Kimberly Stark

Kim Stark and I met on July 6 to contine work on the Problem of Practice which she has identifed as her work for the summer course.  As indicated in previous notes, Kim has decided to develop units of study which incorporate comprehension strateegies that she is learning in thee course.  To develop the units she is using the Comprehension Instructional Framework which was introduced to her in the class.

One of Kim’s concerns with the current curriculum that is being taught in the district is that some of the time to work on comprehension strategies and vocabulary has been shortened or even eliminated so the opportunity to upgrade units to include these concepts is much appreciated.

At this meeting, Kim shared with me the work she had been doing on unit 4 of her curriculum.  In this unit, she has decided to focus on the comprehension srategies of graphic organizers and “gist logs.” At our meeting, we discussed each of the elements of the comprehension instructional framework and how the strategies would be incorporated.  I asked her about vocabulary instruction as I know that there are vocab strategies that are part of this class. I learned that at the district level there are developed slides that teach vocabulary. As we viewes the slides, it was obvous that evidence-based stratgies had been incorporated.  The only issue is the length of the slide show and the lack of time to get everything done within the literacy period.

She is enthusiastic to try these with her students in the coming school year.  Betweeen now and our next meeting which  is Tuesday, July 14, Kim will work on Unit 6 to incorporate more of the comprehension strategies.