Reading Project--Day Eleven

Day two of recording in most classrooms.

I think the shift into full time recording is letting the Reading teacher see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Recordings went much better today. There were quite a few absences, that for now I'm attributing to the Steelers Victory Parade instead of students skipping school to get out of this. That being said, we still made good progress and got most of the students recorded. We were even able to re-record the students I missed in the first class.

Because I won't be here for the next two days (hopefully the last two days of the project) the Reading teacher did a lot of my job. She did the recordings so she would know what to do tomorrow. I also showed her how to clear the memory cards to make room. In the process of that, I showed her how to make folders to organize her personal drive.

Even though it feels like this project has dragged, it has been very enlightening. I think both I and the Reading teacher have learned from it. And, we are planning as we go for the modifications we'll make next year. Her quote today "this will go like 9 million times smoother next year" was really promising. She wants to do it again, even though there were major bumps in the road. She's planned changes that will make it fit more with her timeline (not in January when it can be plagued with snow days) and she's going to focus on just the out loud reading, not the writing.

I hope that she does well tomorrow, since I won't be here. I think I'll shoot her an email to make sure she has my cell #.

Reading Project--Day Ten

We started recording on Monday. It was not the most oppurtune day to begin recording. We had a two hour delay because of the Super Bowl.

Because of the shortened time, we only managed to record two groups in the first class and one group in the second class.

This did not go as well as planned. In the first class, I did not properly start the camera, and missed a significant chunk of the student presentation. I will say that this might have been at least partly because we started, stopped, and restarted several times. One of the students was struggling with a mixture of stage fright and a lack of practice with the teleprompter. Since this was the very first student to read, we allowed him to restart once. The second time, he happened to want to restart right after another teacher walked in front of the camera and made a lot of noise, so I let them restart again.

Other than that, there we no problems with recording. However, upon going back to the room, the Reading teacher and I looked at the videos. The sound quality is abysmal. We plan to place the camera much closer to the students in the future.

Reading Project--Day Nine

Once again, I'm blogging late about this.

On Friday, we made good progress in all of the classes.

In the first class, all of the students have printed a rough draft. Most of the students received that draft back with teacher recommendations and made adjustments. In the second class, everyone is on target and has finished making teacher recommended adjustments and is ready to record. On Monday (today) students will begin recording. At the very beginning of class, everyone will practice reading aloud together (even though they are reading different things) as a warm-up. Then, then will be recorded reading one at a time or with a partner. Those with partner will sit together in front of the class, and transition to one another during the report, but everyone has to read his or her report alone.

In the third class, the last period of the day, we are a bit further behind. However, it is not that far behind considering how much class time has been missed over the last two weeks. By the end of class, everyone had printed a first draft. Next class, they will get them back with comments and will have to finish the final copy by the end of class. We will begin recording on Tuesday.

The Reading teacher and I have been discussing how this project has dragged. A few things came to mind. One, the Reading teacher seems to have decided to not do any more long term projects in the middle of January. She's not against long term projects, she just doesn't want them to be made longer by snow days and snow delays. Also, we talked about having the kids have something to read that did not need to be modified.

After doing some searching, we both decided that using news transcripts would not work for this project because they include too many people talking (which does not translate well into the teleprompter) and they include too many references to videos and images. I did a little more thinking and searching, and found a site with teen monologues. They are a great length, and would shorten the process of this project significantly. Students would be able to choose a reading quickly because they will not have to find one. Also, they will not have to modify it, which is something they did not necessarily understand how to do (many of them do not make a regular habit of watching news, and therefore don't know what types of things reporters say to transition or end a report). I think using the monologues would take a lot of pressure off of the students, and remove a lot of stress from the teacher.

Reading Project--Day Eight

And it has been a long 8 days. The Reading teacher is beginning to feel that this project is dragging on interminably. I worry that that fact will possible lessen the likelyhood that she'll want to do another project. Part of the problem was two snow days, followed by a 2 hr delayed, coupled with one of the classes being skipped for a school assembly. Now, we just found out there will be a fire drill during that class tomorrow.

One of the problems with this project is having the students modify their articles. Many of them don't really understand the concept. They don't know how to make an article flow. When offered suggestions, they are inclined to ask you to repeat it word for word so they can copy it down.

This is partly because a lack of comprehension. I already blogged about why they are not really comprehending the articles clearly, so I won't repeat that here. But, because they are not comprehending them, they are not able to make meaningful or logical transitions, opening lines, or sign offs. If they don't know what they are talking about, they can't react to it or summarize it.

I kept thinking today that one thing I might do differently in the future is provide the students with a handful of report-ready articles. Then, the students could just browse through them and sign up. This would help speed up the project because a) students would pick an article more quickly because they would want to sign up before anyone took their article and b) students would not have to modify the articles at all. Those were probably the two most time consuming aspects of this assignment.

The Reading teacher seems optimistic that tomorrow will go better. They will be doing a paired reading tomorrow. In that activity, students will work in pairs and take turns. One partner will read from the teleprompter while the other reads along with a hard copy of the report and marks errors. This will give the students meaningful practice, and they will at least have a respite from typing and modifying (which has become frustrating for the teacher and the students).

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.

Reading Project--Day Five

Just got back from my last class of the day with the reading project.

Something that struck me very early on, and that the Reading teacher said before we started, and that every teacher knows is true every year, is that the different classes have very different personalities as a group. And, that effects how quickly students work through assignments.

The Reading teacher, being more familiar with the kids, does phrase things differently, and handles distractions differently in each class. I think as a coach, I'm at a disadvantage that disadvantages my teachers. As a teacher, I knew what to expect from classes--not always, but I had a feel for them. I knew when something would need to be presented a little differently, or which student I needed to win over at the beginning to prevent half of the class from declaring a project a failure before giving it a chance.

As a coach, I walk into each new class blind. Certainly b the end of a project, I have a better feel for classes. And, if I do a second or third project with a teacher, I won't have that same initial speed bump.

I would like to, in the future, ask teachers to let me come in and watch and/or interact with a class for a day or two before getting down to the last stages of planning. I think most teachers will understand where I'm coming from. And, if a teacher is already letting me come in to work together on a project, he/she probably won't mind letting me get my feet wet first.

As far as the project today, one of the things we are dealing with is students working at very different paces. Partly this is do to ability level. Because the second part of the project was writing a reflection, some students zipped through it because they did not reflect very seriously. Others went very slowly because they were being more methodical. Some were able to work quickly because of typing skills. Others were held up because they only know the hunt and peck method (although I wonder if speed could have been improved by allowing them to type it all out on a phone with their thumbs.) Some write slowly because it is not a strength. Other write quickly because it is.

Differing speeds are also due to absences and, of course, schedule disruptions. Ideally, I would like to have the ability to allow students to work on this at home. But, students don't have access to email to send files home, and we can't expect every student to bring a jump drive to school. And, we can't expect every student to have access to a computer at home.

I still haven't had time to read any student reflections, so it's still too early to decide if students made use of the first part of the assignment. However, I did have one idea I would like to incorporate if we do this project again. We had students reflect on what areas of their reading need improvement and what they need to do to improve, but we are not specifically evaluating if they improve those areas. I think, in the future, I would like to see some part of the evaluation of the second reading based on their reflections from the first reading.

About half of the students moved on to finding articles to read for the taped, cueprompter reading. Many of them were unsure if reading about a crime was going to be school appropriate. The Reading teacher took it on a case by case basis.

I was also happy to see that, in addition to practice with reading and writing, and reflecting on their skills, some of the students were also gaining exposure to current events. Most of the students were very interested in the articles they selected since we told them to find something that interested them. Several students found current events articles that engaged them.

Reading Project--Day One

I got into the classroom with the reading project for the first time today. All in all I think things went really well.

As the teacher said, each of her classes has a very different personality.

The project, in my opinion, is really worthwhile. And that is largely because of the reflective element that the reading teacher based it off of.

Yesterday, the students did a pair reading. They listened to one another and gave each other feedback. Based on the feedback, they had to reflect on APE (the things you need to not sound like an ape when you read)--accuracy, pacing, and expression.

She wasn't entirely pleased with their reflections from yesterday. She revisited what directions they had been given and created a writing assignment for today. After the students recorded themselves, they had to listen to themselves at least twice. While listening, they had to read the article and find miscues and errors. Then, taking that information, they had to reflect on APE. She gave students specific directions. For each letter, they had to find two things they did well, two things that need improvement, and two ways they can work on improving them. They have to find specifics from their recordings.

This is of course in preparation for the next project where everyone will hear them read. This way they get a chance to hear themselves and a) realize how important it is to practice and b) figure out what they need to work on.

We didn't get as many kids recorded as I had hoped. However, that was largely do to some house keeping that needed to be taken care of. We'll still be able to finish most if not all of the recordings tomorrow. My biggest worried--the microphones picking up too much background noise from other kids reading--was not a large problem. Its low level buzz, but students can still make themselves out clearly on their own recordings.

I think the teacher is currently pleased with how the project is going. She also said that, especially now that it is started, she's very happy to have a second person.

I am anxious to see how much the students improve between the first round of recordings and the second. In other words, I'm anxious to see if the students are taking advantage of the reflection and learning from the work they do.

Reading Project Update

I think working with the English teacher on the reading project is one of the easiest to manage. Because I share an office with her, it is really easy to find time to collaborate.

We made a few more tweaks to the project and have set down a timeline. To give the kids practice using cueprompter, she is giving them a pre-project reading. Every kid will have the same article, will have time in and out of class to practice reading out loud, and will be recorded with audacity. Then the kids will have to listen to their own recording and do a reflective activity. Basically, the teacher feels that the kids are unlikely to actually take her seriously when she tells them they won't do well if they don't practice. She wants them A) to have more than one out loud reading and B) listen to themselves with the first reading and realize they really are going to be embarrassed reading in front of the whole class if they don't practice. I thought it was a brilliant plan.

Also, this will help her determine about how long the final project articles ought to be. She wants the kids to read for a significant amount of time--3-5 minutes I think. But, she doesn't know how much they need to fill up that time. So, we're going to look at how long the recordings are and make length requirements for the articles based on that.

Instead of having kids loose on the internet looking up articles about vague, broad topics, we decided to confine them to four broad topics and point them in the direction of some resources. I created a very basic wiki with links to new sources and to sample articles. This way, the students have an idea of where to search, and the sample articles can give them a visual of about how long we want the articles to be.

I wanted to get the entire site set up for the teacher to see, so I did that yesterday. I let her know that I can swap out the articles easily. That way, if the ones I picked are too short/too long, we can fix that. Also, she can look through them and let me know if they are at an appropriate reading level. The students are allowed to use the samples, but I didn't go out of my way to find the most interesting articles (although some of them are pretty interesting.) That way, students are encouraged to find their own. Either way, students will have to read a few articles to find one that they want to read.

An Unexpected Project

I share my "office" with the reading and study skills teacher. She's not a CFF teacher, but I tend to share useful tools and articles with her all the time. And she will often tell me how classes went or what she's working on--thinking aloud while making lesson plans.

Just through conversation, we started talking about what to do after Christmas. She planned on having the students practice reading out loud. I tried to convince her to have them record themselves on audacity so they could hear what they sounded like. She was pretty wary of the logistical issues of trying to pull it off.

And then I found an online teleprompter, cueprompter. She thought it looked really neat, and I saw her typing things into it from time to time. She saw potential for it in her class.

And so we're going to do a project.

She's decided she wants to have the students read from the teleprompter, record themselves, listen to themselves, and look for miscues. I'm very excited.

And this really was a joint effort at creating the project. I got as far as read "something." That isn't nearly good enough. She decided that they are going to pretend to be news reporters--for news, sports, celebrity gossip, or anything they want. That is much more of a hook.

At first she was going to have the kids write their own script, but then decided, since the focus of the project is on reading, and time is an issue, she's going to have the kids look up a script. They do plenty of writing activities in class, so I think not using the writing aspect this year will not be a detriment to the project. Then, if it goes well and she wants to do it next year, she has to option of setting aside extra time so the students can write a script.

She's asked me to find resources for the students based on what type of news they want to do--she'll have them sign up for that in the next few days. I think I am going to suggest having them go to a related news site (e.g kids wanting to do a sports story will find an article on SI.com, kids interested in reporting on celebrity gossip can go to the entertainment section of cnn.com). That way, there is one more step in the reading. Students will have to read through the article and see if it is something they want to read (no one here will pick an article about how the Steelers will be out after the first playoff game) and if it is something they can read (someone doing the project without a partner shouldn't be reading an interview).

She also suggested that if we give the students the recording on a CD, many of them will be proud of their work and maybe even post it to youtube.