Section 1: Academic Achievement - National Center for School ...

more comfortable with it. I questioned whether the expectations the grant held for my
students were too high. I watched some of my students get frustrated because while they were
exposed to more of the curriculum than in the past, they were mastering less of it. However, I
still had hope that as a professional I had the necessary skills to reach my students. It was
going to require some additional effort and energy on my part. I had the second half the year
to focus on my instructional strategies and I could use my surveys to match the curriculum to
the learning needs of my students.
However, that is when the Reading First grant threw a curve ball into this research project.
We attended training in January which outlined what we would teach and for all intent and
purpose how we would teach it. The message came across loud and clear that the only way
these kids (school wide, district wide, state wide) could show the necessary growth was if we
followed their standardized way of instruction. Their required ways of instruction were
teacher directed and had limited student interaction. The theory behind the instructional
practices from Reading First was the more explicit and direct the teaching the more
curriculum the students will be exposed to. However, with the student population I have
contact with daily, including the H&HM students, they need the discussion time. They need
time to practice oral language. They need different experiences to develop a context for
activating background knowledge and connecting them to the curriculum. Finally they need
activities which require them to interact with their peers, not just listen to the teacher talk.
While Reading First was requiring choral responses, some tactile activities, and lots of teacher
directed teaching to keep the pace up, the emphasis was on reading skills, not on interacting
with the curriculum, which was the focus of part of this Web-Based Professional
Development project
While I tried to implement the grant as required, I also consciously made an effort to use a
little variety from time to time. As the rest of the year progressed, I informally asked students
to rate what they thought of a particular day’s activities. What I found was that my students
were very polite to me. Although they didn’t say they loved most of the strategies, they didn’t
say they hated them either. Each grade level had their favorite, but those tended to be the
activities that were more interactive and had more direct student involvement. There were
two areas I found most interesting and had nothing to do with what my students could
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