Video Reflection

Week 4
Goals:
1. John will understand that reading can be valuable even for children for entertainment and learning.
John will also gain confidence in his own reading skills. This will result in an overall MRP score of
80% by December.
2. John will be able to identify words out at an instructional 2nd grade level on the San Diego Quick
assessment by December
3. John will reach independent first grade reading level reading words in context on the QRI by
December
4. John will improve his reading rate to 45 WPM on first grade texts CORE assessments by December
5. John will improve in spelling vowel digraphs and igh/ough word teams, reflected by a move to late
within word pattern on the Words Their Way spelling inventory.
6. John will write a 3 sentence paragraph without help. Each sentence will contain an

independent clause. All sentences will be on topic, and will not repeat ideas. The paragraph
will be legible.
Background of the student: John is a second grade student who attends a private Christian school. He
has two older siblings, a sister and a brother, who both enjoy reading and have always read above grade
level. John is the only child in his family who struggles with reading. Though John has been well behind
his classmates in reading skills since kindergarten, he did seem to make some strides in his first grade
year, catching up in decoding (phonics skills) and comprehension. He is still behind in fluency and
writing. While his teacher from last year indicated on the classroom report that he was only one year
behind his classmates in these areas, I later learned that she was under the impression that the form
was going back to Johns mom and was not as honestly critical as she would have otherwise been. My
initial assessments indicate that Johns fluency and writing skills are at the primer level. The initial
assessments also indicate a weakness identifying and spelling words with vowel digraphs and igh/-ough
teams.
John has always been above grade level in oral language, which was evident also by the CORE
vocabulary assessment I gave him on which he scored independent at a 3rd grade level. As his classroom
report indicated, John also has strong comprehension skills despite his low fluency scores. He has the
advantage of being part of a family that often travels and has exposed him to various cultures and
experiences. His rich background knowledge seems to play a role in helping him to comprehend texts,
though his reading is so labored. John has never had behavioral problems in school, though he is easily
distracted when completing less desirable tasks (like those involved with language arts). He sees himself
as an okay reader, but he believes his friends are much better readers. Though he knows reading is
important for adults, he does not yet see the value of reading for kids except as it helps them later in
life.

Week 4:

What did he learn before this lesson?

Up to this point, John has been learning about writing strategies such as making short, focused
paragraphs with separate sentences using proper punctuation and capitalization. He has also been
learning about reading with tone and expression. He has also been indirectly learning to increase his
reading rate and identifying words in context. The following lesson is part of our first direct practice with
words out of context. He has also practiced identifying digraph vowels and gh words out of context.
Video lesson/ focus
Objective: John will read through a story containing multiple vowel digraphs and gh words with 95% accuracy.

Description of activities in the video:

Then I gave John a story I had written for him. I purposely wrote the story to include the variant vowel
digraphs and diphthongs and the gh words we had been working on to see how well he would recognize
them in context. I also created the story to be at a second grade level as measures by the Raygor graph
formula. Finally, I based the story on a special soccer team tryout, a topic I thought Johnny would be
interested.
As John read through the first time, I kept a running record. He missed 4 out of 88 words for 95%
accuracy. His rate during that first half of the read through was 29 words per minute. He was able to get
almost all of the words with prompting, but he could not yet read the piece with automaticity. I took the
opportunity in his struggle to teach him how to figure out an unknown word using context. I had him say
blank for the unknown word in the sentence to see what might best fit that looks like the unknown
word. Using this method twice in the story, he was able to decode the word for himself both times.
Questions for Reflection
1. Was the objective met? What evidence from your video demonstrates this? If not, what would
you do differently?
It could be said that John met the goal on the first read of the story, if I do not count his
tendency to skip and add words. With prompting, he was able to fix his mistakes. He was
certainly not fast, but at least he was getting through the reading. When it came to the focus
words, he actually did pretty well, except that he did struggle with enough once, and he had
trouble with through multiple times. The vowel digraphs he was able to get with just a quick
reminder from me to remember the rule. One thing I forgot to do was to have him repeat the
reading to see how he might improve. However, I can have him do this in the next session.
2. Identify areas of teacher talk that scaffolded, extended, or redirected the student response.
I helped extend Johns available strategies for decoding by teaching him how to use the context
of a sentence to decode a word. When he could not decipher the word through, I had him
read back through the sentence and say blank for the unknown word to let his mind figure out
what would make sense there. We did this twice, and both times it worked well for him.
3. What is a possible alternative approach/strategy for follow-up?

Another, perhaps wiser, approach would have been to let John go through the reading without
any help, and treat it as a more formal running record. In that situation, we could have
discussed his errors at the end, and ran through it again for a chance to improve. However, John
did seem particularly tired this lesson, and if I had not pointed out errors as he read, he might
have had a difficult time with comprehension, which would have impacted the writing part of
the lesson to follow.
4. If you were acting in a coaching role- what question/s would you have for the teacher (you)?
I might ask why the teacher is not following the traditional rules of a running record when
calculating accuracy to see if John met the object. If asked this question, I would reply that my
goal at this time is really to rate Johns ability to decode and self-correct errors dealing with
these focus words which he often had to be told in pre-assessments and early in the
intervention. While one of my goals is for John to avoid substituting, adding, and deleting words,
I do not want to judge him by these silly mistakes that could be accounted for by his tiredness
and lose sight of my focus which is really to see if he is getting to a place where he can figure out
these problem words on his own.
5. What is a key learning you achieved from this teaching episode?
I believe I might be too quick to jump in and point out errors while tutoring. I did not usually give
sufficient time to see if John would self-correct if the error was outside of the focus words. I will
need to practice patience in future, and though I do not want to let John struggle to the point of
frustration, I do need to give him time to catch his own mistakes.