Teacher Evaluation of the Program
School: Abraham Lincoln High School
Teacher: Constance Flannery
School Year: 2001–2002
Do you think your students have benefited from your collaborations in the CAPI project?
During the Fall 2001–Spring 2002 school year, two of my classes were directly involved in a collaborative with the CAPI project: my third period Psychology class, which had 38 students in the fall, and my fifth period Psychology, which had 32 in the fall and 26 in the spring.
Both classes were given the reading comprehension and writing tests administered by the State Universities for placement purposes in October 2001, and the writing test was administered again in May 2002.
In the fall, when the results came back from the tests, Esther Chan went over the results with my students. Each one became clearer about where their individual strengths and weaknesses in vocabulary and comprehension-understanding of inferences, allusions, deductions, were.
During the remainder of the school year, Esther and I tried to work with the students as individuals and in groups to improve their reading skills. Some of the methods I employed were:
- Ten minutes of silent reading, usually of the Chronicle newspaper, each day
- Developing pre-reading strategies for each new chapter
- One paragraph summaries of the chapter based on the pre-reading activity
- Outlining the chapter
- Specific short essay questions based on reading the chapter
- Multisensory classroom activities based on the newspaper and chapter readings
- Video note taking skills and writing short summaries of the videos
- Out loud reading to students of newspaper articles and pertinent myths (such as Psyche and Cupid)
Which, if any, of your teaching practices have changed or been influenced by working with your SFSU collaborator? What was the most useful/valuable practice you implemented in your classroom?
Although I was already doing some of these activities before the collaboration, I honed them as a result of Esther Chan’s weekly visits to my classroom. Esther and I realized that some of the students were not really reading the chapters but answering the essay questions based on partial readings of some sections, as well as the classroom discussions. Esther modeled the pre-reading method to the class and I assigned it as a homework.
The next day I questioned the students about the chapter based on their pre-reading. Many were amazed at how much they had learned in a relatively short time, 20–30 minutes, using this technique. I also found it helped getting them to go back and now read in detail, over two or three days, the entire chapter.
I used this method consistently with each new chapter, and it was the most useful new practice that I implemented in the classroom.
At the end of the fall semester, Esther asked the students to evaluate the CAPI program. Most of the students mentioned the pre-reading as a valuable new skill that they had developed. Some mentioned that they thought their writing had also improved because they were now writing clearer with the purpose of having others understand what they were saying, as opposed to just writing for themselves.
I have for many years used silent reading with newspapers and magazines at the beginning of the period to encourage students to read more. I have now become more aware of the importance of interactive reading and encourage my students to talk about what they have read with other students or to look at and quietly discuss articles and pictures in magazines.
Car and Driver, Sports Illustrated, Seventeen, and Glamour are especially conducive to interactive reading. I will try more next year to get he students to apply these interactive skills to more sophisticated reading, such as the editorials in the newspaper and their textbook readings.
Reading myths, fables, short stories, etc. to my students has always been enjoyable and I was gratified to get this method confirmed as worthwhile at one of the CAPI Saturday meetings. Again, I received ideas as to how to make this activity more useful and valuable to the students and help them improve their comprehension.
Basically, I enjoyed and grew as a teacher from the collaboration with the CAPI Project. It helped me to be more consistent in my teaching practices and more focused on improving students’ reading and writing. Esther Chan was a joy to work with. She is very supportive, and her feedback on what I was doing was most helpful in my methodology development.
She gave me many good suggestions to improve my units, which I intend to use more effectively in the coming year. Although Esther only came to my fifth period class, my third period class also directly benefited from all her suggestions, and both classes received the diagnostic tests. I also used many of her ideas and suggestions with my government/economics classes. I had three of those for an additional 90 students.
What can you suggest as further methods of improving student proficiency for entering the CSU campuses?
Another good interactive method that I have used for years in my American Government class is political cartoons. I have all the students study the political carton on the editorial page and tell me what they visually see—a big man, a small woman, etc. Then we read the words in the cartoon and try to make sense out of them.
Finally we read the caption of the cartoon and analyze the cartoon and its message. I think this is the same set of decoding skills they need when reading difficult expository text: study the information carefully, put all the pieces/clues together and then arrive at a conclusion.
Did the Diagnostic Writing Service (DWS) help you or your students? Why or why not?
The first Diagnostic writing Service report was useful to my students and helped them to know what their strengths and weaknesses in writing were, and gave them some ideas of what to do to improve. Esther’s weekly visits helped with this, too.
The second test was less useful because it came too late in the semester and was graded by a different reader who graded them much harder than the first one. This was discouraging to the students, and confusing.
Also, because the semester was almost over and most were graduating in a week, they didn’t care. They had already taken the test ‘for real’ and were sick of tests, and it was just too late for them to see the value in it.
Because the evaluator was much stricter, I had trouble seeing the value in it, also, and—in fact—it was discouraging to me, too. I didn’t think it accurately reported the change or improvement in their writing since most of them got lower scores than the first time.
What other assistance or involvement would you like to have from San Francisco State University?
I plan to be involved with the CAPI Project again this next school year as a teacher facilitator of the one week workshop coming in late August, as well as the expanded project at Lincoln High involving several teachers in other disciplines during the year.
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