Unit Reflection

After teaching each lesson, write a Book Club Blog Posting discussing the following:

·          What students learned and which students struggled with the lesson. 

·          What are alternate reads of your students’ performance or products?

·          When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?

·          If you were to teach this same lesson again, what would you do differently and how do you think the changes would improve students’ learning?

What did you learn so far about implementing your ‘core practice’ and what do you need to do to continue your professional learning? 

Over the course of my unit, I taught both whole group and small group.  The small group work was the focus of most of my work.  During this time I worked on a reader's theater performance with the lowest two reading groups.
The students saw huge strides over the two weeks.  They used more expression and read smoother and more accurately.  They learned new vocabulary and how to work as a team.  We had difficulty with behavior and talkativeness  but working through these issues I feel the students got a lot out of the 2 weeks.
I gave the students self assessments to rate their performances.  While most of the students rated themselves in a similar fashion to how I rated them, there were a couple of outliers.  One student ranked herself in the lowest categories, saying that she was terrible.  I disagreed.  While she had issues controlling herself, she read with the most expression of anyone in the group by the end of the two weeks.  One student ranked himself with the highest ratings, when I evaluated him as significantly lower due to expression, reading rate, and behavior.  This is potentially because he a) did not have a chance to see himself perform, or b) that he thought his evaluation was for a grade in the classroom.  
The re-teaching of material happened over the course of the 2 weeks.  I kept a running record of missed words, punctuation, and expression, and reiterated those points during our read throughs.  By the final performance the vast majority of these problem points were performed excellently.  
If I were to do this activity again I would have not put my 2 lowest groups together.  While they had the most to gain from this exercise, the behavior and self control would have been much better if I had mixed a lower group with a higher one.  In addition, the higher group would have been able to model proper technique.  The entire 2nd week of planned lessons I scrapped and stretched my first week over 2, because the students needed all of that time to be able to read the piece.  When I selected the piece I focused on tying it into the whole group lessons, and chose a piece at a level far above the students' reading level.  Next time I would make sure to have a properly leveled piece so lessons would move at a faster rate.  
I learned that to increase fluency and comprehension lots of re-reading, explanations  and patience are necessary.  I felt like the students should have been able to move at a faster pace, and therefore had to change my plans entirely.   Having led this, I feel more prepared to handle a similar situation, and look forward to helping the students become better readers through the course of the year.