6th grade language arts teacher at Carver Middle School
She sits in the second row, and she is tiny. When I ask students to sit up and get
focused, her feet dangle under her desk like the pendulum of a clock. “Slinky,” as her friends call her because of
her ever curly hair, has not missed a day of school all year, and she is never
late. She has never told me this, in
fact she rarely speaks to me at all, but I know she likes to be here.
Yet as is typical of most students in this class, she is a
struggling reader. At the very thought
of reading grade level text, I can see her eyes glazing over as if she is
travelling to a far off place where she is safe from the fear of failure and
embarrassment. A note to the wise; most
everybody has a fear of failure, but at no point in life is this fear more
pronounced than in middle school.
Back to “Slinky”…“Slinky”
has spent so much time not comprehending text that, instead of asking for help,
she has slowly developed coping strategies to deal with this dilemma. She pretends to read. To answer written questions, she writes parts
of the text. During sustained silent
reading, she tries not be noticed.
Getting students like “Slinky” to embrace the possibility of
academic success appears monumental. You
see, on paper “Slinky” is a 6th grade student, but inside her own
head she knows she is not. She knows
that she can not do what successful 6th graders are doing. On the play yard, these are her close
friends, but in the classroom they are miles apart. This is the conundrum that struggling
students face every school day.
Enter blended learning (insert trumpets here). Blended learning gives all of our students
the time they need to work on what is most pressing to their long term academic
success. They need time to experience
the intrinsically rewarding sensation of true success.
Since the initial inception of blended learning at my school
last year, my students, “Slinky” included, have shown dramatic improvement on
both state test scores and the quality of class work. “Slinky” has improved 2 grade levels in reading, since blended
learning has addressed her areas of greatest need.
The time period each day where “Slinky” is reading materials appropriate to her lexile level makes all the difference. She is learning more now than she has in a long time and slowly, but surely, her confidence as an academic and indeed as a powerful person is beginning to bloom.
The time period each day where “Slinky” is reading materials appropriate to her lexile level makes all the difference. She is learning more now than she has in a long time and slowly, but surely, her confidence as an academic and indeed as a powerful person is beginning to bloom.
Mr. Barret Graf has been a teacher for 14 years, the past eight of which have been spent as a 6th grade language arts teacher at Carver Middle School. The Partnership for Los Angeles Schools recently awarded Mr. Graf a challenge grant to research blended learning models and produce a series of self-guided mini-lessons using Achieve3000.
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