What I'm Finding...

Upon analyzing all of my data that I have collected thus far, here are a few themes that I am noticing. The students who are in the class of struggling readers really do dislike reading. I was able to observe the students in their classroom setting during the first thirty minutes of class. The students began the class period with AR reading. I was anxious to see how students responded to this time during class. Several students were seen not reading at all. They would either open their book and stare off into space or they would look at the pages and be flipping back and forth through the pages clearly not reading. A handful of students didn't even have a book that they had been consistently reading because they immediately got up and went to the classroom library where they quickly grabbed a book without really paying attention to even what they were choosing. One student, a fifth grader, chose a "Clifford" book. This is really uncommon for a fifth grader to be reading and I would imagine a little embarrassing. These observations made it obvious to me that reading does not hold a high level of importance. This seems to me that they have never been able to foster a positive relationship with reading because they simply aren't good at it. Being in a class full of kids like this for several years can cause these feelings of reading to decrease if they aren't surrounded by students who do care about reading. In the adjacent classroom where there are students who are advanced readers, the students are deep into their chapter books with every single student either reading or taking a quiz on a book that they have just finished. There are no interruptions and the teacher doesn't even have to ask the students twice to read. To me, grouping students in this way is giving the struggling readers an extreme disadvantage at improving their ability to be better readers. They have no one to look up to. I'm anxious to see what my further observations and future conversations with these students might provide me with.