After discussing how literacy is addressed and aided in the virtual school English class with my host teacher, I found out several interesting aspects about how literacy standards are integrated into some online Senior English courses.
Actually, she said literacy is a large focus of the course in several ways, two of which are reading fluency and comprehension. How these particular standards are addressed and assessed in the course has undergone recent revisions, she explained, mainly because of the need for the virtual school to align itself with state standards and ensure a baseline level of skills for its students.
In the past, as part of their course exam, the students were required to read a random passage aloud, from a novel typically, recording their voice into a digital file, then submitting this recording to the teacher. Now, instead the student does not choose the passage and they must call the teacher and read the passage in real time, rather than submit an asynchronous recording.
The actual instructions the students sees in the course materials for their "literacy check" are as follows:
This oral component tests your knowledge of the book you have read.
A portion of this oral assessment will also check for fluency. Your instructor will select approximately 100 words for you to read aloud. The selections may come from the directions, lessons, or texts used in the course.
The rubric will be used to assess your fluency level. Full credit will be awarded for completing the fluency standard as a part of this oral assessment. Points awarded on other components of this oral assessment are at the teachers’ discretion.
Please call your instructor to complete this part of the exam, unless otherwise instructed.
My host teacher said that there has been difficulty, however, with some of the students completing the literacy check portion of their exam, mainly with logistics. In many cases, the novels the teacher might use for selecting a passage was one used in the coursework, but because the virtual school did not provide the text for the student, the student may have borrowed it from someone or checked it out from a library and already returned it before the literacy check portion of the exam. So the problem comes, she said, when the student doesn't have the same passage available as the teacher intended for them to read, and they don't want the student to be practiced.
Currently, while fluency is the main standard being addressed, she said "comprehension is what we're going for."
Students who don't do well in the coursework, are often those who don't understand what they're reading, regardless of how fast or with how much prosody they can read it, just like the traditional school. While there is a direct correlation in most students between fluency and comprehension, my host teacher explained that many of the students in the virtual school Senior English class are just taking the class to fulfill an English credit for graduation requirements and often read just enough to find the information they need to complete the coursework. Because of this, she said many skim to find this information and filter the rest of the text. While she said developing this skimming is a useful literacy skill that can serve them well later, even in college coursework, they often misinterpret text because they fail to obtain a full picture of the selection and be able to employ critical thinking skills that rely on comprehension.
At the traditional school, we are required by our state to complete certain literacy checks a few times per year, including an oral reading fluency and what's called a MAZE test, where students read a non-fiction passage with three words periodically given as choices to correctly complete a sentence. Students must circle or mark the word that best completes the sentence. In both cases, these literacy assessments are timed. This is not the case for the virtual school's literacy check. My host teacher explained that they are untimed when reading the 100 words the teacher selects for them to read aloud. If comprehension is the goal, she said, the faster the student tries to go, they may mess up and further damage their ability to comprehend.
But what about before students take this literacy assessment as part of their culminating exam? How do virtual school English teachers identify and serve their struggling readers when they never meet with students in person? Well, my the teacher said that it is more difficult in the virtual school to recognize those students who might be having difficulties in reading. She said it takes a keen eye to know which students might be avoiding more difficult assignments and skipping around from module to module, not because they are lazy, but because they aren't strong readers and may be in need of additional help. Further, the teachers do not receive literacy ability records for students, such as state reading assessment scores, automatically. Those scores either have to be requested specially by the virtual school from their traditional school guidance counselor or the information is given to the virtual school by the parent or the students themselves. This is not the case in the traditional school where every teacher is given a copy of students' state reading test scores and expected to play a role in increasing those marks.
However, because of the very nature of the virtual school's English class, there is a lot of reading involved and a weak reader might have a difficult time completing assignments without assistance. For instance, my host teacher said in the case of ESOL students, each is encouraged to have someone available with them to go online and help with translating or explaining the coursework personally. Given the difficulty with assessing student reading ability through the coursework at first, my host teacher said her particular virtual school is in the process of implementing basic literacy checks when students first come into the course and determine their baseline abilities. She said this would also include their comfort and abilities with the information and communication technology (ICT) literacy that I mentioned in previous blogs. This way, she said, the virtual school teacher will know what they need to focus on for each student in helping to bolster and develop their literacy and technology skills.
I think in the traditional classroom teachers might often have more exposure to the student and their work over a period of time (even a week) and is able to identify their literacy shortcomings quickly. Still, as is apparently true for virtual school as well, students in traditional school might not do certain assignments, not out of rebellion or laziness, but simply because they don't understand what they are being asked to do. I know for many teachers it is easy to jump to conclusions and assume that it is sloth, but if one looks closer and isn't hasty, they can identify where a student might need literacy skill development. For instance, a student might blow off an assignment that involves creating a computer-based document. It might come across as being belligerent and idle, but it could be because the student is a poor typist and speller and/or has never had a computer in the home and avoided classes that involved interacting with it in the past.
Personally, I commend the virtual school teachers who seek to identify students weak in literacy and then help to develop their skills, because it isn't as easy to determine who these students are, especially out of the 200-plus students that are often assigned to some of these teachers. Further, because this virtual school is a not a diploma-granting institution they are not considered ultimately responsible for students' literacy abilities or their passing of state reading assessments, however, they strive to increase students' skills in these areas anyway. Again, this is because the school's focus is on serving the students and getting them what they need for personal success, as it should be.
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3 comments:
The more reflections I read, the more I marvel at the similarities between the virtual school and face-to-face classroom. It makes sense, really. The more popular the virtual school becomes, the more it reflects a cross section of the national student population. I would expect to many of the same academic challenges. What's most interesting is how those challenges are handled in a virtual environment. It's clear that communication is SO important between the teacher and virtual students. As you point out, they seem to do a good job of identifying struggling readers with the strategies they are using.
It seems like students with reading difficulties can definitely slip under the radar in a virtual course unless teachers actively look out for that. It seems like getting state reading assessment scores automatically would be useful for virtual teachers, yet I can see how that could difficult to arrange.
I think one of us mentioned this before now, but I wonder how the local school districts feel about the virtual school teachers not having the same 'pressure' in terms of student performance on standardized testing.
Like any learning environment, the teacher is the key to student success. Virtual teachers need to be on the prowl for hidden academic difficulties, as do face to face teachers. Classrooms have so many distractions and it's easy to miss reading difficulties if one isn't looking for them. Virtual teachers seem to have fewer distractions, but they have MANY more students. Meeting the needs of learners is tricky business, in all learning environments.
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