McKenzie Hayes

12/1/16

TCH 235

Instructional Cycle Reflection

My clinical experience at Evans Jr. High was my very first time working with students in a
classroom setting. I started the semester not having a clue what I was doing, taking every hint the
online lecture notes could give me, reading the progress of my friends, and muttering to myself
as I stared at the running record and miscue analysis forms. While I was distracted by the
technicalities of the profession, a weight had crept up behind me and settled on my shouldersit
was the weight of fearing my own deficiencies. Despite the encouragement of others, I knew I
needed to see just what I was capable of before the mere idea of teaching and its responsibility
continued to cripple me. I was successfully able to connect to my student, evaluate the data from
her running record and miscue analysis, and design a small intervention that targeted her
glitch. While I was certainly not perfect, what I gained from the clinical experience, I believe,
was a much deeper understanding of teaching that I will carry with me as I progress through the
Middle Level Program.
During the first day of my clinical experience at Evans Jr. High, I created many connections
to not just my student, but to the classroom setup, our CT, and the building itself. These
connections would become instrumental in the decisions I made during my time there. I loved
our CTs roomthe seating was a great model of middle school teaching philosophy in action!
The room was fairly large and there was not a student desk in sight. Instead there was a round
table, the teachers desk, and an accumulation of sofas, chairs, loveseats, and ottomans. My
favorite part were the window seats in the back, which would have been my seating of choice
had I been fortunate to use that classroom as a student. Relevancy is vital to successful middle
school teaching. Adolescents are undergoing massive brain growth, forming connections at a rate
that rivals the first few years of life, while also pruning those connections in patterns that will

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affect future cognitive processes. Having a classroom environment that mimics real lifeonly in
school do humans read at hard desks that often arent the correct sizenot only helps students
feel engaged, but also encourages the idea that learning is not reserved for the classroom alone.
Adolescents physical growth often means the hard desks they are confined to for six-plus hours
a day become painful and impede focus. Having the ability to sit in a different position, or even
just to stretch and move around, helps students feel physically comfortable, emotionally invited,
and intellectually open to learning. One of the largest critiques I have for the room was her use of
posters, which were pre-assembled. Organic, student-centered posters that emerge from
classroom discussion can be much more effective for student learning as it provides context and
memory to the new concepts that creates a much stronger connection.
Meeting and speaking with my student on the first day will likely stick in my memory for a
long time. Our CT randomly assigned our students to us as we walked through the door. I was
excited and also nervous, unsure how effective the reading inventory I had planned would really
be. I brought with me one of the books I had recently read over the summer, and I hoped that my
student would feel comfortable enough to share his/her favorite books with me as well. As soon
as we were partnered I could tell that my student was a little nervous too, and when we sat down
in the commons area to start the inventory, she was at first hesitant and quiet. After we
introduced ourselves, I pulled out the inventory and we started to discuss the questions. My
student first admitted that she kind of liked reading. This answer worried me initiallywhat if
I had trouble teaching her because she simply was not interested in reading? So I changed
approaches and spent a lot of time discussing the books she liked and was able to connect my
interests and hers pretty well! I wrote down some of her favorites and she even read part of the
back of one of the books to me. My student was mostly taught how to read by her sister at home,

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and she said that then she was the one teaching her brother. I will admit that some alarms went
off in my head that there seemed to be a lack of parental involvement. However, I was very
aware of the racial and cultural differences between my student and me. I wanted to keep my
mind as open as possible. I was glad I did. When we brainstormed all the different reasons for
why people read, and how reading surrounds us everywhere we go, I noticed my students
attitude start to shift in the way she thought about reading. She came up with a lot of the items on
our list, often thinking outside the box. She then changed her tone from I kind of like reading
to I like reading these certain items/genres. I knew that was something I could work with.
Through our conversation we discovered that we liked a lot of the same genres and read similar
authors when we were younger. Whenever my student seemed without an answer, I explained my
own experiences with reading so that she could find something to connect to. I felt that my
enthusiasm and excitement for reading was encouraging hers, and now that she understood she
didnt have to like reading math books to like reading in general, she started to consider more
enthusiastically how reading was important to her. We finished the survey just in time, and as she
was leaving to return to her classroom, she casually turns and smilingly told me I really do like
reading now that I think about it. I was stunned to see, on only the first day of my first clinical,
how I can have a positive influence on my students views of themselves as learners during this
time of open-minded identity searching that often relies on how they see themselves fitting into
the interactions with those around them.
My student had told me during the inventory that she liked to choose books that were a little
challenging for her. I thought it was awesome that she wanted to better herself in that way, but I
truly had no idea what her running record scores would be. Consequently, I tried to go into the
running record with an open mind. I prepared some basic questions for the retell beforehand,

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made a copy so I could mark her miscues on a separate page without her watching, and prepared
my explanation/reassurance that this wasnt for a grade, no one else would hear the recording
except for me, and that I was looking to see the kinds of reading strategies she uses (as opposed
to the mistakes she makes). She seemed pretty comfortable before she started reading. But as she
progressed through the paragraph, she seemed to grow more and more unsure of herself, using
her finger to stay on the correct line as she grew more nervous. I had to give her the word
variety and I tried to make encouraging gestures as often as possible. Despite how long and
difficult the passage was for her to both read and comprehend, she never stopped reading and
tried to answer my retell questions to the best of her ability. By the end of the reading selection
and the retell, I was left concerned and surprised. The number of errors she made total for the
whole passage was nineteen, and she had six self-corrections, which means she corrected about
32% of her errors. Her percent of accuracy for the passage was 93% and within instructional
level, but she only read the first two sentences, which consisted of 50 words, in the one-minute
time marker. For the whole article, her words correct per minute was 58. Less than half of her
errors were made using the meaning cuing system. Even less frequent was the syntactic cuing
system. The majority of her miscues were made because the substitution had a letter-sound
similarity with the text word. Part of the reason she spent so much time on the article was that
she not only read each word haltingly, but had 12 separate repetitions of phrases within the
sentences.
Even with the extra time and repetitions she was taking, it was evident from her retell that
key pieces of the article were missing from her comprehension. She did not realize until
prompted what era the article was in, what tenement housing was like, and the fact that children
were making up their own games using the environment around them because there were not

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many areas for parks and sports back then. She also didnt realize they were doing this to escape
from their depressing conditions. Many of these aspects were explicitly stated in the text. She did
understand/was able to connect to the sports the kids designed, and could give me quite a few
details about what children played the sport and generally how it was played. She read the
second half of the article (the part that discussed the sports and activities they played) much more
quickly than the first half, which is why the words correct per minute for the first minute was 50
but ended up averaging to 58 for the entire passage. The amount of repetitions, however,
remained pretty consistent for each paragraph: four for the first, two for the second, three for the
third, and three for the fourth. Only when I prompted her to interpret why the children were
playing outside did she consider it, and again her answer was not because they were poor,
hungry, and living in unbearable conditions, but instead she said it was because the crowded
tenement (which I had to explain to her) would mean they wanted fresh air. Despite it being an
accurate interpretation, it missed a lot of underlying themes the text was conveying. For these
reasons, I rated this article to be at frustrational level for her on the retelling rubric.
My first impression directly after the running record and retell was alarm and concern. When
I expressed these concerns to her teacher, she suggested that something in my students family
life was contributing to it, especially given what she told me about her sister teaching her how to
read instead of her parents. She also told me that my student was one of her lower readers, but
she was not behind enough to warrant specialized intervention. I made some judgements from
my own bias on what that meant for my student and her abilities. Suddenly my expectations for
her were unintentionally lowered in my mind. I began to fear that my student, if she continued to
fall behind, would perhaps not stay engaged in High School and possibly never reach college.
Before I really analyzed the results I documented, I immediately had the impression that my

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student had a vocabulary glitch. I felt that the reason her retell was so disjointed and cursory
was because she had not successfully comprehended the text, and considering the fact I had to
give her the word variety and also explain much of the main ideas of the article to her during
the retell, that it was simply my students vocabulary level that was making the article too
difficult for her. It took me a week to listen to the entire process several times, make sure
everything was marked correctly, document those markers, analyze their significance, and piece
each of the parts together. That Thursday after the running record session, and while I was still
analyzing, we happened to do an activity given to us by our CT that involved me orally reading
an excerpt from Langston Hughes Thank You Maam to my student. After I read to her, I would
then help her try to come up with textual evidence that supported a conclusion from the text.
When I read the text to her, the difference in her comprehension was undeniable. She was able to
employ concepts in the Macro-Level of comprehension, which included summarizing the story
plot and picking out the most significant pieces. She could use the Integrative Level when she
made inferences on why one of the characters in the story was kind to a boy who tried to steal
her purse. She was also able to achieve the Elaborative Level of comprehension by using higher
level thinking skills to support her opinion with textual evidence in order to create a wellsupported argument. I walked away from that activity realizing that my students cognitive
reasoning and comprehension abilities were right on track with a sixth graders abilities when
she heard the text. I reevaluated my data and some parts of it started to click into placethe
number of repetitions, for instance. I realized that she was repeating phrases, even ones she read
correctly, because she was first reading it to get the words right only, then re-reading to try to
discern their meaning. Another piece of the data that jumped out at me suddenly was the fact that
the visual miscue dominated her errorsfourteen out of the total nineteen errors used the L-S

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miscue. She wasnt mixing up words because she was confusing them with words that mean
something similarshe was mixing them up because they looked like other words. I realized that
the meaning of the words were not coming to her first. Instead she was spending much more time
just trying to figure out how to decode the word. It also explained her low fluency score. Her
flow was absent, instead she read in a slow, halting manner that lacked inflection. Her phrasing,
which is important to transitioning meaning into long-term memory, was inconsistent and
choppy, likely leading to her reading retell being lower than her abilities that I observed after
reading the Hughes article to her. Her prosody, or pitch, was nonexistent, every sentence read
monotonously. She was too focused on decoding the words to notice much else. If my student
could hear words and understand them well enough to draw conclusions, organize textual data,
make predictions, and connect personally to the oral reading of the text, but struggled to do so
when she read the words herself, I concluded the glitch was happening at the Micro-Level. In
other words, my students vocabulary was there, but she did not recognize that the words on the
page were actually words she already knows in her mind.
All of the conclusions I had made lead to the design of my first mini intervention lesson. My
initial bias I gained from the CT and my students reading background inventory was utterly
disproven. There was absolutely no reason for me to imagine that she was any more literacydeficient than the next student. The Emergent Literacy Theory asserts that literacy emerges
naturally before formal instruction in children, whereas fluency and micro-level decoding must
be taught. I realized that in order to best help my student, I would need to find a way to give her
the decoding practice she needed in a sort of Bottom-Up or skills-based manner without ignoring
the very important relevancy and immersion that the Whole Language Theory incorporates. This
would be especially important because my students cognitive development necessitates holistic

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thinking. It would be completely unacceptable to disengage her higher-order thinking abilities by

only drilling her with skills practice. I decided I wanted to focus the practice of decoding words
so that it was purposeful and fresh in her mind before she immersed herself with holistic reading.
I decided to limit the intervention exercise to about five minutes before diving into her
independent book and immediately applying those practices in a meaningful manner. I picked
three books, Ellen Tebbits (third-fourth grade reading level), Wringer (fourth-fifth grade reading
level), and One Crazy Summer (fifth-sixth grade reading level). All of them were in genres I
knew she liked. From those books I found a word that fit one of two criterion; it either looked
hard to say (had silent letters, repeated vowels, looked like other words) or had flexible
definitions (the meaning of the word could vary a lot depending on its context). I pulled the word
out and wrote it separately first on the page. Doing so would force her to think at the
graphophonemic levelonly decoding the word in order to say it correctly. Then beneath it I
included the paragraph, or context, the word was in for that particular book with the word bolded
inside the paragraph. After saying the word correctly, she would next move to the sentence and
phrasing level, using the context of the sentences around it to decipher its meaning. Even if she
knew the words definition before she read the paragraph, I wanted her to explain how it was
unique to that particular paragraphs context. I also found a picture online that gave the word a
visual representation. The visual was meant to help her with the mental-visualization of the
word/sentences to hopefully bolster the movie that should be playing inside her mind as she
reads. It is the visualization of words and sentences that helps the Integrative Process aspect of
comprehension, which requires students to close read and connect with the text, which sets the
stage for complex cognitive processes at the Macro-Level.

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Before I gave her the lesson I prepared beforehand, I really wanted to help establish her
comfort with reading. I did so by giving my student authentic feedback from her running record
results so that she can accept that she can reach the expectations I have for her. I told her that I
noticed she was using her finger to help her stay in place and I told her that she really took her
time to try to understand the article even when it was hard. But most importantly, I told her that
her determination and perseverance were truly remarkable. Sometimes when I am reading
something challenging, I get frustrated and give up. But you kept up the whole time, and you
know what that tells me? It tells me that you can do this. I had her title her notebook Reading
Strategy Treasure Map. I did the same on my own notebook. I explained that reading strategies
are like a map pirates use to hunt for treasure. Sometimes the meaning of text is buried and not
easy to see. Using reading strategies can help us find the treasureor the meaning of the text
much more easily. I also brought some leftover Halloween candy as our actual treasure for
when she did persevere and read the word/uncover the definition correctly. I felt it was necessary
for her to feel truly rewarded for her efforts because I fully anticipated it to be a laborious
process. Using our imaginations by becoming word pirates also helped, and it made the
practice feel more like a game than a chore. Together we brainstormed about six different
strategies: chunking, syllable clapping, sounding out, context clues, and using your finger or a
bookmark to focus your attention. I wanted to tap in to my students meta-cognitive abilities by
giving her the chance to think about her own reading and what she struggles with, and also how
to employ some strategies that could help. Next I handed her the prepared sheet. One word,
emergencies, she did not recognize immediately. She separated the word out, clapped it, and
eventually was able to say it without my help. As soon as she did, she smiled and said oh I do
know that word! I asked her if there were a lot of words she didnt know until she figured out

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how to say them. She further demonstrated her meta-cognitive abilities when she nodded and
told me that sometimes she doesnt recognize the spelling of words, even ones she knows. I was
very intrigued by this notion because it did not fit into the Four Stages of Word Knowledge very
neatly. The first stage states that the student has never seen the word before, and therefore does
not know what it means. Indeed, this seemed to be where she was at with many sixth-grade level
words. Stage two dictates that the student has seen and/or heard of the word before, but does not
recognize its meaning. My student seems to be on a level not documented. She has never seen
the word before, and at that point does not know what it means, but once it is orally spoken to
her, she immediately recognizes it and can give me a thorough definition like in stage four (or
can at least successfully determine its meaning in context like in stage three). At the end of the
activity, my student seemed to particularly like the pictures I chosethat visual connection often
made her smile and appear more confident in her understanding. I was surprised to hear how
much fun she thought the exercise was. I repeated this process for the last three times we met. If
I could change anything in the activity, I would have liked to use her own independent reading
book for the paragraph examples to make it even more relevant to her. I also think it would have
been awesome if she could draw the word instead of me handing her a visual.
At her teachers suggestion, I decided to introduce her to a graphic novel after we did the
mini intervention exercises. I told her we could read that or the independent reading book she
had already chosen. She looked excited about the graphic novel, and after reading the back, she
decided she wanted to give it a try. I loved the idea of the graphic novel because its a great tool
for practicing fluency. I knew that even though my students reading level was below her age,
she still thinks, acts, and is cognitively developed in many wayslike every other sixth grader.
Too often when students have to go below their grade level for books, they get stuck reading

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about kids much younger than them, which makes the characters less accessible and their trials
less relevant. But graphic novels by nature have less text and are a great way to read about a girl
my students age while still maintaining her confidence in her reading abilities. I wanted to stay
away from frustrational level reading, which could push my student into the fight or flight
mode, thereby creating setbacks in the progress I could make with her. Another reason I liked the
graphic novel is that we could do a form of readers theater and practice prosody, flow, and
phrasing. Every time we read it together I let her pick a character she wanted to read and I would
pick the other. When I read my part aloud to her, I would use a lot of expression in my voice and
encouraged her to do the same. Often she would read very flatly even if it was a question or
exclamation. I would ask her, now that you know the words can you read that like a question? I
want to really feel it! And she would, very successfully. As for decoding and reading strategies I
taught, I was able to formatively assess her while she was reading the comic in order to
determine its effectiveness. Whenever she did run across a word she couldnt say, all I had to do
was point to her notebook before she started employing the strategies we practiced beforehand. I
loved seeing her confidence and patience whenever she did this. It was also confirmation that my
student has a strong desire to improve and that my lesson at the very least made her feel capable
in her knowledge and comfortable with the strategies. Even the student teacher commented on
how much fun we seemed to be having using that book! I thought, even if she does not improve a
ton during my short time with her, I hoped she would at least have some fond memories of
reading to reflect back on one day.
I really do like reading now that I think about it. If I was my students teacher at Evans Jr.
High, I could test her hundreds of times. I could design dozens of interventions grounded in
every well-proven theory out there. I could involve her parents, the community, and her mentors

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in her reading progress. All of these are important to education. But I know that what lies at the
heart of teaching, what will matter when she looks back on our experience years from now, is the
process of helping students realize themselves as readers. It was that very first connection that
made everything we learned together possible. I will likely make many mistakes as a teacher. I
may not be able to give as much specialized instruction to my kids as I want to. I may not have
the right approach to every lesson. I may fail. But this clinical experience has proven to me that
underneath all the standards and test taking, all the tracking and politics, is my real purpose; to
guide my students in discovering their value and great potential as lifelong learnersno matter
the glitch.