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Your most important project for the reading section of this course is your Practicum Journal. It is the way that you can demonstrate what you have learned in a real setting. You will be tutoring a middle school student who is having some difficulty with reading, both assessing his/her reading and working with the student on strategies to improve reading. You will also be teaching several lessons in your apprenticeship site, observing what the students need and helping them to develop skills and strategies in reading.

Journal Directions:
Each time that you meet with your tutee or have insights in your apprenticeship class/classes about reading or the teaching of reading, write in your journal about what you have learned. This will be like an ongoing conversation with your instructor, so it needn't be formal. When appropriate, the texts you are reading should enter this conversation. Your reading about reading will also shed light on what is going on with your tutee. If at all possible, please word process these entries. You will also be asked to try out the following activities with your tutee and/or with your apprenticeship class, and the journal is a place to write about how those activities went. In each entry, also include questions that you have reading and the teaching of reading. Freire (1970) noted that reflection should be inextricably lined with action (praxis). Without action there is unfilfilled reflection and without reflection there is only runaway activism. The journal entries should provide reflection about what you did and about what you will do in the future.

Below is a list of possible activities to do with your tutee. Bracket text in which you have discussed the use of the following activities with your tutee or class, and label them in the margin so we can both keep records. Each of us will initial in the blank, so we can track your progress on this checklist. Remember, you need not check off each item; some will be impossible given your tutee or your apprenticeship class. Nevertheless, the Plan for Progress and the Miscue Analysis are mandatory, and you should complete at least 2/3 of the activities with your tutees. If this won't be possible for some reason, conference with your instructor.

________reading interviews - Describe what you learned about your tutee as a reader from using the NCTE interview, the Burk interview that we tried in class, and the interview in Schoenbach, p. 49. When you feel that your tutee is comfortable with you, you can talk with them about their definitions of reading and how those definitions might affect the way they go about reading. This may be your first of many metacognitive conversations.

________interest inventories- Describe their use with your tutee. You may prefer to look over these inventories and just have conversations with your student. What different inventories did you use, or did you decide not to use one? Why? How will you be able to use the information provided? What topics might interest your tutee for sustained silent reading?

________setting goals- What goals does your tutee have for improving his/her reading. Talk about this right away with your tutee and again before you complete the Plan for Progress. You can also have students set goals for every time he/she reads. What does the tutee perceive that he/she needs to get from that particular text on that particular day?

________book choice- Describe the process you went through to connect your tutee or other students to a book. Remember to help them find a book that is on the easy side, one that they will be able to read independently, one which will help the student develop fluency in reading. It is also important that the reading is not a series of short pieces, but a piece of longer fiction or non-fiction. When your student selects a book, find a second copy for yourself from my book cart or from the library. Help the student to be aware of his/her purpose for reading this book. Talk to your students about giving the book a "ten-page chance" (See Schoenbach et al., 63-65).

________sustained silent reading for fluency- Depending on the student's frustration level with reading, how will you find a way for the student to read silently and independently? You will need to read with him or her for awhile to figure out what situation for this may be most effective.

________tapping prior knowledge- Spend some time helping your tutee to find out what he/she already knows about the topic of the book. This is what your text would call "accessing existing schemata." If you see any big holes in the knowledge your tutee has, you might want to tell them something to help them get started in the book. You can also help your tutee to understand the "grammar" of a specific text (Schoenbach, p. 35) and the discourse community that it is meant for. See Beers: Front Loading Strategies.

________ think aloud- Model thinking aloud sessions, using a section of something that you are reading, and then ask the student to do the same in the first few paragraphs of the text. Have students try. You should write about this at least once, but it (as well as post and pre-reading activities) should be modeled and practiced in many sessions. Think alouds can include summarizing, questioning, predicting, articulating confusions, solving problems, rereading, visualizing, comparing, etc

________pre-reading activities- Describe students formulation of reading questions, how did it help them find out what they already know about the subject of the text internalizing questioning/ prediction strategies. See Beers: Front Loading Strategies.

________activities during reading- Help your tutee internalize questioning strategies while they are reading. Help students to ask questions while they read. You should write about this at least once, but it (as well as post and pre-reading activities) should be modeled and practiced in most every session. How do these strategies help your tutee keep their attention on the text? See Beers: Chapter Chapter 7.

_______ visualization- Help your tutee to visualize what he/she is reading by developing pictures in the mind or by drawing. This will help with comprehension and retention. See Beers for more details.

________shared reading- Read aloud with your tutee, which although is new to the student, has some feature of familiarity for the tutee. The theory is that the student learns fluency and expression by paired reading with the teacher. As a tutor, allow the student to assume increasing amounts of responsibility for the process of reading.

________chunking- Does your tutee need this? This can mean chunking information together in reading, or seeing words within words. Different researchers/practitioners use the term differently. Would it help/has it helped your tutee to find words within words? Does it help your tutee to chunk meaning together from different parts of the sentence?

________sight words- Checking to see that your tutee knows basic sight words can be a part of assessing what your tutee needs. There are lists available beginning page 327 of Beers book. Beers also gives good information about what to do if your tutee can't read most of these words in Chapter 11 and 12. Write about what you learn.

________miscue analysis- Once you are clear about how to do miscue analysis and feel a certain amount of comfort with your tutee, do this. It is required that you do this and do the analysis. Conference with your instructor after the process and write about what you learned about your tutee's reading. Beyond writing about what you have learned, make plans for future work with your tutee on the basis of what you discovered. What questions are you left with?

________miscue analysis conference with tutee- Meet with your tutee to discuss the results of the miscue analysis. This should prompt a metacognitive conversation (see Schoenbach pp. 57-58- I will copy this text for you). Discuss the positive strategies that the students bring to reading (the good mistakes) before you focus in on what the student could change. Let this session build confidence. This should be completed by week 7 of the semester.

________cloze procedure- Use the cloze procedure with your student both as a means of assessing the readability of a particular text for that student and to help students in predication skills.

________post-reading activities- Experiment with your tutee to see what kind of post-reading activities best helps him/her to both comprehend and to anchor information in the long term memory. What kind of activities worked or didn't work? What is there to learn about your tutee from this? Does your tutee have comprehension or retention difficulties? See Beer, Chapter 8.

________plan for progress - At the conference about your tutee's miscue analysis, talk with your course instructor about a plan for progress for your student. Include information that you have collected from your tutee's teacher, from inventories, interviews, goal setting, and from the miscue analysis. With your cooperating teacher, talk about whether the Plan for Progress shoud be written to your student, the cooperating teacher, the student's parents or some combination of those people. When the plan is complete, review the plan with the tutee's teacher, give the teacher a copy and perhaps a copy for the tutee's parents and/or the tutee, and turn in a copy to your instructor. This should be completed by week 8 of the semester. See more directions below.

________dialogue journal (similar to SSR log)- After reading Atwell, try writing letters back and forth with your tutee about what is going on in the reading he or she is doing. Try this with email if your tutee is on-line. What kinds of things is your tutee predicting or thinking about in this process? Does writing help your tutee in comprehension or retention of information?

________vocabulary work. Read the Comber and Peet (in Cleary and Linn, 1992) article and Beers, Chapter 9, use some of these strategies with your tutee, and give your students multiple exposures to words they will encounter again in their reading. Write about how it went.

________a reading guide- Make up a reading guide for your tutee for some chapter long reading that is important for the tutee to understand. Help him/her tap prior knowledge, ask questions, and make predictions during his or her reading process. Was this effective in helping your tutee to get meaning from the text. Include a copy of the guide with your journal entry.

________organizational skills- Work on organizational skills with your tutee, what do they need, how can you help them? Some students have even helped them clean out their back packs and lockers, turn work that the tutee found there, organize a binder, start an assignment book. What does your student need to get organized?

________readability formulas- Try out two readability formulas on a text that your tutee is reading. Write about what you learned. What would be positive and negative ways to use these in your future students' best interests?

________dialect problems- Think about the dialect that your tutee uses in spoken English. In what ways might this affect your tutee's reading or writing?

________ consciousness raising - help your tutee to see that his or her problems are not due to intellect and help him/her to explore future careers and the reading or writing that might be needed for possible careers; write about what you learned from these conversations. These conversations will be metacognitive in nature. What kinds of texts will they need to work with in the future? How can they come to know this? How can they learn how to master them? How could he/she come to finding authentic reasons for reading?

________downshifting- Think about your instructor's short lecture on downshifting (when emotional confidence affects reading). Does this affect your tutee? How? What does it indicate?

________learning style-How would you classify your tutee's learning style? How should this affect the way his teachers should work with him/her? Write about what you learned and what you might do about it.

Plan for Progress (Attach the miscue analysis. Your audience will be the teacher or parent. The student may also read this. Conference with your instructor before giving this to your apprenticeship teacher.)

Goals: What are the goals that the student has for her/himself in reading?

Collected Information: What information have you collected about the reader? Refer to the Burke interview, to the students' interest inventories, to the miscue analysis, and to other interactions that you have had with the student reader.

Miscue Analysis: Attach the miscue analysis, but write what you and the student have learned from it in fairly simple language.

Plan for Progress: What things do you plan to do with the reader during your apprenticeship to meet the reader's goals and to enable the reader to be successful in school? What activities might the teacher or parent continue with the student after you are finished with your apprenticeship? See Beers, p. 27-28 and other strategies from the book or from the activities above.

Suggested Tutoring Session (Callery, 2005):

Familiar Reading (fairly easy reading that has already been done in a different session)- 10 minutes

Miscue Analysis (from the prior day's shared reading text)- 5 minutes

Guided Silent Reading- (have them predict and confirm)- 3 minutes

Shared Reading (tutor and tutee read aloud together a section of next text, slightly slower pace, reading fluently, reading with emphaisis on expression and intonation)- 10 minutes

Reciprocal Questioning -(tutor and tutee take turns asking each other questions about the text read in shared reading)-2 minutes

Focused word study- 5 minutes, if needed; see Beers list of common words for recognition, or practice chunking

Option #2: Reading Inquiry Project

This assignment is designed to help you think deeply about what you see at your apprenticeship in regard to reading and the teaching of reading. The assignment borrows heavily from the project described in Braunger, Donahue, Evans, and Glaguera (2005). Based on your observations of students, teachers, and curriculum at your student teaching placement and reading, you will identify a question about reading or learning to read. Using the students at your placement as a major source of data, you will answer that question. At the end of this course, we will share the findings with each other in a May class.

Assignment in Depth: For each step along the way, you should write up a Reading Inquiry Journal Entry.

1. Identify a Question: What do you want to know about students' ability to read? How will answering this question help your students? How will answering this question help you as a teacher? How, if at all, will it help other teachers? A good inquiry is specific, not general. Think about these questions also as you define your inquiry: Who are your students? What problems do your students have in reading? In what kind of reading or in what reading strategies are you particularly interested and why? What academic reading have you done that has contributed to these questions?

2. Develop a Method to Your Inquiry: Questions to ask include these: What kind of data would you need to answer your question? Surveys? Interviews? Students' written work? Think-aloud data? Based on your question, from whom do you need data: One student who confounds you? All the girls in the class? Boys? Students who don't do reading for homework? Reality check: Can you collect the data you need in a short amount of time? Are students willing to participate in your research? Do some background reading about your topic.

3. Collect and Analyze Data: Does your method of analysis make sense given the nature of the data and your question? We will talk in conference about how to collect qualitative and/or quantitative data (for example, students' writing or interview responses). What reading will help you formulate your research strategy?

4.Discuss Your Findings and Implications: What do you know now that you didn't know before? What are the implications of your findings for teachers' practice? What, if any, are the implications for continued inquiry by you or others?

5. Write your Findings in a Research Abstract: Your abstract should include the following information that is standard in most published research:

Introduction and discussion of the question (why it's important, why you or other teachers care) as well as what others have to say about the question (here you may refer to researchers and authors you have read for this project, this class, or other classes).

Methods (what you did to answer the question, including how you analyzed the data)

Findings (what you learned)

Implications and conclusion (how your research can inform inquiry and practice in reading and writing)

Bibliography (cite the reading that you have done to help you with your inquiry)

6. Share Your Findings with Others in the Class

Follow the above outline in order to present to the class. We will have discussions to connect the presentations.