Push In Support - Post 4: Mid-Year Update

With the last week before the break, I got behind on my intended schedule for my push in support series of posts. Today I will pick back up by discussing how the year has been going since the TOSA at my school and I realized we had a shared vision about ideal reading support for students. One aspect that has been highly beneficial in making our push-in model be more successful is being able to meet together to debrief and plan. It works out in our schedules to meet two times per week during my prep period for about 45 minutes. We still meet on my Spanish weeks when needed to get ready for the next English week. We use the planning time to talk about whichever area of growth is most necessary at the time or to prepare. Topics have included:

• Conferring
• Book clubs
• A system for anecdotal records
• Discussing what we notice about students to collaborate on what we think would be the next best step
• Talking about data from multiple sources to determine which students are ready for the earlier rounds of state testing in reading

The year started off a little bit slow, as it typically does because I needed to do running records/QRIs in Spanish and English. However, it was so nice to have the TOSA in my classroom because she was able to begin conferring. Through her notes, I felt like I was able to get to know my incoming 6th graders' reading habits to a deeper level than I typically am able to during the time where I am mainly administering the start of the year assessments. Having access to her anecdotal records, along with my observations in class and during assessments and based on standardized test data was very beneficial. For returning students, I was able to tell the TOSA some background information about students based on what she was noticing as well. This was my TOSA's first year conferring, so the start of the year was also supporting her with conferring. I loaned her my copy of Patrick Allen's Conferring, and she quickly bought her own copy. She is a natural at conferring, and it has been a smooth transition.

Aside from being able to get a jump start on conferring because of the push-in model, she was also able to get started on book clubs with some students. We met to talk about different ways to group and select books, as well as the routines in place for selecting book club meetings and due dates for sections of the book. I shared my evolving philosophy of book clubs, and last year I had shared Kelly Gallagher's Readicide with her. This quarter, we have been able to have each student meet in a book club.

Our most recent meetings have centered around refining our anecdotal records process. We began with a Google Doc so that we could both access it at the same time and so that we would have access to it from home. The accessibility was ideal, but there were glitches with Google Docs that I had not noticed since I started using it last year. At times we would be typing and there was a big delay in the words showing up, and we could not move on to another column in our table until the words caught up. In addition, it was cumbersome at times because the area on the screen where it showed the cursor was not really where the words would start typing. At times this would be solved with a refresh, but other times it was not. 

Thus, we revisited and reflected many times how we could be effective with our anecdotal records. We recently prioritized our students into three groups: those who need the most scaffolding, those who still need support to be highly engaged readers, and those who are voracious readers with a variety of genres. We also recreated some forms for anecdotal records, going back to a paper/pencil version and keeping them in a binder with a conferring tracking chart in the front (students sorted in alphabetical order and by our priority levels). For now, we are only going to keep conferring anecdotal records on the two groups of students who need comparatively more support. For the students who are highly engaged and proficient readers, we will continue to confer with them on a less frequent basis without anecdotal records unless we observe something that we really want to record. These students often initiate informal conversations about the books they are reading as well. Much of the interactions with these students will occur in book clubs. For book clubs we created a rubric, as well as an anecdotal record form to store in our binder. 

Overall, it has been a smooth transition into having push in support, rather than pull out support of previous years. We still have areas in which we want to improve, but are both satisfied with the way the year is going.