School Gardens: Sowing the Seeds of Experiential Learning

• December 15, 2011 by Norene Wiesen

Many children’s songs and rhymes reference gardens and the vegetable world, but when I was a student we stayed indoors singing rather than experiencing that world firsthand. But in the last two decades, schools have introduced gardening into the curriculum as a way for students to learn lessons only nature can provide. Allowing students to research, design, and build a garden gives a teacher an opportunity to demonstrate the practical application of classroom subjects in a real world scenario.

Activities such as composting, selecting appropriate plants for a climate zone, and profiling soils are directly related to science and ecology. Building trellises, measuring wood for fences, and solving garden equations such as “If a row is 10 feet long and we plant our corn 12 inches apart how many corn stalks can we grow in one row?” all contribute towards mathematical problem solving. Having students keep a handwritten and illustrated journal is a great way for them to develop handwriting and written communication skills, and to scientifically observe and chronicle the seed-to-plant life cycle.  The opportunities for learning go on and on, from collecting bugs and insects in a terrarium and observing their habitat and behavior, to researching the nutritional composition of vegetables grown, to learning safe kitchen procedures and following a recipe in preparation for cooking the harvest later in the school year.

When I was a child I detested most vegetables, even ones I had yet to taste! Because students are often willing to taste vegetables they have helped to grow, school gardens can improve a child’s eating habits, giving them nutrient rich foods that may be lacking in their diet. It’s also fun for children to participate in the preparation of meals, adding a sense of accomplishment in seeing their harvest from seed to plate. Students can opt to sell their vegetables and flowers to raise money for their school or a class field trip to a local garden. Introducing a business plan and how to handle money is a great hands-on math assignment that can be rewarding for students.

Just as important as the practical, hands-on skills that the garden teaches, are the aspects of self-regulation required to bring plants to maturity.  A student who wishes to eat a carrot must leave the carrot in the ground until it is grown rather than pulling it up as soon as it sprouts.  This lesson is quickly learned, as is the lesson that the carrot plant must receive proper care and nurturing  in the form of sun and water and protection from frost and pests so it can fully develop.  For many students, a garden provides a rare opportunity to experience first hand the importance of patience and nurturance as life skills.  There are no short cuts, and pulling a big orange carrot out of the ground is an irrefutable reward for a job well done.

School gardens provide a highly practical and direct form of education, where children can see the results of their decisions and actions. Learning how to grow good food not only gives students a chance to apply classroom learning in a practical setting, but can also improve health, provide a livelihood, and increase self-sufficiency.

So find out how you can get involved in your school’s garden, or start to build one with your students.  What a difference it can make.

Related Reading:

Modeling Healthy Choices: Three Habits for Optimal Brain Health

Individualizing Instruction Through Understanding Different Types of Learners

 

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Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: creativity, how children learn, learning environment, learning through play, math, motivating students, novelty, nutrition, play, school leader effectiveness, science, teacher effectiveness, teacher impact

Using the Power of Optimal Timing to Improve the Brain’s Ability to Learn

• December 13, 2011 by Bill Jenkins, Ph.D.

Learning is both a behavioral and biological process that is supported by the neurons in the brain over time.

When we learn, our brain cells physically change in response to stimulation, forming pathways to facilitate the connections we use repeatedly. For example, if you meet a person only once, you might not remember their name or recognize their face if you were to run into them on the street ten years on. On the other hand, if you see that person every day for a year, you will likely be able to recognize their face and remember their name much more readily should you not see that person for a long period of time.

Learning processes like these in the brain take predictable, measured amounts of time. While these rates will vary from person to person and nervous system to nervous system, we can depend upon certain relatively constant timeframes for learning and processing an understanding of some of these timeframes can allow educators to take maximum advantage of them. That’s why the Fast ForWord® products function on each of these scales by design, using the power of optimal timing to improve the brain’s ability to learn.

Learning depends upon a specific feedback loop characterized by timing between stimulus, response and reward ^[i]. Here are some of those timescales, along with how Fast ForWord works within each:

• Milliseconds: Auditory processing happens on the millisecond timescale. Fast ForWord helps improves auditory processing rate to ensure that students are able to “keep up” with auditory input such as spoken directions from their teacher.
• Seconds: Reinforcement learning happens on a scale of seconds and is achieved by interacting with one’s surroundings.  The Fast ForWord program’s reward system is based on this time scale, delivering rewards to students at just the right moment to maximize reinforcement learning, helping students get the most benefit from the program.
• Minutes: Our actions change based on how we perceive our surroundings. This kind of adaptation can take minutes. As students move through Fast ForWord exercises, they can see their performance results changing minute by minute. Being able to see such improvement helps motivate students toward greater learning. In other words, as they perceive the positive results of their actions, students adapt and learn to generate more of those positive results.
• Days or Weeks: Consolidation and maturation of memories can take days or weeks. When a student overcomes an obstacle in Fast ForWord, their confidence is strengthened and they not only learn the material, but they learn about their own capabilities and what success feels like. The memories of such experiences and the associated feelings – gathered and built upon over the days, weeks and months – lay the foundation to spur them on to future success. Such success in the classroom can lead to a greater drive to perform well in other areas, such as doing well on a test, winning on the athletic field, or successfully completing that college application.   We cannot underestimate the power of experiencing success and the sensation that it creates.

In the classroom, having an awareness of how long it takes for a student to assimilate and process certain kinds of information can add an entirely different rhythm to our instruction. In having such an understanding of how the brains of our students work, we can time our teaching to optimize learning and help our students achieve maximum success.

References:

[i] Why Time Matters Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center. University of California San Diego

Related Reading:

The Brain Gets Better at What it Does: Dr. Martha Burns on Brain Plasticity

Video Games: A New Perspective on Learning Content and Skills

 

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Categories: Brain Fitness, Brain Research, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, accelerate learning, auditory processing, brain plasticity, emotions in learning, how children learn, learning environment, motivating students, processing rate, teacher impact, technology in education

The Making of a 21st Century Educator: 5 Ways to be a Better Teacher in Today’s Classroom

• December 6, 2011 by Sherrelle Walker, M.A.

The highest calling of today's education system is to equip students with the characteristics and skills needed to navigate the ever-changing 21st century global economy as adults. We talk a lot about how to engage students and make them better learners, but how often do we step back and consider how to make better educators? The success of our students and the effectiveness of the education system as a whole starts and ends with the teacher.

So what might an effective 21st century educator look like? eSchool News recently polled its readers and came up with five characteristics that the most effective educators have in common.  Here’s what you can do to emulate them:

• Be forward thinking. The 21st century educator must have a broader vision, anticipating and adapting to trends, not only in education, but technology and science as well. Our teachers are tasked with preparing students, not for the world as it exists today, but for the one they will someday inherit.
• Be an eager learner. Technology has become a fundamental part of our students' daily experience, both in and out of the classroom. Educators operating in such a rapidly evolving technological climate simply must be willing to learn to effectively teach. The phrase "lead by example" comes to mind. If we want our students to be inquisitive, open-minded and willing to learn from making mistakes, so must be our teachers.
• Be a builder of relationships. Today's students are more likely to gauge their number of friends on Facebook than by who sits with them at the lunch table. In such a world of technological isolation, where it's possible to go through an entire day without real human interaction, we must facilitate interpersonal relationships within the classroom while prioritizing communication, respect and cooperation.
• Be equipped to teach all levels of learners. As effective 21st century educators, we not only need to be armed with the same characteristics and skills we plan to impart on our students, we must also have the ability to teach those characteristics and skills to every student at every level in the classroom. This includes the ability to effectively relate to students and teach to their unique learning styles.
• Be able to implement technology effectively. Enhancing the educational environment with technology can facilitate faster learning and streamline teacher tasks, such as grading, planning and presenting lessons, but simply putting a computer in front of your students isn't enough. Technology can just as easily be distracting or unproductive. An effective 21st century educator will have the discernment and know-how to incorporate technology into the classroom in a way that facilitates, rather than distracts from, teaching and learning.

As educators working under pressure to maximize student performance, we sometimes focus all of our time and energy on developing curriculum, planning and implementing lessons, and accessing our students' skill level at the expense of our own ongoing education. If we take the time to foster the characteristics necessary to be an effective educator in ourselves and our peers, our students will ultimately benefit.

References:

Five characteristics of an effective 21st-century educator

Related Reading:

Using Google in the Classroom: Two Simple Tips to Refine Your Search

Facebook in Schools: Tool or Taboo?

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Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: how children learn, learning environment, motivating students, school leader effectiveness, teacher effectiveness, teacher impact, technology in education

Facebook in Schools: Tool or Taboo?

• December 1, 2011 by Joseph DuLaney

When it comes to opinions on the use of Facebook in education, there’s a pretty clear dividing line: one side believes that when used in the right way, Facebook can be a tool, while the other thinks it is a distraction that should be kept away from schools. 

Statistics show that 85 - 95% of American high school and college students are on Facebook, with a majority accessing Facebook via smartphone. When so many students access Facebook on their phones, it would be easy to take the position that Facebook could siphon time from classwork and create distraction.  The clear remedy would be to ban cell phone use and block Facebook access on campus.

One question, though, begs to be asked those who have taken this approach:  How is this working out for you?

This question is not a criticism of school or district policy, as the appropriate use of technology in education is a legitimate concern and there are challenges that arise from open access to Facebook in schools.  However, when our students are using Facebook via smartphone as a primary means of communication, should we be communicating with them as “digital natives” on their terms?

There may be constructive alternatives to banning one of the most powerful tools our students have access to today.  Let’s take a look at a few simple ways to use Facebook as an education tool and eliminate some of the taboo that comes along with it.

1)      Create a private, closed group page for a class and invite students to join.  Teachers can use a group page like this to invite students to connect in a safe manner that does not connect them to personal pages.  In addition, teachers can add or remove students at any time, thus keeping the group intact and current their current class.

2)      Post a daily topic of discussion.  Have the students view the page daily to see what the next day’s class discussion topic will be.  Via the comments section, allow students to ask questions and post thoughts that can be used to guide the next day’s lesson.  This is also a great way to see where your students’ base knowledge of a subject lies.  If you’re worried about inappropriate comments, set clear guidelines up front and let students know that access will be permanently removed for any student who violates the rules. Chances are, students will see it as more important to be able to access Facebook and use the tool than to test the boundaries and be banned.

3)      Post links to articles, resources and websites for your students.  Your Facebook group page is a quick and easy place for you to share other learning tools you have found that could help them.

4)      Once a week, have a student create a daily topic of discussion.  Open up discussion to topics your students find relevant in their world.  A topic may not be within your exact curriculum, but use it as a chance to understand their world and have a meaningful line of communication.

5)      Review the comments monthly with your students. As the year goes on, the level and depth of discussion should grow. Use this as an opportunity to motivate your class by going back and reviewing the comments with your students.  Assess the growth as a group, having the class highlight comments they felt led to higher level thinking and challenged them.  Support the conversation by recognizing discussions you feel had a strong impact on the group as a whole.

Whether you are in favor of using Facebook in schools or not, there’s no denying that our students today learn, communicate and socialize in ways that we never imagined.  It is a challenge for us to reach them sometimes, and every once in a while we will have to take a leap and try something new.

Related Reading:

Using Google in the Classroom: Two Simple Tips to Refine Your Search

Opening the Classroom Through Online Collaboration: 21^st Century Learning Environments

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Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: creativity, curriculum, digital natives, innovation, learning environment, motivating students, technology in education

The Question Formulation Technique: 6 Steps to Help Students Ask Better Questions

• November 29, 2011 by Sherrelle Walker, M.A.

The ability to ask questions is the genesis – the “big bang” – where learning really starts. It is that moment where information that has entered the brain mixes with other ideas and begins to synthesize new ideas. Questions demonstrate curiosity. Questions represent the beginning of discovery and innovation. The first step of the scientific method itself is the careful formulation of a question.

But how often do we focus on teaching our students how to formulate good, well-considered questions? Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana have focused their work on exactly this skill, developing an approach they call the Question Formulation Technique (QFT). The two are co-directors of The Right Question Institute (RQI), a non-profit organization that focuses on helping people learn to better advocate for themselves and participate more in decision-making processes by teaching them how to ask questions. While the RQI applies their techniques across health care, community service, public agencies and community-based organizations, their ideas represent an excellent tool that we can use in our classrooms every day.

Recently published in the Harvard Education Letter, their article “Teaching Students to Ask Their Own Questions,” describes the Question Formulation Technique, a way for educators to present material in ways that encourage students to take a more active ownership role in their learning. There are six steps to the technique, as follows:

1.      Find a focus - The “QFocus,” as it is called by Rothstein and Santana, is a prompt that serves to focus student questions so they can explore more expansive ideas. The authors offer an example presented by a teacher after covering the causes of the 1804 Haitian revolution: “Once we were slaves. Now we are free,” With a clear, direct thought like this to focus their thinking, the students begin formulating and posing questions around this idea.

2.      Brainstorm - Constrained by a few simple rules to help people stay focused, students formulate as many questions as possible. At this point, they are asked not to judge the quality of the questions, nor pursue any answers. This is much like the classic “brainstorming” process, where ideas are generated in a free, uninterrupted flow.

3.      Refine - The students work with the questions they have created, reformulating them as open- and closed-ended questions. They categorize them and make them clearer, more focused and more apt to yield the desired answers.

4.      Prioritize - Using lesson plans and teaching goals, the teacher helps students select their top three questions and use them to zero in on the most important aspects of the material.

5.      Determine next steps - Students and teachers together review the priority questions and make decisions about how best to use them for learning. The questions can be used to drive experimentation, further reading, research and/or discussion.

6.      Reflect - The teacher and students review their questions in the context of the six steps they have worked through to produce them. According to Rothstein and Santana, “Making the QFT completely transparent helps students see what they have done and how it contributed to their thinking and learning. They can internalize the process and then apply it in many other settings.”

Note the key word in that last sentence – internalize. Through this process, students add question formulation to their cognitive toolbox, making it a part of how they address information and problem-solving going forward. The authors note a number of benefits to the QFT, including increased group participation and better classroom management. But more importantly, they found that students were more apt to delve deeply into topics on their own, posing well-considered, critical questions that not only help direct their learning, but allow them to take more effective ownership of that learning as well.

As a “habit of mind,” the Question Formulation Technique demonstrates beautifully how the brain is built for pattern recognition. It also represents research that holds great promise for helping students form thinking patterns early on that will yield lifelong benefits.

Related Reading:

Teaching Creativity in the Classroom

Inspiring Students to Dream, Learn and Grow

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Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: cognitive skills, creativity, decision making, elementary school learning, how children learn, motivating students, science, teacher effectiveness, teacher impact

Using Fiction Writing Activities to Develop Creative Thinking in the Classroom

• September 29, 2011 by Sherrelle Walker, M.A.

We are always on the lookout for more effective ways of teaching creativity in the classroom. With much attention on the decreasing status of the United States in the world economy, the need for a stronger creative class, and the realization that the next generation of professionals and leaders will have to be more innovative than ever to solve the world’s problems, educators need more ways to teach children the ability to engage in creative thinking.

In the classroom, so much of what we do focuses on teaching our students to recognize and repeat patterns. Mathematical functions follow patterns. Letters and languages represent graphical and sound patterns that have meaning because of their repetition.

Creativity, on the other hand, is the breaking of patterns. In the creative act, the mind proceeds to a place where there is no existing path to follow, building something new where there was nothing before.

So therein lies our problem: if teaching strengthens the mind’s ability to recognize patterns of meaning, how do we teach creativity – an act that by its very nature breaks with patterns?

The neuroscience research behind brain plasticity has shown us how the brain responds to stimuli by forming neural pathways, and that the brain constantly changes, much like a landscape changes under the influence of the forces of water and wind. The brain adapts in order to more efficiently recognize and make use of the information and patterns that make up the world in which we live.

The answer: we need to teach the patterns that support creative thinking. Writing fiction and storytelling offer immense power and potential for us to help our students learn to break their patterns of thinking and develop these creative habits of mind.

Creative idea generation is not easy; in fact, it can be quite intimidating for a great many youngsters, not to mention adults. Our goal should be to help our students let go of their inhibitions and become comfortable with – or even better, excited about – undertaking creative challenges.

From a practical standpoint, we have access to endless activities to spur our students on to cultivate their creativity through writing fiction. These are just three of them:
 

• Ask students to develop a “what if” question and then answer it with a story. That simple act of creating their “what if” question forces the mind to go to a place it has never been before, and in writing the story, they get to spin out that idea as far as it will go.
  Example: “What if mice could read minds?” or “What if we could send a spaceship to a black hole?”
• Give each student a character from one well-known story, place that character in the context of another well-known story, and ask them to write about what happens. Example: “The giant climbs down the beanstalk and meets three little pigs. What happens next?”
• Ask each student to select one item they would want with them if they were stranded on a desert island. Then, ask them to write a story about how they got to the island and how that item ensured their survival. Example: “I would want a small folding knife. When I fell off the ship during a storm, I had had it in my pocket because I had been carving a stick on the deck. Luckily, it didn’t fall out of my pocket when I hit the water…”

While it offers a higher level of challenge, I’d like to offer one final exercise to consider adapting for your students: the six word short story. Perhaps the most famous example is Ernest Hemingway’s story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” This kind of poetic and conceptual challenge forces students to combine creative thinking with a laser-focus on word choice.

For younger students, this can be adapted by asking students to write their own six-word versions of well-known stories and fables. More advanced students can be given the freedom to come up with their own stories.

While these fiction writing activities are primarily for elementary school students, they can all be adapted for adolescents and, especially in the case of the six-word exercise, adult learners.

But notice that each of these examples puts some limits around the creative process. This is the key to fostering creative thinking: through focusing each student’s effort into a tightly formulated creative problem, they are then freed to develop and follow their ideas to conclusion.

In such fictional writing, students learn that they have the power to break patterns of thinking and develop their own creative ways to think through problems, skills that will serve them well as they grow and mature into tomorrow’s creative thinkers and leaders.

In my own six words? Your instruction focused, their creativity unleashed.

For resources on teaching fiction writing, visit the National Writing Project and their resources for teaching fiction writing and Creative Writing: Teaching Theory and Practice.

Related Reading:

Teaching and Learning with Intent through Guided Reading Activities

The Great Homework Debate: Is Homework Helpful or Harmful to Students?

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Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: arts, creativity, effort, elementary learning, learning through play, motivating students, play, teacher impact, writing

10 Big Benefits of Using iPads in Schools

• September 27, 2011 by Corey Fitzgerald

Got an iPad yet?  School leaders say it’s not just a cool toy, but rather a powerful, versatile tool that is virtually changing the face of education.  With more than 15,000 “educational apps” available through Apple’s app store, teachers and students alike are having no trouble finding content and material for all areas of learning. 

From kindergarten through college, iPads offer educators more diverse methods for delivering instruction and engaging students for learning in the 21^st century.  Here are 10 big benefits of using iPads in schools:

1. Tablets fit students’ lifestyles – The appeal of using iPads in school is obvious and students find them easier to use than traditional computers.  This novelty leads to learning and when schools don’t implement what has now become “everyday technology”, we’re doing students a disservice. Besides, who wants to carry a backpack full of books?
2. Classrooms are ready for the iPad – Tablets are fully compatible with online teaching and learning platforms which can be easily integrated into the everyday classroom.  Some of the most innovative instructional software is being developed specifically for tablets, and teachers and students alike are more comfortable using them.
3. Students can run the helpdesk – Not only are kids eager to embrace new technology but many can troubleshoot and resolve computer issues faster than adults.  With many districts experiencing cutbacks in IT staffing, it’s a natural fit for students to handle many of the basic questions to assist in routine triage and problem solving.  And, there’s an app for that.  Check out the SchoolObject:helpdesk by Eduphoria in the App store!
4. Collaborative content creation – Never before has it been easier to create and share content with others.  The touch interface of iPad revolutionizes the way we interact with computers, making it easier to leverage database and social networking technology, like wikis, to promote collaboration and communication for enhanced learning.
5. Mobile data collection – From the science classroom to the gymnasium, students are now recording observations in the lab and on the court.  Today’s teachers can more easily integrate instruction in cross-curricular lessons, for example, when students studying physiology measure their heart and breathing rates during exercise and apply it to their cellular respiration lab.
6. Tablets integrate with IT trends – With tablets and cloud-based computing systems, students can work from anywhere on campus with greater portability and connectivity.  Schools also don’t have to pay for computing power that they no longer need.
7. iPads make mobile computing labs easier (and lighter) – Many schools utilize carts of laptops to bring technology into the classroom.  When you compare the cost, size and mobility factor, tablets win.
8. Paperless innovation - School districts have found creative ways to use iPads to save money.  From homework and tests to digital textbooks, the iPad offers numerous ways to eliminate paper, saving dollars and the environment.
9. No more missing the bus - Even if a child doesn’t ride a bus to school, chances are they’ll take one for a field trip.  When bus drivers are equipped with an iPad they can easily monitor when children enter and leave the bus, noting time and location, and ensuring everyone is safely accounted for.
10. Virtual tour guide – iPads offer students an exciting way to experience field trip destinations.  From the aquarium to the zoo, children receive enrichment through interactive maps and exhibit-specific content.  And don’t forget to order your souvenirs--they’ll be ready for pickup on your way out.

Related Reading: 

Teaching Creativity in the Classroom

Building Unstructured Play into the Structure of Each Day

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Categories: Education Trends, Reading & Learning

Tags: blended learning, creativity, digital natives, elementary school learning, how children learn, learning environment, motivating students, technology in education

Implementation Fidelity: Maximizing Your Fast ForWord^® or Reading Assistant™ Investment

• August 11, 2011 by Andrew Ostarello

What is Implementation Fidelity? It is Scientific Learning’s measure of how well Fast ForWord and Reading Assistant users are following product usage protocols.

In order to maximize a student’s benefit from Fast ForWord or Reading Assistant, users need to have an intensive and persistent experience.  This means using the products regularly and according to protocol.  The available Fast ForWord protocols are five days a week for 30, 40, 50, or 90 minutes per day.  For Reading Assistant, the protocols are 20, 30, or 40 minutes per day (depending on the grade band) for three days per week.  Adherence to these protocols helps students build on their daily successes.

This leads naturally to the following question:  How do you know if a student is having an intensive and persistent Fast ForWord or Reading Assistant experience?

Our answer is a concept called Implementation Fidelity.  Implementation Fidelity measures how closely users of Scientific Learning products are adhering to the recommended usage protocols.

There are three components to Implementation Fidelity:

• Completion Rate
• Attendance
• Participation

Each of these components can be measured at the individual student, classroom, or district level.

Implementation Fidelity components are measured on a scale from 0 to 100%.  Scores in the top 20% are considered “Good,” scores in the middle 60% are considered “Fair,” and the remaining scores in the bottom 20% are considered “Poor.”

Scientific Learning Progress Tracker is an online tool to monitor and manage Fast ForWord and Reading Assistant success.

Progress Tracker has reports to help customers track the Implementation Fidelity of their students.  For example, one Implementation Fidelity report shows the overall Completion Rate, Attendance, and Participation categories for a district as a whole and for each school in that district.

We have found that a good implementation, on average, leads to 50% more reading gain per year.

Related Reading:

Forecasting ROI from Fast ForWord® and Reading Assistant™ Products

Making Computerized Learning Work Takes WORK

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Attend one of our popular webinars with thought leaders in learning. Live and pre-recorded webinars are available. Register today!

Categories: Fast ForWord, Progress Tracker, Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant, Scientific Learning Research

Tags: academic success, accelerate learning, child reading development, improving reading skills, learning to read, motivating students, reading intervention, school leader effectiveness, student growth, technology in education, video

Leigh Ann’s Story: Making a Difference in Children’s Lives

• August 4, 2011 by Norene Wiesen

This post is the second in a series aimed at sharing the success stories, both personal and professional, that Scientific Learning employees witness every day.

Leigh Ann’s Story:

“Hi, my name is Leigh Ann.  I’m a BrainPro Representative with Scientific Learning and I have a few stories I would like to tell today about some outcomes that have really touched my heart.

The first story I want to tell is about Henry.  He’s eleven.  He lives in Michigan and his mom was really very excited to tell me this story. At eleven, he couldn’t spend more than fifteen to twenty minutes reading, and a month after he started our software he spent three hours in the hammock in his backyard reading a book from cover to cover.  And when he was finished he ran in the house and he goes, ‘That was fun!’ And his mom was just so thrilled when she told me that story.

There was a seventeen-year-old boy in Canada, and the Internet where they lived was not strong enough to deliver our software into the home.  So he had to drive forty minutes one way to his dad’s office.  So he drove an hour and twenty minutes each day.  That boy’s life completely changed.  His parents said he’s a different boy.  He saw himself catching up to the smarter kids in class.  It completely, totally changed his life.

And those are the stories, those are the things that help me get out of bed every morning and get to work with a big smile on my face and know that I’m make a big difference in children’s lives.”

Related Reading:

Jolene’s Story: “I Saw Tremendous Change”

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Categories: Family Focus, Reading & Learning

Tags: academic success, child reading development, effort, emotions in learning, employee stories, high school learning, improving reading skills, learning to read, motivating students, reading comprehension, self-esteem, student growth, success stories

Inspiring Fluency: One School’s Journey to Improve Reading Skills

• July 21, 2011 by Jacqueline Egli

A focus on core reading skills has recently been promoted in college coursework for beginning teachers, statewide initiatives for student achievement, and professional development for teachers across the curriculum in all levels of education. One of the five core skills, fluency, is still being heavily debated among the researchers, but is gaining traction as an instructional skill that is necessary to the efficiency of reading. Differences in word reading or naming speed, two aspects of fluency, have been identified as early as kindergarten levels in struggling readers (Wolf, Bally, & Morris, 1986), and can continue to be tracked into middle and high school (Meyer, Wood, Hart, and Felton, 1999). Many students who struggle and are identified as having reading deficits have difficulty with reading speed and accuracy. 

Although there seems to be a significant and growing body of research on reading skills, including fluency, there is still much to be learned about the impact of fluency on overall learning. The typical definition of fluency is “the ability to read connected text rapidly, smoothly, effortlessly and automatically with little conscious attention to the mechanics of reading, such as decoding” (Meyers and Felton, 1999). Reading fluency problems of children with reading difficulties, according to Torgeson (2006), are a result of students’ difficulties forming large vocabularies of words that they can recognize “by sight” or at a single glance. If students receive “powerful and appropriately focused interventions many of them can become accurate readers and their reading comprehension improves as a result of being able to correctly identify more of the words in text” (Torgeson, 2006).

Bridges Academy, located in Winter Springs Florida, serves students with specific learning disabilities. The overall purpose of the program is to remediate the learning gaps for the students and to “bridge” them back into mainstream schools with mainstream curriculum. Ninety-nine percent of the students who attend the school have an identified deficit in reading and many are considered to be dysfluent readers. Several years ago, Bridges Academy incorporated a computer-based instructional tool, Reading Assistant software, that provided a highly focused intervention for fluency to address the skill development of reading fluency, as a trial implementation.

For the pilot program, 10 middle school aged students were selected to try the Reading Assistant program. Each middle school student was invited to participate, if they desired to do so, during their homeroom time at the end of the day. Homeroom time, of course, is a very social time and many of the middle school students looked forward to spending some time connecting with their peers before leaving campus for the day. Each of the students was asked to commit to no more than 10 days, so they did not feel that they were giving up their social time for the rest of the school year. 

To get familiar with the program and the process, each student was assigned a level of the computer program that was instructionally suited to their present independent reading level. The requirements were straightforward. Students were to listen to a selected story read aloud on the computer a total of three times. Then each student was required to review any words that were unfamiliar to them by selecting the word and seeing or hearing an example of that word in a picture or sentence. After this initial step the students were required to orally read the story selection. Words Correct Per Minute (WCPM) was tracked by the software and students were directed to complete a series of comprehension questions when done. One key component unique to this product was the requirement that the student listen to their own voice recording of the selection after each of the three required oral reading samples. 

The interest and enthusiasm amongst these 10 middle school students as the project began was very exciting to the faculty and administration. All 10 students shared information with their parents and their classmates about the project and the way the program worked. During their lunch break, they discussed the various stories that they were reading amongst themselves   and shared their present WCPM scores with their peers with tremendous pride!  These students would celebrate their promotion to a new story with a “high five” and pored over their data reports at the end of the week to see what types of gains in fluency they were making. What was most encouraging? All 10 of the students chose to work on the program for the duration of the school year, a period of eight weeks. One student even elected to come back to the campus during summer vacation to complete the stories he was reading, so he could reach his own set goal of 200 WCPM! 

The impact of this implementation of the Reading Assistant program is now being realized across the campus at Bridges Academy. All students who are reading above a second grade level are provided access to the Reading Assistant program two to three times a week, throughout the school year. Students who are preparing to “bridge” to a new school program are provided the opportunity to work four afternoons a week as an after school option, so that they may increase their proficiency rate with above grade level material in preparation for their move to the mainstream schools. Every January through April, 80% of the students eligible for bridging can be observed working in the afterschool program. What is most impressive is that these students have chosen to participate in this afterschool program! 

The assessments, data analysis, and individual summary reports built into Reading Assistant track the overall impact of the program in improving reading skills for student participants.  Bridges Academy staff and administration are pleased with the overall improvements in the students’ reading skills and confidence. The students perceive themselves as readers, and parents report that the students are now becoming more confident readers who enjoy reading--many for the first time!

References:

Meyer, M.A., & Felton, R.H. (1999). Repeated reading to enhance fluency: Old approaches and new directions.  Annals of Dyslexia, 49, 283–306.

Meyer, M.S., Wood, F.B., Hart, L.A. & Fenton, R. H. (1999) Longitudinal course of rapid naming in disabled and non disabled readers. Annals of Dyslexia, 48, 89-114.

Torgeson, J.K. & Hudson, R. (2006) Reading fluency: critical issues for struggling readers. In S.J. Samuels and A. Farstrup (Eds.). Reading Fluency: The forgotten dimension of reading success. Newark, DE: International Reading Association

Wolf, M., Bally, H., & Morris, R. (1986) Automaticity, retrieval process and reading: A longitudinal study in average and impaired readers. Child Development, 57, 988-1000.

Related Reading:

Truth in Numbers: School Achieves Statistically Significant Improvements on TAKS

The Essential Nature of Developing Oral Reading Fluency

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Categories: Reading & Learning, Reading Assistant, Special Education

Tags: academic success, child reading development, fluency, improving reading skills, learning to read, literacy, motivating students, reading comprehension, reading intervention, self-esteem, struggling readers, student growth, success stories, technology in education