Notes
Allyson Atchity and I met on March 25 for her 5th coaching session. Allyson is in the Take Action Phase of the Vector model and has been working with her students on understanding the academic vocabulary used in the question sets from the Wit and Wisdom curriculum. Initially, Allyson noticed that her students were struggling with the 2 part comprehension questions provided by the curriculum and conducted a survey of her students to determine what they felt was the primary reason they were not proficient n answering the questions. The survey revealed that most of the students simply did not understand what the questions were asking, or in other words, did not understand the academic vocabulary being used. At that point, Allyson developed a goal that 90% of her students would score at least 80% of higher on question sets found in Wit and Wisdom, This would be accomplished by Allyson explicitly teaching the words and using them in her instruction throughout the day, not only in reading, but in other content areas.
Allyson identified a strategy that she felt would be most effective in attaining this goal. She decided to give her students a passage from text they were reading and have them develop question sets like the ones developed by Wit and Wisdom. Since our last meeting, she implemented the strategy and had tremendous results! I received an email from her and she was so excited to share the results–91% of her students were proficient the next time a wit and wisdom question set was administered.
At our meeting, Allyson shared student work from this activity. Students worked in groups of 4 to accomplish this task and she indicated that the work took about an hour. Prior to beginning the work, Allyson modeled what expectations and explicitly explained the process of writing the questions. As we analyzed the student work, we found that students were accurately posing questions using the academic vocabulary that would be found in Wit and Wisdom passages.
Allyson will continue to use this strategy and at our next meeting we will be able to discuss data from further testing to determine if the strategy continues to be successful.