Glenda Ruff

As we met on April 9, Glenda was still trying to figure out how she could help her reading intervention group reach a goal of being able to accurately summarize a paragraph of informational text in order to aid in their reading comprehension. This group of students were able to read fluently and accurately but still struggled to comprehend academic text. Currently, she was pointing out the main ideas and supporting details in the text and constructing the summary sentence. They were definitely in the “You Do” phase of instruction. She had decided that the strategy of “What and What is it about” was a strategy that resonated with these students to help them identify the main idea and supporting details and wanted to continue using that instructional strategy. She came up with a lofty goal of having 75% of her students be able to write a summary sentence including the main idea and supporting details by May 15 on their own. She meets with these students every day for 30 minutes and is hoping this is achievable. We had a lot of discussion on how she will measure their progress and she is going to come up with a checklist for the underlying skills to writing a summary sentence with 3 areas – no evidence of application of strategies for writing a summary sentence, some evidence of application of strategies for writing a summary sentence, and evidence of application of strategies for writing a summary sentence by completing a competent summary sentence on their own. Next time we will view a video of her instruction and review the data she has accumulated so far.