Week 12 Reflection (ENG 394)

Last week, the class focus was on working on their quarter two book projects. The students were supposed to be using their learning strategies, such as making predictions, making connections, and asking questions of the text.

Individually, I had a chance to have an individual conference with one student, Arham. First, I allowed him to explain what was going-on in his book, in which he was only a few chapters away from completing. I noted how he wasn't using all of his reading strategies to understand the text. He was only using predictions while he was reading, and when he did explain the text to me, he would use exact quotes that he read to me straight from the book. When I asked him what questions he might have for the last few chapters, he asked very basic questions like, "What will the boy [named Michael] and his sister find in the basement?" Arham was able to hit the main ideas for the most part, but was missing a lot of context clues that could have better-developed what he thought could happen, and even connect with, in which he told me how he thought his house was haunted when he first came here, because the home was so different from he lived in when he was in Pakistan or Toronto. Overall, he did a nice job, but he, like many of the students, had to be guided to use all the strategies they should be applying.

The students' bell-ringer for the week had them analyze drop-out rates at local high schools. The students had the opportunity to understand some new vocabulary, like dropping-out and population, while also connecting it with math by doing averages of the amount of students dropping out of a particular school. The students seemed to run into some difficulty at first, but by the end they were very comfortable with the calculator and understanding the chart.

One interesting technological skill I saw was in the other ELL classroom. She used the SmartBoard and made a game in which the students individually had clickers to choose the correct answer to review for their test. They reviewed vocabulary, sentence structure (which is correct), and gap-filling exercises. The students, combined (3 students), scored a 70% based on all their answers throughout. Towards the end, the students were given an opportunity to receive "Cav Cash." The students seemed to respond stronger in that they took time to answer, and not rush. The incentive ended up bringing the overall score up to the mid-70s by the end of the hour.