RTI for Adolescents- Part IV (CD2M Introduction)

Last week, I attended High Impact Reading Interventions for Secondary Students with Deborah K. Reed at the ESC Region XI center.  She closed out the session by discussing a strategy that I'm extremely familiar with, because we use it at my school in all English classes.  So, instead of using her language to describe it, I'll use the conventions and coding I'm used to.  Here's an image of the poster I have hanging on my wall to remind the kids of the parts of this strategy:

We use the term CD2M with the kids to indicate that this is the strategy we are using.  This stands for Connect Device to Meaning.  It highlights the parts of the text that help the reader with comprehending what the author is trying to convey.  At the beginning of the year, we explain to students why it is important to be able to analyze text in this way.  We tell them that once they start to recognize the parts of the sentence, and the moves that the author makes to build their argument, it will help them to understand meaning.  There is also the writing benefit, that when students understand the mechanics of a successful piece of writing, they are more likely to be able to mimic that style or use those strategeis in their own writing.  It is important to note that students need to understand that with any strategy, once they learn how to do it, they must decide if it is helpful to their ability to answer questions before spending time on it during a test.  If they are overwhelmed by the strategy, don't use it.  If it  helps, then pull it out of their toolbox. 

This is a multi-step strategy, one that needs time to teach.  It would be a bad idea to hand students a text and a worksheet with all these parts, for example, and tell them to annotate the text.  Instead, the teacher should model each individual part and then build to where they can do all parts of the strategy independently on one piece. 

B? and L? is used to indicate student questions on the text.  What do they not understand?  What does it make them think about?  When they mark the paper with a B or an L, it is a signal to them to go back and think about the text.  It is also a signal to the English teacher that these parts might need to be focused on as a whole class. 

In Texas, students are asked to write open-ended responses (OERs) on their state assessment.  We spend a good amount of time trying to get students to where they can answer these questions by using text support and explaining their answer.  Questions are meant to be expanded on, and the best answers include key evidence from the text.  I usually tell students their answers should be 3-5 sentences for OER.  The best way to answer can be described in a number of different formulas, but the easiest one I can provide is:  1) Turn the question into a statement to indicate the answer, 2) Provide a detail from the text to prove why that answer is correct, 3) Explain how that detail supports the answer.  We also sometimes ask for a more complicated answer which would be: 1) Background, 2) Answer, 3) Detail, 4) Explanation, 5) Concluding Statement.  Either model can work for writing an effective OER. I've also used the Jane Schaeffer Writing technique to teach kids to answer OER's.  Use whichever one works best for the kids that are in the class that year. 

I'll continue my explanation of the CD2M strategy with a focus on diction in Part V.

RTI for Adolescents- Part 3

In this section, I will discuss the text complexity activity from Deborah Reed's High Impact Reading workshop at the Region XI center. 

We were given four versions of a text, and asked to order the versions from easiest to most difficult.  Then, we discussed the rankings with tablemates. 

 

Reed explained that both readability and cohesion are important factors in text complexity.  Above, she provided this heuristic to model the fact that selection A was high in both readability
 and cohesion, and B was low in both.  Readability is complexity of sentences and word choice where cohesion is the relationship between ideas, cause-effect relationships.  Both of these things matter in determining text complexity.

She described a study she did where students were given texts that were varying levels as above paired with comprehension questions.  Those students who received the easier text were more likely to get comprehension questions right.  Students with the harder text were more likely to get comprehension questions wrong.  However, the difference between the two middle selections was negligible.

In part IV, I will discuss the strategy "Attention to Syntax."

RTI for Adolescents- Part 2

Continuing my summary and reflection of Dr. Deborah Reed's High Impact Reading for Adolescents workshop at the ESC XI center, this post will explain the first strategy that was discussed.  First, it is important to understand that most students would say that a difficult part of comprehension is big words.  Students sometimes seize up when they see big words.  But the thing about big words in the English language is that they are often comprised of word parts or are part of word families.

Reed mentioned the strategy of teaching word parts briefly, prefixes, suffixes, and roots.  This is one of the stock lessons that I always keep in place.  I show students words that are clearly able to be broken up into parts.  For example, the word sociologist has the root socio (Latin for friend) and the suffix -ologist (Greek for speaking, is used for the study of). We discuss how many words are comprised this way.  I will pick out a few for us to go over together, but I don't ask them to memorize a list of them.  That won't work.  It is about the strategy of recognizing that words use the same word parts, so that they can break down an unfamiliar word and relate it to a familiar word.

In order to put a room full of English teachers into a situation where we felt like a student feels when decoding words, she showed us the Russian word институт.  I don't know Russian, so when I looked at this word, I tried to sound it out.  I had no idea how the first symbol is pronounced, so I though something like ic tin tut.  If I related that to a word that I know in English, it isn't a huge stretch to come up with the word institute.  In this case, this was the correct guess.  Students should be able to think in this way.  What does it sound like?  What does it look like?  Can I make a reasonable guess?  

Another problem for students is that they can sound out the words and "read" them, but they don't always know the meaning.  One way to break down meaning is to look for patterns.  What words are repeated?  Are they parts of they same word family?  Can meaning be inferred by knowledge of any of the derivations?  For example, sociologist could be paired with social, sociology, society, etc.  If the student knows any of the words, they can look for relationships.  They also would know that this word is important to know. 

The British National Corpus has lists of words that are within a word family.  She showed us http://www.lextutor.ca/ where you can retrieve these lists.  It is also possible to cut and paste a text into the  document and this online tool will identify words in word families and highlight it in different colors, as shown below.

Wordle can also be used to look for text frequency, but it does not show words that are related like the lextutor tool does.


In discussing this strategy, Reed made a good point about the difference between content literacy and the reading test.  In English class, we teach students to write with variety.  The same word should not be repeated over and over.  But, in science class, there might not be a similar word.  She explained that mass, for example, cannot be equated with weight.  Where weight would change with different gravitational pulls, mass would never change.  In a science text on mass, then, we would expect the word would be repeated.  Other informational text would function the same way.

Names are another stumbling block.  Students shouldn't stress out over names.  Emile, for example, might be read as Emily instead of Ee-meal, and it would not change the meaning of the overall text.  When I read Harry Potter, I had no clue how to pronounce Hermione.  I read it as Her mee oh nuh. Instead, it is Her my uh nee.  I was off, but it didn't get in the way of my understanding of the text. 

In summary, students need to know how to attend to words.  First, they should recognize and connect word families.  Second, they should look for words that are repeated.  Third, they should know how to deal with proper nouns.

Stay tuned for RTI for Adolescents Part III for a discussion of text difficulty.

RTI for Adolescents- Part 1

Today, I attended the "High Impact Reading Interventions for Secondary Students" workshop at the ESC XI center which was led by Dr. Deborah K. Reed.  Reed is a former Texan, who has been transplanted to Florida, returning here to share RTI strategies with secondary teachers.  RTI is an acronym for Response to Intervention, a term usually used to indicate what strategies the teacher takes to help students that need extra support.  RTI is the actions we take to support struggling readers.

Students who struggle with reading can't be fixed in a single day.  Indeed, even an entire year is really not enough to completely transform adolescents that have been accustomed to not getting it.  But, we can aim to have the reasonable goal of helping them to a) first stabilize their performance relative to peers, and b) then move on to improving relative to peers.  Reed suggests that this is usually best done over two years minimum.

Beginning our session, Reed explained that it is a good idea to "know your enemy".  What this means is the teacher should know how test-makers construct the tests.  First, she discussed the concept of passage dependency.  Passage dependency is the desired effect where students must read the passage in order to answer the questions.  The student should not be able to answer the questions without reading, if they could, then the question would be considered passage independent.  Reading comprehension tests are not memory tests like most high school content areas use for assessment.  This is a skill-based test, where background knowledge is not necessary to succeed.  Instead, reading comprehension tests are looking to see if students understand the process of reading.  These exams require multiple readings, using strategies, and actively trying to be "close readers".

Another thing that is different about Texas reading tests, is that the newest assessment, the EOC, is a timed test.  In some ways, this goes against the idea of how to be an effective reader because strategies slow the students down so they are more closely reading the text.  We don't want students to just go through the motions of reading, where they do little more than word call.  Students need to get better about using their time wisely, to slowly attend to the text but to be able to do it in a way that doesn't waste time either.  It is a balance situation.  The ideal would be that the reader, text, and environment should be working together to get to a close reading.

We talked about four different types of questions, taken from Raphael & Au:

• Right there- in the text

• Think and Search- putting different parts of the passage together

• Author and Me- using text evidence to support a conclusion

• On My Own- using own background knowledge

There will be mostly Think and Search and Author and Me questions at a high school level, with very few Right There questions and On My Own being almost non-existent.  Therefore, students need to understand strategies for Think and Search and Author and Me questions.  She does not suggest that students should be required to identify the different types of questions, but she does say that teachers should be aware of what the test is comprised of.  However, some of the teachers that were in the room and discussing the strategy of identifying question types thought that it might be a good activity.  Personally, I would not suggest asking students to identify the question types.  I would provide them the questions and then I would discuss the questions and types with them as a part of a lesson on how to identify which strategies to use.

I will continue this discussion in the next post, RTI for Adolescents- Part Two.

How Can I Use Video Games In My English Classroom?

I love this question, and I get it all the time.  There is research supporting the idea that video games function as great learning tools (Gee, 2003; Prensky, 2001).  But teachers don't necessarily want the research.  Teachers want practical answers. 

If you have a month or more to dedicate to this, try video game design:

Students will need foundational programming skills, which can be obtained by doing coding exercises at codeacademy.com or alice.org.  Then, students can use GameStar Mechanic (tutorials available online) to create 2-D games.  You might also try Scratch, but I find it a bit difficult to work with.  My favorite one is Unity 3-D, but it does take time to learn.  I'd recommend the Virtual Training Company course to help you through designing a first-person shooter.  The positive part about actually designing a game is that students have a finished product, and they've learned technical skills.  The downside is that it takes time to create games that work, it isn't easy.  This is hard fun.  Students must be dedicated and persistent, motivated by the medium. 

If you have less than a month:

As worthwhile and engaging as game design is, it isn't always doable to spend time teaching kids programming skills in a content area class.  So, forgo technical design, and instead thinking about smaller projects you can do.  If your heart is set on design, have the students create a design document where they describe what they'd like the game to do.  There are templates available at Game Pitch Template,  UNC Game Design Template, and Sloperama.  Keep in mind, the length will be up to you.  Professional documents are usually 100 pages or so, but you don't have to hold your students to doing that level of detail.  That would be terrifying!  I like the example given by Tufts An Ants Life Project, it is an eleven page document but it was put together by a team of students.  This is essentially a technical paper, so this could be an introduction into technical writing.

Design isn't the only entre into gaming and school.  Try serious games that support the English classroom.  Think about using Third World Farmer and Ayiti to engage students in issues of poverty.  Perhaps using it in conjunction with an article like Africa Hunger Facts and a chapter from Lurlene McDaniel's Angel of Hope would be a good idea in 9th or 10th grade.  This could also begin a discussion about what students think about when they think of Africa, to show them that the continent of Africa is much more than impoverished black tribes.  It also includes Egypt, Morroco, South Africa.  It includes modern cities, not just the bush.

There are many games out there than can be used as part of a unit.  Check out this wiki to find more ideas Gaming in the Classroom. 

The above games are PC-based, but if you have access to consoles, pick up some entertainment games that students actually play and use their trailers as writing prompts. 

Uncharted 2- This video game is an action packed, beautifully crafted game that functions very much like a movie.  They have paid special attention to crafting a story worth telling.  What I like about this one is that it makes a connection to Marco Polo.  Perhaps pair a short story or article with it about the Age of Discovery.

Writing prompts from this short trailer could include asking students to pretend they are in one of the scenes shown in the trailer and describe it using five senses.  For example, in the first few seconds, we see the main character collapsed into a heap of snow, bleeding.  What caused him to be that way?  What is he thinking?  How does the snow feel underneath him?  There are two cuss words in the below trailer, so you may want to consider using TubeChop or some other service to isolate a scene you want to highlight or cut out undesirable parts.

Portal 2 offers options including an advertisement for boots, turrets, and panels.  Personally, my favorite is the boots one, and I think adolescents would love a prompt where they were asked to design the ultimate pair of shoes (or other clothing).  They could draw it and then write a description.  You could even take it a step further and ask them to write an advertisement for their shoe.



Of course, there are also videos from games scholars.  I particularly like the Smithsonian's Art of Video Games Exhibit collection.  Using the video below, you could parallel the writing process to the design process for games.  A potential prompt might be to ask students how important story is to a game.  Is it necessary?  Is it not?  Why or why not?

The opportunities for playing video games are vast and wide.  I'm going to plan on making more posts that give more ideas as I come up with them.  Feel free to share your ideas too!

References

Gee, J. P. (2003). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. Computers in                Entertainment (CIE), 1(1), 20-20.

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants part 1. On the horizon, 9(5), 1-6.