Notes
After hearing a bit about how things have been going with Sara, I recapped what we had talked about last time. I reminded her of a couple of things we discussed as potential areas for our work together moving forward.
Tell me a bit about how the writing has been going with your science classes. Are you still seeing struggles with students producing complete sentences and paragraphs?
I thought that this might be where she would land. While she is still seeing the need, she felt that the amount of content she is needing to cover would not allow her to spend as much time focusing on the writing as she would like right now.
Before I could even ask about her WIN time groups, she brought it up. She was proud of the groups she has going and the fluency work she is doing with them. She was very convincing that this is where she would like to focus. So, we began making plans for that.
Before we meet again in two weeks, I asked her to simply continue doing what she’s currently doing with her groups and don’t change anything yet. We discussed it would be nice for us to have a chance to look at her current practice and student data together before we decide on a goal.
I asked if she could send me:
- The Benchmark Advance fluency guide/materials she is currently using (if allowed)
- The student fluency tracking sheet she showed me (including anything students record about WPM, words to focus on, miscues, etc.)
- An example of the fluency passage/material she’s using
- Whatever fluency information she is already collecting for a few students in each group. Nothing new or formal—just what she already has available.
I also asked her to listen closely to how a few students are reading and jot down some observations about what she notices. For example, are they reading word-by-word, reading accurately but slowly, struggling with particular types of words, guessing, self-correcting, reading without appropriate phrasing, etc.?
I also asked her to do this specifically with her on grade level group that is also engaging in fluency work. I am very curious if this is appropriate for them.