Katie O’Connor’s Intervention
Prompt/Task
Students were to read and purposefully annotate materials to infuse into their writing. Scaffolding was necessary so information is listed below is based on largest impact on learning.
Design Overview
- Pre-reading and writing, multiple interventions, post-reading and writing over the course of a semester.
- Required reflection on skills and “habits of mind” at the end of each major intervention.
- Same assignments given to 2015-2016 students as a pilot group to gain understanding of which interventions would be most productive. Most interventions listed below were attempted and refined over the course of using twice. NOTE: “The Shallows” editing page was not used last year, and ironically had the largest impact.
- Students were very aware of the process of my working with my cohort, so overt discussions about need for reading and writing improvement was very overt.
Population
- At Ferris High School, Bridge to College is the required class for seniors, so they are very traditional classes. Approximately 20-30 students varying in levels and abilities from university bound to students with fifth grade reading and writing levels.
Interventions
- Students were given an easily accessible text with a request for annotations of text then a written response after reading. First layer of intervention provided no instruction of how or what to annotate for the purpose of collecting an assessment of students’ demonstration of “understanding”.
- After completion, students were to reflect on their efforts and explain their understanding of the purpose of and the strategies typically used to “hold thinking” while reading.
- Students were introduced to “Annotating with a Purpose” (a guide to annotating text based on the purpose for reading) and asked to practice annotations while reading numerous texts throughout the semester.
- Students were then asked to transfer reading (including significant annotations) into their own writing without instruction of how to do so.
- Students reflected on what they understand and typically do when asked to “provide evidence” in their writing acknowledging they didn’t understand the purpose for annotations because so much of what they were taught was around “text to text”, “text to self”, and “text to world” which did not address purpose for transitioning to their own writing.
- Instructional interventions of annotating for the purpose of source integration and commentary on such integration were scaffolded for students over the course of two more units.
- Realizing students still lacked true understanding of the level of writing expected of them in college courses, they then assessed college level coursework varying between “not college ready”, “college ready” and “college level” to develop understanding of college level writing expectations. Once they realized the expectation, they compared their writing to the different levels to evaluate which level they felt best described their writing.
- Students final demonstration for writing for the semester was a 3-5 page paper discussing the impact the internet has on human learning. They were required to integrate “The Shallows” by Nicholas Carr as the primary source and three additional academic sources to support what they have to say about their chosen topics.
- Students reflected on their biggest improvements with their writing skills and the most significant interventions used causing improvement.
