Core Proposition #4
Teachers think systematically about their practice and learn from experience.
Element A: Teachers are continually making difficult choices that test their judgement.
Artifact: SIOP Lesson Plan
Event: Placing an ESOL student in Special Education
Description: Students can be referred to special education by the classroom teacher. In fact, certain disability categories such as learning disabled, behavior disorders, language impairments, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and mild intellectual disability are disabilities in which identification is based on the judgment of school personnel rather than that of a medical professional – and determination can be subjective (Echevarria, Vogt & Short, 2013). Because numbers show that there is a disproportionate representation of minority students in special education, one lesson in my Teaching English as Second Language course was how to assist struggling ESL students and how to determine if the student needed to be placed in special education. Is the student struggling due to a reading problem and/or learning disability or is the student struggling due to a lack of English proficiency? The answer to this question can be difficult for a teacher to make and can really test their judgement. Therefore it is critical for teachers to use the Response to Intervention (RTI) multi-tiered service delivery model.
For starters, in Tier 1, teachers need to assist all students, not just ESOL students by using effective teaching consistent with the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) Model. The SIOP Model is composed of eight main components: lesson preparation, building background, comprehensible input, strategies, interaction, practice and application, lesson delivery, and review and assessment. Within each component are more specific features that teachers can use to aid English language learners, even though in result, the features benefit all students. Again, this is the MINIMUM instruction that ALL students should receive. My SIOP lesson plan is an example of a lesson that includes several strategies from the SIOP Model, which will be explained in further detail in the “Analysis” section of this element.
However, if a student is still struggling (which there will be some) then it is time to offer intervention for those struggling students. This would be considered Tier 2. Interventions include but are not limited to: specialized materials, small-group or individualized instruction, homogeneous grouping by area of need, and focused and targeted instruction delivered by the general education teacher, reading specialist, or other specialist. With all of the intervention, some students will do well. Unfortunately, a few students may still struggle and may need to be placed in Tier 3 Intensive Intervention – Special Education. This decision is not quick and easy. Teachers need to ensure that the student has been provided ample opportunity to respond to effective instruction and intervention and that an appropriate process of progress monitoring and intervention has been followed (Echevarria, Vogt & Short, 2013).
Analysis: At this point in my teaching career I have not had to refer any student for special education. I also have not worked with an abundance of ESOL students. However, I do know the importance of effective Tier 1 instruction and the incorporation of intervention strategies within my everyday teaching. Within my one SIOP Lesson Plan I strategically planned presentation, activities, and assessments that make content comprehensible and build language proficiency for English Language Learners.
For example, when I begin my lesson with a partner pre-test, it allows students to preview the concepts and vocabulary that will be assessed at the conclusion of the unit in a non-intimidating way. Students are also able to discuss background information with each other and as the teacher, I am able to see what students already know about the subject. Then I use a foldable for notes presentation that allows students to organize vocabulary and list numeric and algebraic examples. It is hands-on and allows for the opportunity to discuss word parts such as roots. There is no way that English learners can realistically learn all the words they need to know through instruction and memorization. Therefore, teachers must help students learn that many English words are formed with roots to which are attached prefixes and suffixes (Echevarria, Vogt & Short, 2013).
To practice the content in my lesson I incorporate several hands-on activities where students get to read, write, speak, and listen through social interaction. These activities include Kagan structures such as Quiz-Quiz-Trade and Numbered Heads Together. Students are more engaged academically when working in small groups and with more engagement comes more benefits. Some benefits include: deeper understanding, oral language development, brain stimulation, increased motivation, and increased attention (Echevarria, Vogt & Short, 2013).
Students are also informally assessed in a variety of ways including Share-Compare-Repair, hand gestures, and response boards. Higher-order thinking questions are asked throughout the lesson and students are given an authentic assignment of creating a book for their peers. Echevarria, Vogt and Short (2013) state that effective classroom assessment is informal, authentic, and multidimensional, with multiple indicators that reflect student learning, achievement, and attitudes.
Reflection: Even though I know the decision of whether to try more interventions or refer a student to special education is tough and subjective, I feel that I would be able to make the correct decision based off of my knowledge about ESL learners and the interventions they need. I will continue to devise SIOP lessons, and if needed, implement further interventions. If that still doesn’t do the student justice, then I will be confident in my decision to refer a student for special education because I am educated and have implemented all the necessary interventions for the student.
Description: Students can be referred to special education by the classroom teacher. In fact, certain disability categories such as learning disabled, behavior disorders, language impairments, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and mild intellectual disability are disabilities in which identification is based on the judgment of school personnel rather than that of a medical professional – and determination can be subjective (Echevarria, Vogt & Short, 2013). Because numbers show that there is a disproportionate representation of minority students in special education, one lesson in my Teaching English as Second Language course was how to assist struggling ESL students and how to determine if the student needed to be placed in special education. Is the student struggling due to a reading problem and/or learning disability or is the student struggling due to a lack of English proficiency? The answer to this question can be difficult for a teacher to make and can really test their judgement. Therefore it is critical for teachers to use the Response to Intervention (RTI) multi-tiered service delivery model.
For starters, in Tier 1, teachers need to assist all students, not just ESOL students by using effective teaching consistent with the Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) Model. The SIOP Model is composed of eight main components: lesson preparation, building background, comprehensible input, strategies, interaction, practice and application, lesson delivery, and review and assessment. Within each component are more specific features that teachers can use to aid English language learners, even though in result, the features benefit all students. Again, this is the MINIMUM instruction that ALL students should receive. My SIOP lesson plan is an example of a lesson that includes several strategies from the SIOP Model, which will be explained in further detail in the “Analysis” section of this element.
However, if a student is still struggling (which there will be some) then it is time to offer intervention for those struggling students. This would be considered Tier 2. Interventions include but are not limited to: specialized materials, small-group or individualized instruction, homogeneous grouping by area of need, and focused and targeted instruction delivered by the general education teacher, reading specialist, or other specialist. With all of the intervention, some students will do well. Unfortunately, a few students may still struggle and may need to be placed in Tier 3 Intensive Intervention – Special Education. This decision is not quick and easy. Teachers need to ensure that the student has been provided ample opportunity to respond to effective instruction and intervention and that an appropriate process of progress monitoring and intervention has been followed (Echevarria, Vogt & Short, 2013).
Analysis: At this point in my teaching career I have not had to refer any student for special education. I also have not worked with an abundance of ESOL students. However, I do know the importance of effective Tier 1 instruction and the incorporation of intervention strategies within my everyday teaching. Within my one SIOP Lesson Plan I strategically planned presentation, activities, and assessments that make content comprehensible and build language proficiency for English Language Learners.
For example, when I begin my lesson with a partner pre-test, it allows students to preview the concepts and vocabulary that will be assessed at the conclusion of the unit in a non-intimidating way. Students are also able to discuss background information with each other and as the teacher, I am able to see what students already know about the subject. Then I use a foldable for notes presentation that allows students to organize vocabulary and list numeric and algebraic examples. It is hands-on and allows for the opportunity to discuss word parts such as roots. There is no way that English learners can realistically learn all the words they need to know through instruction and memorization. Therefore, teachers must help students learn that many English words are formed with roots to which are attached prefixes and suffixes (Echevarria, Vogt & Short, 2013).
To practice the content in my lesson I incorporate several hands-on activities where students get to read, write, speak, and listen through social interaction. These activities include Kagan structures such as Quiz-Quiz-Trade and Numbered Heads Together. Students are more engaged academically when working in small groups and with more engagement comes more benefits. Some benefits include: deeper understanding, oral language development, brain stimulation, increased motivation, and increased attention (Echevarria, Vogt & Short, 2013).
Students are also informally assessed in a variety of ways including Share-Compare-Repair, hand gestures, and response boards. Higher-order thinking questions are asked throughout the lesson and students are given an authentic assignment of creating a book for their peers. Echevarria, Vogt and Short (2013) state that effective classroom assessment is informal, authentic, and multidimensional, with multiple indicators that reflect student learning, achievement, and attitudes.
Reflection: Even though I know the decision of whether to try more interventions or refer a student to special education is tough and subjective, I feel that I would be able to make the correct decision based off of my knowledge about ESL learners and the interventions they need. I will continue to devise SIOP lessons, and if needed, implement further interventions. If that still doesn’t do the student justice, then I will be confident in my decision to refer a student for special education because I am educated and have implemented all the necessary interventions for the student.
Element B: Teachers seek the advice of others and draw on education research and scholarship to improve their practice.
Artifacts: Action Research Study, Homework Intervention Strategies PowerPoint
Event: The implementation of action research to increase homework completion.
Description: Cole and Knowles (2009) describe action research as developing a focus, gathering information, making sense of information through analysis and reflection, and acting based on findings. Others describe action research similarly, but with different wording. All can agree, however, that action research is never ending. Hendricks (2013) states the process is a series of steps in which the action researcher reflects, acts, and evaluates. After evaluation, the process continues with reflection, action, and evaluation. In my Action Research Study I chose to tackle an issue I saw in my classroom far too much: lack of homework completion. I wanted to help improve my students’ homework completion rates and see if it would increase their overall achievement.
I started by speaking with my colleagues to see if they had the same frustration with homework completion as I did and began to list reasons why students didn’t do homework. We also rattled off some ideas that could possibly improve homework completion. These conversations were just to get my wheels turning. Next, I started the steps to the action research process. I researched literature relevant to homework completion. From the literature review, I came up with strategies to improve homework completion such as parent involvement, clear expectations, rubrics, external and internal motivation, and rewards. Also from the literature review came a purpose and research questions. My primary question for the study was: What gains will be made to student test scores by incorporating homework intervention strategies? My secondary question was: In what ways does the implementation of homework intervention strategies increase student motivation? Next, an intervention plan was devised and a data collection plan was designed. Last, my projected results were listed because I had not started the intervention at that time.
Analysis: The promise of action research is its capacity to help individuals, small groups, or even entire school faculties increase their understanding and improve their practice (Hendricks, 2013). As a result, individual students, small groups of students, and entire student populations benefit from educated teachers and their implementation of best practices. Action research literature supports that conducting action research encourages educators to work collaboratively, gives educators a voice, encourages educators to rethink the ways they evaluate their work and the work of their students, provides educators with rich sources of data that can lead to school improvement, and helps educators get to know their students academically and personally, which increases mutual understanding and respect. (Hendricks, 2013).
More specifically, my action research was successful because I was able to: 1) learn about other benefits, besides the obvious, of students completing homework, 2) become aware of all of the factors that come in between students being successful at homework, and 3) discover motivations for students completing homework. With this new knowledge I could now share the benefits with my students, design interventions to steer students from homework roadblocks, and implement strategies that increased student internal and external motivation. I also was able to use parental involvement to increase homework completion. Not only did the parental involvement help with homework completion, but it helped the overall rapport between the parents and myself.
Reflection: At the end of my action research paper, I hadn’t actually put my research in to practice yet. I was waiting until the new 2013 – 2014 school year to begin. After the chapter 2 tests from that school year were over I was able to find that my intervention strategies worked and that my 2nd hour Algebra II class significantly improved their homework completion and test scores from chapter 1 to chapter 2 while my 1st hour control class did not show the same results. The hardest part of the whole process was knowing the intervention strategies the literature said to be beneficial and not using them on my 1st hour control class while I was using them on my 2nd hour intervention class. I felt like I was cheating those 1st hour students. What is encouraging, though, is that most articles in my literature review state the strategies can be used to improve homework completion among any group of students. I know that in the future I could use these strategies on any of my classes and never again keep them from any group of students. The entire action research process was new to me but very inspiring. How empowering it feels to see a problem and then do something about it!
Hendricks (2013) states that through the action research process, educators are able to generate knowledge about their practice and share that knowledge with their colleagues. I can share my PowerPoint with other teachers and hope they gain ideas, knowledge and strategies from me, along with being inspired to do action research of their own. In result, I can then learn from them and their findings as well.
Description: Cole and Knowles (2009) describe action research as developing a focus, gathering information, making sense of information through analysis and reflection, and acting based on findings. Others describe action research similarly, but with different wording. All can agree, however, that action research is never ending. Hendricks (2013) states the process is a series of steps in which the action researcher reflects, acts, and evaluates. After evaluation, the process continues with reflection, action, and evaluation. In my Action Research Study I chose to tackle an issue I saw in my classroom far too much: lack of homework completion. I wanted to help improve my students’ homework completion rates and see if it would increase their overall achievement.
I started by speaking with my colleagues to see if they had the same frustration with homework completion as I did and began to list reasons why students didn’t do homework. We also rattled off some ideas that could possibly improve homework completion. These conversations were just to get my wheels turning. Next, I started the steps to the action research process. I researched literature relevant to homework completion. From the literature review, I came up with strategies to improve homework completion such as parent involvement, clear expectations, rubrics, external and internal motivation, and rewards. Also from the literature review came a purpose and research questions. My primary question for the study was: What gains will be made to student test scores by incorporating homework intervention strategies? My secondary question was: In what ways does the implementation of homework intervention strategies increase student motivation? Next, an intervention plan was devised and a data collection plan was designed. Last, my projected results were listed because I had not started the intervention at that time.
Analysis: The promise of action research is its capacity to help individuals, small groups, or even entire school faculties increase their understanding and improve their practice (Hendricks, 2013). As a result, individual students, small groups of students, and entire student populations benefit from educated teachers and their implementation of best practices. Action research literature supports that conducting action research encourages educators to work collaboratively, gives educators a voice, encourages educators to rethink the ways they evaluate their work and the work of their students, provides educators with rich sources of data that can lead to school improvement, and helps educators get to know their students academically and personally, which increases mutual understanding and respect. (Hendricks, 2013).
More specifically, my action research was successful because I was able to: 1) learn about other benefits, besides the obvious, of students completing homework, 2) become aware of all of the factors that come in between students being successful at homework, and 3) discover motivations for students completing homework. With this new knowledge I could now share the benefits with my students, design interventions to steer students from homework roadblocks, and implement strategies that increased student internal and external motivation. I also was able to use parental involvement to increase homework completion. Not only did the parental involvement help with homework completion, but it helped the overall rapport between the parents and myself.
Reflection: At the end of my action research paper, I hadn’t actually put my research in to practice yet. I was waiting until the new 2013 – 2014 school year to begin. After the chapter 2 tests from that school year were over I was able to find that my intervention strategies worked and that my 2nd hour Algebra II class significantly improved their homework completion and test scores from chapter 1 to chapter 2 while my 1st hour control class did not show the same results. The hardest part of the whole process was knowing the intervention strategies the literature said to be beneficial and not using them on my 1st hour control class while I was using them on my 2nd hour intervention class. I felt like I was cheating those 1st hour students. What is encouraging, though, is that most articles in my literature review state the strategies can be used to improve homework completion among any group of students. I know that in the future I could use these strategies on any of my classes and never again keep them from any group of students. The entire action research process was new to me but very inspiring. How empowering it feels to see a problem and then do something about it!
Hendricks (2013) states that through the action research process, educators are able to generate knowledge about their practice and share that knowledge with their colleagues. I can share my PowerPoint with other teachers and hope they gain ideas, knowledge and strategies from me, along with being inspired to do action research of their own. In result, I can then learn from them and their findings as well.
My Goals:
1) To continue to plan lessons with several effective strategies for ESOL students.
2) To collaborate with my colleagues for ideas, advice, and solutions.
3) To use what I learned through Action Research to have high homework completion rates.
References
Cole, A.L., & Knowles, J.G. (2009). Researching teaching: Exploring teacher development through reflexive inquiry. Nova Scotia: Backalong Books.
Echevarria, J., Vogt, M., & Short, D. (2013). Making content comprehensible for English learners: The SIOP model. 4th ed. Boston: Pearson Allyn & Bacon.
Hendricks, C. (2013). Improving schools through action research: A reflective practice approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.
1) To continue to plan lessons with several effective strategies for ESOL students.
2) To collaborate with my colleagues for ideas, advice, and solutions.
3) To use what I learned through Action Research to have high homework completion rates.
References
Cole, A.L., & Knowles, J.G. (2009). Researching teaching: Exploring teacher development through reflexive inquiry. Nova Scotia: Backalong Books.
Echevarria, J., Vogt, M., & Short, D. (2013). Making content comprehensible for English learners: The SIOP model. 4th ed. Boston: Pearson Allyn & Bacon.
Hendricks, C. (2013). Improving schools through action research: A reflective practice approach. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.