108 Assignment 2: Differentiated Assessment

For the unit that your Lesson Study lesson plan is situated in, what are your student outcomes (unit topic, understandings, knowledge, skills) and your end of unit assessment? How does your planned instruction & formative assessment for the lesson plan move your students toward that goal?

It's a little tough to answer this question since I chose to differentiate my blending (or, well, re-differentiate my blending... I tried it about a month ago but I had too many things going on for the kids to do and time-wise it was all over the place). The Top 10 standard I was hitting is Reading 1.10- Generate the sounds from all the letters and letter patterns, including consonant blends and long- and short-vowel patterns, and blend those sounds into recognizable words. Since blending is 'ongoing' the outcomes are essentially what's written in the standard, but I know that for some of my students, they still have a way to go on that. On the other hand, I have 7 that are fairly proficient in this arena, so giving them the independent work to do makes sense I think.

In terms of assessment, its different if we're taking about this in terms of the 'unit' or in terms of the specific day. For the day that I had videotaped, the goal was for the students to be able to blend words that contained the ou (/ow sound/) spellings. We were working on the OCR 'cow card' (day 2 of this study, since we'd already covered the ow spelling). Understanding being that vowel teams paired together can make a different combined sound than the two vowels do separately-- something we've also been working on in the past two OCR 'mini-units'. My instruction for the day moves my students toward that goal by ensuring that all have reached a level of understanding of the sound (via two different means-- written communication with higher students, verbal with lowers) and are able to sound out words that contain the sound. This didn't happen 100% in the lesson for all students (I had 2 that still didn't totally 'get it'), but I had built-in the option of continuing it in Guided Reading groups later in the afternoon to go over it again and specifically address these issues. I'm trying to track what's going on in terms of blending with these specific few kids, because I'm thinking that I may need to implement a 'blending center' (I have a variety of thoughts on how to do this, but will be running a few by Peggy this week) just for my lowest reading group. They seem to need more than what I was able to provide during the differentiated lesson, and without boring the majority of my class (who, per ongoing assessment, totally 'get it'), I think I need to look at other avenues to ensure mastery for them. I hope that that makes sense-- I track 'blending' (and general phonemic awareness lapses) through a system of notes on which kids still need to work on what, and I definitely plan on getting myself together more on this and pulling together a more cohesive system of assessment for this soon.