowledge, and to become lifelong learners despite the rewards offered.
Another exciting part of the observation was Ms. Rebecca's introduction of the special project of the week. The children were learning to associate mean, median, mode, and range with specific sets of numbers during that particular week in their during-school hours. Ms. Rebecca allowed the children the opportunity to achieve an additional five hundred points though the creation and decoration of a flip book, teaching the concepts of each of the terms, alongside an example utilizing a group of numbers. I liked how this idea integrated what the children were learning in their actual classes, propelled them to think critically through the creation of an example, while allowing them to become creative and decorate the books in their own distinctive style. Although Ms. Rebecca showed the class a way to make the book, even the construction of such was open to self-interpretation. One issue that I took note of during the introduction of the project is that, immediately following her explanation, the students had a mad dash to finish their homework, sometimes half-hardheartedly, and those that perhaps were slower learners were extremely dissatisfied with themselves once the other students began their special projects. A final issue I noted was that the students immediately began constructing and decorating their books, even after receiving direct instruction that they had to complete their definitions and examples prior to constructing and decorating. This, however, is to be expected of children that age when arts and crafts is mentioned at all!
As far as my feelings toward the experience, I enjoyed it thoroughly. I have been working with Ms. Rebecca and Washington Elementary for a period of three years, and enjoy thoroughly every opportunity I am given to analyze the way the program is structured and the way in which various classrooms are taught. I think that Ms. Rebecca is an incredibly talented and patient teacher, and has a natural knack for dealing with all types of people (she was previously a social worker). Although I don't necessarily agree with her monetarily-based reward system, I do understand her logic behind implementing such and honestly feel that the students have benefited in that they are self-driven learners and achievers. I witnessed Ms. Rebecca putting action behind her words, through asking a variety of challenging analytical questions to every student she teachers, and through her integrating both individualized and whole group instruction into her classroom. She does, however, rely heavily on worksheets and memorization for the bulk of her academic points, and I would love to see the children get rewarded for learning new facts in unorthodox ways (such as attending a fair or event). I would also love to see her utilize her volunteers in order to generate a more in-depth study of each child's fluency.
As far as within my own classroom, I think that Ms. Rebecca has demonstrated the usefulness of several concepts. I love the idea of reading levels within the classroom as a way to allow students at different levels to have their own appropriately-leveled texts. I think it is important that the level of analysis is similar between groups, but allowing lower readers to read less complicated readings gives them space to analyze successfully, rather than spending all of their time comprehending. I would, as previously stated, use this after a more in-depth study than what Ms. Rebecca instituted, but still allow the students an opportunity to move upward throughout the year as she does. Game instruction is always an exciting activity for students, and even memorization has it's place, so long as it is not substituted for comprehension activities. I also admire the idea of a point system, but I would have to drum of alternatives than money as rewards for students doing well each week. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know the teacher I have worked with for two years on a more in-depth basis, and admire her more so for developing her own niche for teaching and allowing it to blossom within each of her students.
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