19 May 2010

Super Heroes to the Rescue

He calls me his superhero. I feel like I've failed him. Why is there this disconnect?

To Daniel, I might be one of the few teachers who has talked to him frankly about his learning gaps and said directly that we would work together to fill in those gaps. We followed a model presented to me last year through BAYCES' Impact 2012 initiative. In this model teachers select a group of students who fall outside of the "sphere of success." These students are called "Focal Students." Daniel was my first pick focal student because I rarely understood what he said in class because he covered up his English language skills with jokes and laughter. I also chose him because his older sister had been the previous year's Valedictorian. The gap between what she had accomplished and what he was lacking was astronomical to me.

After diagnosing his learning gaps through the Qualitative Reading Inventory (QRI), I discovered, along with the help of some BAYCES coaching, that Daniel was at a second grade reading level and his primary struggle was decoding. More specifically, Daniel didn't know all of the ways an English vowel could be pronounced, far more than the variations available to him in his native Spanish.

For the last few months, I spent 20-40 minutes a week working with David on his short and long vowels. He amazed me with his speed. Through a sorting activity he easily identified patterns. For example, ai makes the long 'a' sound but so does ay. If a week had gone by between one session and the next, he would impress me with his ability to retain and build on the patterns he had learned before. We quickly moved on to the long 'o' and the short 'o'. He gained confidence when we were together one on one.

When I retested Daniel at the end of the school year, he'd moved three grade levels to a fifth grade reader! This is fantastic news for Daniel. He is proud of his growth and so am I. On average, with no intervention, students increase one reading grade level per year. Anything more than one grade level is considered an accelerated pace, which is essential for students who are behind. Together we had accelerated his learning!

He calls me his superhero. In a focal student panel with the rest of the staff, he announced that I "saved his life." This gratitude and enthusiasm bolsters me up and makes me happy, but simultaneously saddens me.

Daniel now reads at a fifth grade level. He is about to be a tenth grader. He is still five grade levels behind. In order to close the gap between where he is now and where he will need to be to graduate, Daniel needs a lot more intervention and soon. If I follow the model I started two years ago, I will be able to impact students like Daniel for a few months at a time, give them a taste of acceleration before passing them off to the next grade, but then what? If no further intervention happens, the best case scenario is that Daniel and students like Daniel will reach an eighth grade reading level by the twelfth grade. The chances of him being able to graduate are slim. His curiosity, innate intelligence, and quick retention of new information may be depleted by lack of confidence or low self-esteem.

Daniel was the first student I was able to systemically intervene with. It took me four years of teaching, lots of professional development, intense instructional coaching, and the right learning partnership with a student for it to happen. Now that I know it is possible, I feel a moral imperative to not only continue intervening with Daniel but to intervene with the next crop of Daniels who come to me next year. I said it aloud at our staff meeting last week, and I'll repeat it here: what will we (our staff, our district, our public education system) do to systemically support the work of accelerating learning for students like Daniel?

If we can answer that question, we will be real super heroes who make sustained changes in our students' lives rather than comical renditions of ourselves, swooping in to patch up an error here or there.

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