Kelly Voigts

Our last session began with celebrating the hard work of the coachee. She said that she still needs to finish up Module 12. I asked her what were some of the ideas and concepts that stood out to her. As a first year teacher, she said that the dyslexia simulation was really powerful giving her perspective as to what it looks like. She also said that the session on orthographic mapping has caused her to think about encoding in her classroom.

As she looks toward next year, she hopes to supplement more with hands on learning in literacy including using gestures and visuals. She is also excited to really evaluate her vocabulary instruction and going deeper on tier 2 type words.

When reflecting on what she changed and can learn from was when she was working toward her student goal and they didn’t meet the first half of the micro goals. She noticed that she introduced too much too fast. She realized she needed to not introduce all the r-controlled vowels at once. Instead, she needed to scaffold and tackle one sound at a time. Fortunately, by making those adjustments, her students were able to meet the goal target by the end date.

Another area that she gained so much knowledge in was how much you can pull out of a read aloud. Every read aloud should be well-planned with a purpose.

When I asked her what feedback she might give concerning the whole experience of the course, she said that several of the guest speakers were superior. She also liked the option of being able to take the pre-test and move straight to application if she got 85% or higher. She also really appreciated having a choice in the application portion. She asked if there was a way to have access to the course matieral once the class is over. She said it would be great if there was a user-friendly way to print the information to refer back to later.