Lindsey Fuzzell

Today Lindsey and I met and combined the Commit to Change and Taking Action steps in the coaching cycle. She revisited her goal and shared that she still feels it is the right direction, so she plans to stay the course.

Lindsey has been meeting with her student, Lucas, daily and has already taken some initial steps to support him. She had a few questions about how to score his self-correction rate, so we reviewed that process together. We also discussed the types of self-corrections he has been making and examined the errors that are still present in his reading.  As we analyzed his data, we noticed that most of his errors are not negatively impacting his comprehension, but rather his “test score” on the assessment. This suggests that Lucas is reading for meaning; many of his substitutions still make sense within the context of the passage. However, his scores are affected by rapid reading that leads to omissions or insertions.  We also noticed that many of his errors occur at the endings of words. These include mispronouncing endings, leaving them off entirely, or substituting a similar word with the same ending (for example, everybody for somebody). We talked about how to support his ability to cross-check for both meaning and graphophonic aspects of the word.

Based on this pattern, Lindsey plans to provide more explicit instruction on word endings and suffixes. We also brainstormed ways to incorporate phrasing strategies from Susan Barton that may help Lucas slow down and attend more carefully to each word in the passage.  Lindsey will continue scoring his self-correction ratios to monitor whether his rate is improving over time. We plan to meet again on April 9 to check in on Lucas’s progress and to discuss how Lindsey can further operationalize the procedures she has found valuable through this process.