From Reflection to Action
“Personal reflection is a way of life, not just an interesting intellectual exercise. When you begin to acquire and value the habits of personal reflection your professional life will be enriched.”
My Challenge
Since I am not currently teaching full time I am going to write about a challenge that is on a more personal level. My youngest son suffered chronic ear infections for the first two and a half years of his life. We went to doctor after doctor and even to the ENT to try to get him some help since I knew from my teaching experience that his speech wasn’t developing properly. Finally at two and a half they put tubes in his ears and what a difference it made but by then he was behind. We moved quite a bit over the last few years and it seemed no speech therapist or teacher shared my concerns of his delays in academics. School became very frustrating for him and lowered his self-esteem. As parents we knew that something had to change so we moved back to my hometown to a school district where we knew he would get the help he needed. The principal didn’t want to listen to my concerns or even hear any history so she would have an idea of how to deal with him. Through all of this he got one of the most amazing teachers in the world. She is someone I would love to have as my mentor. Even with a number of kids in her class that needed extra help she made sure that each child was getting what they needed. I sat in meetings with her as she told me the progress he was making and how thrilled she was and as she is telling me this she has tears in her eyes. How easy it would have been for her just to let him get by but she pushed and encouraged him all year and the results were astounding. She truly lives by the quote, “failure is not an option.”
What I’ve Read
I read two articles that discussed ways to help students with literacy that dealt with learning difficulties. The first article was called, “A Breakthrough for Josh: How Use of an IPad Facilitated Reading Improvement”. It talked about how a teacher was encouraged to use an IPad as part of a diagnosis and tutoring project with a fifth grade ADHD student. This young boy was in fifth grade but read at a second grade level. He was very drawn to the IPad and could stay focused for quite a while when using it. They used it to (a) record him reading, (b) play reading games, and (c) read books. Within this six week tutoring project he went up a whole grade in his reading level. “The device not only helped the student focus attention, it facilitated his becoming much more metacognitive in his reading.” (McClanahan, Williams, Kennedy, & Tate, 2012). Although he was still behind he now had the confidence in himself that he could learn. I chose this article because my son loves using the IPad and although I have installed many educational apps on it for him I felt that this may have ways to help him with reading that I hadn’t found.
The second article I read was called, “Language Delays, Reading Delays, and Learning Difficulties: Interactive Elements Requiring Multidimensional Programming”. This article talked about how delays in speech can cause delays in learning to read and other learning difficulties. This article caught my attention because I felt it dealt with the challenge I am facing with my son. The axiom stated byMcGee and Purcell-Gates (1997) holds true: “Children learn to read and write successfully if their teachers accommodate their instruction to the children, and they struggle if they do not.”
New Insights
I gained a lot from my research this week. Technology is so important to our life today that anyway we can incorporate it into helping our students learn the more they will gain. I am always looking for ways to help my son in his reading struggles and what better way to do it than using what he loves, his IPad. I plan to use these ideas I learned in the article not only to help him overcome the challenge of reading but to also help my future students.
Actions and Evaluations
In order to monitor how these methods are working I plan to do an assessment on the students before I begin using the IPad in my goal to improve reading levels and then again at the end of the six weeks. I will use an assessment test to find out what reading level to start at so that self-confidence is built along the way. I believe that reading comprehension and fluency will be gained by using what I learned in this article.
“Reflective teaching means looking at what you do in the classroom, thinking about why you do it, and thinking about if it works – a process of self-observation and self-evaluation.” We as teachers need to continue to learn, not just from reading and attending conferences, but also from our students. When we do this we show our students how important it is to become lifelong learners.
Reflections of Teaching 