MEd Program Diigo Group

A wonderful exploration and introduction into the pedagogy of a fifth grade teacher, Esquith, overcoming many financial burdens in his school district discovered that, during an instance in chemistry when he inadvertently and obliviously set his hair aflame, that children's learning is the only thing that truly matters in education. A fascinating read and an even greater book by a passionate educator.

This site gives an array of strategies and tips to cater to struggling students.

The website created by Kathleen Bulloch does offer a lot of great tips. I especially like how they are broken down into manageable chunks for a teacher who is working to accommodate a special needs student. Suggestions were provided for certain areas of concern, such as: "If a student has trouble expressing himself verbally, then try....If a student has trouble expressing himself writing, then try..." and many more categories with similar setups. Good resource for supporting special education students with quick ideas for how an educator can differentiate their instruction to support student learning.

An article defining the problem not so much as snow days but as days students take off of school when it is in session

This paper focuses on the critical issue of using technology as a tool to enrich classroom practices for LEP students. When instructional technology is integrated in a competent and effective manner, students have control over their learning by being able to control their time, speed of learning, choice of topics, and it gives LEP learners prompt feedback. Data is cited from various authors; along with research from two diverse schools (El Paso, TX & Schaumburg, IL) where technology was used to successfully support LEP students. Information from ISTE is included curriculum instruction is defined and the NCLB is discussed throughout the paper. A great deal of information is included to help support the LEP student, family, and teacher.

I found this article to be very intriguing, because although it makes the common claim that increased school attendance will result in higher GPA, it also describes how another variable, a student's distance living away from school, affects their attendance rate. According to this study, there is a statistically significant effect of the farther away one lives from school, the greater their absences will be. This is something I want to investigate further once I return to school and can see where some of my historically truant students are traveling from each day.

This article details the difference in achievement that has been attained by the KIPP charter schools in Baltimore, especially in middle schools. Although I was interested in how KIPP succeeded where so many others have failed, I realized that there are many differences between these schools and the school I teach in. (Parent & teacher buy-in, selectivity of the students they serve, etc). As such, I don't think the successes described here would be replicated at my school, with my 8th graders.

This article provides a wonderful overview of ways to involve families in a learning community at school across multiple subject areas. However, there is a large focus on reading and ways to foster family involvement in developing early literacy skills at home. This will be an excellent resource for our group as we begin to design a plan for supporting students in Kindergarten in their ability to blend words and recall high frequency words in text.

This article outlines many of the beliefs we discussed in our data meeting #2. Mostly the fact that children coming from low-income background often come to Kindergarten less prepared than their middle-class peers. For our exploratory question, we want to focus are research on early literacy and the impact of family involvement. This article will be a good resource as we build an argument of the importance of these factors in order to sway parents to do more with their children at home to foster literacy.

Students' middle grade attendance is a strong indicator of future high school performance. As such, middle teachers can use such attendance info to identify students who may tend to struggle in high school, and give those students needed support in advance of ninth grade. I have not been able to implement the strategies mentioned (its Summertime!) but I intend to try some this Fall with the 10 or 15 students that I know will be attendance issues in my 8th grade classes.

Like you mentioned, I already know a handful of students going into 8th grade (I teach 6th-8th grade computer technology as a creative arts course) that will be attendance, behavior, and/or low GPA's. I feel like while our schools try to support student learning, we too often push kids through from one grade to the next. I have students this past year who in the semester every other day that I instruct them (45 classes in all), they have missed more than half and yet they promote to the next grade. Each of the five areas highlighted raise good points and I actually find some of the statistics very alarming considering the small differences in percentages. For example, Figure 3 on page 8 depicts two identical students with exact achievement marks in 5th grade. By the time they reach 8th grade, one students attendance improves 2% and the other students attendance drops 4% to a 93% avg. attendance rate. While this doesn't sound like a terrible drop (at least to me), the possibility of these students being on track for 9th grade went from 93% for the student who improved attendance compared to 66% of this student being on track for 9th grade whose attendance dropped just a few percentage points. I think more needs to be done at the school level to improve performance and setup interventions that help our students succeed rather than worrying about the multiple standardized tests that students are required to complete throughout the year. Thank you for sharing! I'm definitely reading over this again as I prepare for the upcoming school year with my middle school students and may even share it with my staff.

A scholastic article with many different ways to motivate middle school students. This article discusses whole school motivators as well as classroom motivation techniques. A quick read with many good techniques.

Early literacy skills begin developing at a young age, even before kids get to Kindergarten. Therefore it is vital that families consistently read with their children and expose them to text in the home. This article explains the benefits of early literacy in the home and outlines a plan for gaining more parent involvement by creating literacy bags for families to take home and use with their children. The research provided will not only help us to find answers to our exploratory question, but will also give us ideas for action plans that we can put into place in our own schools.

The article shows how you can encourage student dialogue. In this study, the class was given a cartoon showing characters discussing a new or current class topic that has common misconceptions associated with it. After viewing the cartoon, students are asked to take sides and either defend or refute one of the characters' opinions about what they are expressing. This helps students focus on the topic because they are not reading an article or passage that is asking for feedback, but rather they are taking part in a sort of 'debate' amongst these characters. It is a starting point for a student centered lesson and helps the students feel more at ease in defending or arguing a point; they are talking about ideas that the 'cartoon character' has instead of an idea or concept that 'they' came up with.

This paper presents one step in a multi-step process to improve concurrent support of ELLs' academic literacy development. It explains how literacy can close the gap between ELL's and Native English students. It also explains the process to build up literacy in the classroom, explains the 5 components of literacy, and gives evidence that that without literacy, ELLs are less likely to master content.

This article shows that through reflective teaching and coaching, diverse struggling readers can beneficiate from different strategies and will help to close instructional gaps.

I like the ideas presented here, they elaborate on the need for ELL students to have word association and phonetic instruction to further their understanding of content. This is particularly stressed in the elementary grades, however having a teaching coach for ELL learners in the higher grades could assist students that did not have phonetic instruction in the lower grades. One particular item of interest was the comment made that data results from assessment is not analyzed until later in the year and as a result does not benefit the students that took the assessment. Due to this the author stresses the need for collaboration of the teaching team to identify skills and strategies needed and subsequently develop ways to address the skill or strategy needed that will enhance learning.

This article describes the report of a 4 week study of the English reading comprehension of struggling readers. The research used technology to decrease achievement gaps in reading. Thirty 4th-grade students read narrative and informational hypertexts that contained vocabulary, comprehension strategy supports, and text to speech read aloud features. In the process, vocabulary and comprehension achievement was observed in the students. The results in this article suggest that struggling readers and Spanish-speaking ELLs used technology and beneficiated by learning vocabulary and effectively applying reading comprehension strategies.

In reading this article it was quite interesting to me the successes that occurred when the school incorporated the use of a technology based universal digital literacy (UDL) tool. The digital text coupled with vocabulary support was instrumental in the success of these students. It is also important to note that the stories given to the students to study were a blend of folktales that represented many different cultures rather than strictly from the US. It is important to note that when ELL students and struggling readers are given text or material that is relevant to their own culture they are able to access prior knowledge to make connections to the new material. The supports utilized in the study were the initial discussion of "power words" that are prominent in the text. The mid reading strategy is a support to develop comprehension by prompting students at the end of each page to stop, reflect and summarize/predict then being prompted to give a written or recorded response. These activities are able to be tracked using the technology thus furthering a teachers ability to interpret student needs and supplement with various strategies in the classroom. An important element to this programs success was the training of the teachers on the UDL technology.

Article discusses different learning approaches and methods. Research confirms that talking and discussing is positively correlated with an interactive and deep approach to learning

Importance of determining and integrating prior knowledge as an instructional strategy for ELL's.

Our group's EQ relates to how ESOL and Special Education students perform on state tests in English. The article here is from Arizona and is a study in how well English Language Learners performed on their state mandated tests. The document outlines the issues that English learners have in their school along with teacher and district recommendations on how to help improve student scores.

Short article with different motivation techniques for students who don't seem to care about completing work. Includes 5 techniques, such as create challenges that students can master, that are easy to implement.

This article is perfect for our group! We have identified that student participation has had a major impact on student reading, writing, and test scores and that motivation is one of the key elements that needs to be addressed. The first two techniques are of particular interest to me. Students certainly would benefit from knowing the long term benefits of their work. I think just a simple, "what do you want to do for a living once you are out of school?" can go a long way. If a student knows that he/she needs to pass the English PARCC in order to graduate and enter the field of their choice, they are more likely to take it seriously. The idea of creating "challenges that students can master" is a good one as well. I've noticed with my students that they are less likely to attempt work if they believe that they do not have the ability to do it. Introducing the material incrementally can build up their confidence and lead to future success.

This website aligns to my teams EQ by discussing ways educators can differentiate their instruction ELL students (and all students when we really think about it). The resource created by Karen Ford (2011) talks about "how differentiated instruction is not the same as individualized instruction...it is a matter of presenting the same task in different ways and at different levels, so that all students can approach it in their own ways (Trujo, 2004)." Information is also shared focusing on the ELL population and ways teachers can successfully differentiate to support their learning.