Notes
Beth Pope and I met on March 25 for her 5th coaching session. Beth is in the take action phase of the Vector model. Beth has the goal of increasing scores on the vocabulary in context pretest from near mastery to mastery. The original goal had allowed 3 weeks to be accomplished, but due to Spring Break, the timeline for the goal has been extended for three weeks.
Beth continues to try to find time to work with the targeted small group of students whose vocabulary in context scores are the focus of the goal. This has been a big challenge given Spring break eliminated days when the small group would meet. The day after our meeting, March 26, was to be the first day she had to meet with the small group since the break. She has given the pretest and found that students in her focus group had near mastery of the skill (3-4 correct) and is now striving to have 5 correct. She will administer a post test on April 9 and we will discuss the results of the post test at our next meeting.
Beth shared with me the results of one of the questions on a Wit and Wisdom question set in which the students had to, through context clues, determine the meaning of the word “control” in the passage. Only 3 of her students answered the question correctly. Beth and I analyzed the question and both agreed that it was easy to see why the students had given the incorrect answer. Beth discussed the strategies she was using with the entire class to teach context clues, which includes explicit instruction using context clues examples. We will continue to examine student work to identify additional strategies to teach context clues.