Alisa Danielle McMurphy

Today we reflected on her student goal and the strong results from her most recent progress monitoring. She reported that 100% of students were able to read the target words with automaticity and accurately encode (write) those same words.

Midway through the term, she made an instructional adjustment to how students corrected their mistakes during independent practice. She noticed that students were making more errors with ending sounds, so she began supporting self-correction by having them write the words as well. She found that encoding the words was a critical component in strengthening their decoding skills. Additionally, providing a visual representation helped students slow down and cross-check both sound and visual cues.

In her reflection, she strongly believes that the use of sound boxes was a key factor in the gains students made. She noted that if she had implemented them earlier, students may have made even greater progress by the end of the year. Moving forward, she wants to incorporate sound boxes into her phonics instruction from the beginning.

This reflection led us into a discussion about her end-of-term teacher goal. After considering examples from other teachers, she decided to focus on creating a “toolbox” or toolkit that includes word boxes for use during whole-group instruction, with the possibility of transitioning their use into independent practice later in the year. She is considering a two-sided tool: one side focused on segmenting and blending words, and the other focused on encoding (writing).

We began drafting her new goal:
By the end of the year, Danielle will create a differentiated word work map to scaffold whole-group phonics instruction and provide opportunities for structured word mapping practice.