Reading Project--Day Six

Today was the due date for all students to have selected an article to read off of the teleprompter.

After finding an article, they have to modify it. They have to include a greeting, a sign off, and change around any words or wording that don't work for a spoken report. I have a few concerns.

Some of the students who finished early didn't want to take the extra time to practice. They will have in class practice time. But, they could have started practicing today. Some did. Others decided it was free "play on the internet time."

I see two possibilities for improving this in the future. 1) Give the students a chance to record and here themselves read this article. Either have the first recording be after finding and modifying an article, or tell students who finish early to record this in Audacity. That way, students could hear this article. They would have a better grasp on words they don't know how to pronounce, or awkward phrasing. 2) Put more of a premium on improvement. If students could use their reflections as a sort of check list, their practice would be more focused than just "read well." It would be "read so that you can work on these three specific things."

Another concern is that students are not even silently reading the articles. Many are. Some are skimming or picking articles with interesting topics. I think that for some, they will not fully read the article until the in class practice day. On the one hand, it will hopefully give them some concept of consequences for slacking. On the other, it will possibly hurt their confidence. I'm expecting some reactions of "this is too hard," or "this is pointless" from some students, not because its too hard, but because they did not take the steps to make it doable.

I came to the conclusion of not reading based on some things I saw. A few students did paste their articles into the teleprompter, making the text large enough for me to read from behind them. Some of the things I saw were phrases in parenthesis that made for awkward sentences, and large, often technical words.

Now that I think of it, some of that does come from a lack of thorough reading. Some of it probably comes form a lack of comprehension. Its not that the students are slacking (not all of them) and not trying to read. It is that they are so focused on reading aloud that they are missing meaning. They don't realize that something sounds awkward because they don't realize how it sounds at all. It is a string of words, and their goal is to get all of the words, not the sentence.

I talked to the Reading teacher about adding a component to the grade that reflected improvement on the specifics that students put in the reflection. She agreed that it was a good idea. However, she commented that most of the reflections are still very vague. They don't have specifics that students could work on. Also, she said that the things that students would need to be working on are often the things that they just don't do--perhaps things that they don't even realize they need to work on.

So, the students, by the sound of it, did not necessarily take full advantage of the reflection assignment. For me, the next thing I want to reflect on, is how to get students to take fuller advantage of that--in this or any other class.