Our second set of Reader's Theater revolved around cowboy legends and tall tales. I found that there was quite a bit of similarity between the way that our cowboys streeeetched the truth and the way that I had to streeeetch, finnegle and otherwise modify my tidy little research plan that I had on paper to meet the realities of daily classroom life.
First, as I was collecting my all important pretest data, I dealt with numerous student absences which held me up with making sure this data was actually "pre". I found it absolutely impossible to find the time to administer the DIBELS test myself to each student, therefore I had to trust an aide to do it in exactly the same way I was. When I started to input these DIBELS numbers, I noticed the students that tested with one particular aide all had much higher scores then the rest of the class. Should I retest the whole group myself?? I can just imagine the speech to my class, "We will not be doing any math this week so that I can make sure there is consistency in my data collection." I stuck with the data that I have, but I think about my results, and the fact that after all this hard work the results may not be significant because my aide and I had different interpretations of how to administer the pre-test.
Second, I wrote in my tidy research plan that "we would practice and perform one reader's theater play each week for six weeks. Well, I didn't take into account that the last two weeks of work have included an 18 hour field trip to Sacramento followed by a "read-a-thon" day as we all recovered AND a week of minimum days to allow time for parent/teacher conferences, which left very little time for reader's theater. So, my one week plan very quickly stretched into two. I want to stay as accurate as I can with documenting and recording what is really happening in my classroom, so that I can authentically determine the causes of successes or failures in the reader's theater process. I am learning that part of this documentation process includes the realities of daily classroom life.
The shining light and major joy of this process is the "experimental treatment" itself. My fabulous student actors are starting to come out of their shells and embrace their time on stage. It has taken about three weeks to notice a tangible change, and there were many frustrating moments. I found that I had to do much more direct instruction and modeling than I had anticipated the students would need. However, the performance that the students gave of their tall tales yesterday showed poise, expression, and most importantly, fluency in their reading. One of my ELD students came shyly up to me right before the performance with his script in hand and pointed to the word "scaffold". It was the one word that he was still stuck on, so we practiced the short a sound together and drew a quick picture of a scaffold. He said the word perfectly in the performance.
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2 comments:
I had that same experience last year when trying to complete my two social justice math units. I set a time line and then had to throw it out because every other day (I'm sure I'm exaggerating here) something was happening that meant we lost all or some of our math time. We were at assemblies, working on end of the year school-wide projects, at whole school meetings with the principal, or on field trips to here and there. We barely finished the second unit the week before the last week of school and then I had to interview each student-I couldn't have done it without a very supportive principal and aides.
The beauty of action research is that we are not in a lab. We are in classrooms, working with real-human students.
If we were not "doing this research for a class", I believe it would be easier to deal with the realities of day-to-day schedule changes, student absences, and aides who try their best, but in the end, are not...us.
When I read you had noticed the scores from your aide were higher, honestly, my toes curled. That is a hard one.
Again, if this were not for a class, a Master's project, and was not going to be eternally bound and placed on a shelf at Fresno State, I would worry less.
Sigh.
That's a tough one.
How much of a difference in scores? ( I am giggling because I am thinking about "correlary" statistics---is that the name of it? The anova, dovetail, "stuff".) How big is the difference? Maybe, you should have your aide test the students you tested. At least, that way, your data would be consistent.
I will be interested to see what you do.
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