Notes
Coaching Session #7 – Reflection on Problem of Practice and Student Progress
Coachee: Allysa Reck
Date/Time: April 27, 2027 4:15 p.m.
Last Coaching Date/Time: May 11, 2026 4:15 p.m.
Overarching goal with students: Student A will engage in one-on-one instruction for phonics and phonemic awareness lessons for blends by March 17, digraphs by April 15, and long vowel sounds by May 15 at 80% academic success measured by PSI and FastBridge assessments.
The student has surpassed the goal of learning digraphs before the end goal date. She passed digraphs for nonsense words at 100% and sentences at 90%. The date of assessment was 3/30/26.
Student A. passed her psi with 10/10 on nonsense words and 10/10 on sentences last week!
Problem of practice goal: I want to supplement the existing curriculum materials for words containing blends, digraphs, long vowel sounds, etc. The words in the curriculum materials are limited and sometimes the words are not ones that we use regularly; this can be confusing to students. Generating additional words will further challenge my students to learn. I will consult lists from other resources such as Words Their Way to generate my lists. I will work on generating these lists before the end of the school year so that I can have them in place for next year.
Coachee reflections: Student A is growing a lot more confident in her phonics skills. She passed her PSI Skill 5 on long vowels with 10/10 on both sections. She is able to blend, segment, decode and encode. Although, decoding and encoding can be more difficult for her. During this last lesson, I was very impressed that she was able to correctly identify when to use the c or the k with silent e (make, rice, race). Student A did overgeneralize the /c/ sound with silent e on the next word smoke – she wrote cmoke. I have noticed that when Student A is really focused on figuring out one part of the word (in this case the long vowel) sometimes she struggles to remember the other sounds in the word to read the whole word correctly, even though she has made the correct sounds when sounding out. I think it’s hard for her to hold all of that in her brain at one time. These last few weeks we are going to start working on reviewing all the phonics rules we’ve learned this year and putting it all together to work on reading fluently. As far as my problem of practice goal, I was able to find the Words Matter book by Fountas and Pinnell that the district has at each building. It includes lists of words. They are organized in word families, which can make it a little difficult to use when I’m trying to pull a variety of long vowel words that all belong to different word families. I would reorganize this into an easy-to-use list for me to pull where everything is just on one page. It has been good for me to use the words with Student A to figure out which words are familiar and still provide that level of challenge with blend/digraphs/long vowels/short vowels.
Coach reflections: The audio recording demonstrated Allysa’s continued work with student A. They are continuing to work on long vowel sounds for words ending in silent e. Allysa reviewed the names of the long vowel sounds and the short vowel sounds. A. had more difficulty saying the short vowel sounds, but she knew all the long vowel sounds. (During our meeting today, Allysa said that many of the students have difficulty going back and forth between the long and short vowel sounds and will confuse them—it is not unique to A.) Allysa and A. then reviewed the color chips for the segmenting work that they work on together. Allysa uses positive reinforcement throughout the audio recording. A. is able to change name to same and then to sam with no difficulty. She also changed rode to rod and race to rice. Allysa said that they have been working on doing that whole group. A. seems to like changing the sounds within words. All of these skills are done through listening skills. As I have reflected on A.’s work with Allysa it has occurred to me that she is more skilled at performing the tasks asked of her when they are only auditory. When she is either writing the words or Allysa is writing them, she has more difficulty with the skill. When she writes smoke, she confuses the s and uses a c. (rice and race) She also has difficulty with the wh sound in white. When writing state, she misses writing the first t in the blend. I wonder if having two of the same sound within a word is hard for her. This was a 13-minute audio recording, and A. seemed to be very focused for the most part. Her ability to engage was much better than the last audio recording. Allysa has noted that A. leaves lots of letters out when she writes independently.
Questions to consider:
The Problem of Practice is a lot like setting a SMART goal:
- A focus on the instructional core,
- Our work on the goal is actionable,
- Action toward the goal is directly observable,
- The work is connected to a broader strategy of improvement, and
- The work is high-leverage and may result in important changes to instruction and student learning
Focus questions:
What progress have you made on creating lists of supplemental words? Allysa found Words Matter (1998) by Fountas and Pinnell that contains the lists of words she has been looking for. With what she already has generated through AI and this resource, she can combine them and have all of the words in one place. She will sort the words by characteristics—for example, silent e words and then silent e words with blends, etc.
Have you seen differences in how the students are responding based on the additional words? The students are doing well with the new words. Sometimes words are tricky like those that makes the /z/ sound where the letter /s/ is in the word (example: those). We talked about asking the students whether the word “looks right” and then also discussing with them that the written letter z is not used often in our language.
What will you need to do to finish creating these lists? Do you need any support from anyone else? The PLC is processing the words and what the next steps are. They are thinking about the students that have passed skills but still need lots of reinforcement for the remaining of the year and the summer. They are working on fluency with the students so that they have cemented these newly acquired skills.
Working on Next Steps
Work on implementation of your goal for problem of practice by the next coaching session.
Keep working on steps toward goal with your identified students that you want to meet by mid-May.
You can create a video if you like, but that is no longer required.
During the final week of coaching, we will discuss what summer will look like for A. and what needs to occur for her to maintain her skills.