"The most important thing that schools can do is not to use technology in the curriculum more, but to use it more effectively."
John G. Palfrey and Urs Gasser
www.geckoandfly.com
Elevating Readers Through Blended Learning Proposal
Dear Administrative Team of Wildwood Elementary,
In many conversations with other teachers, I am hearing a repeating theme. Many teachers are seeing a diverse spread of reading abilities in their classroom. With various levels of readers and those children needing many specific needs within those levels, teachers are having a difficult time ensuring that each learner is getting what they need on a daily basis. Oftentimes, we focus on our students with the highest needs for growth that we sometimes do not give enough consideration for growth of our learners who are already meeting expectations or are even performing above expectations.
I would like to offer a solution for teachers to help them meet the needs of all learners in their classrooms. Elevating Readers through Blended Learning would provide individualized learning for every student but would also provide students choices in how they accomplish their tasks as well as a way for them to track their progress.
I am proposing to adopt a blended learning model in my classroom to utilize and develop lessons and activities for students to do at their own pace while the teacher is able to work in small groups. These activities may include adaptive software provided by our district, other digital resources which provide immediate feedback for students, and selected paper based collaborative activities. I will be tracking the growth of my students using a Renaissance Star progress monitoring tool monthly and students will also learn how to use this assessment tool to track their growth. Students will also have opportunities to reflect on their learning to determine how to improve in future lessons.
I believe my students would receive many benefits as a result of their targeted instruction. With using beginning of the year data as well as formative data throughout the year to identify student needs, we should see effective student growth for every learner. With personalized and adaptive learning technology (PAL), students tend to make more gains than students who do not use PAL in interventions (Alrawashdeh, 2023). Students will be responsible for tracking their progress and reflecting on their learning in their goal journals. This would encourage a growth mindset by teaching them to embrace the learning journey versus focusing on final product grades and students with a growth mindset have shown to have an increase in grades over years (Dweck, 2006). By giving students choice in how they accomplish their learning goals, our second grade learners will become motivated to be self directed learners (Prescott, 2018).
I would like your support in helping me implement this model during our guided reading block daily as well as during our intervention period 3 days a week over the 2024-2025 school year. I would also like the support of our reading instructional specialist to look over the data with me so that I can compare the growth of my students to the growth of our campus and district as a whole. This will help me to see if this was an effective model and how I can consider changes for improvement. After seeing positive results, I would like to be able to share my experiences and progress with my grade level team during our weekly collaborative meetings to gauge interest in other teachers.
Best wishes,
Melissa Richards
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References
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Alrawashdeh, G. (2023). Exploring the impact of personalized and adaptive
learning technologies on reading literacy. Educational Research Review,
42, 10. 10.1016/j.edurev.2023.100587
Dweck, C. S. (2006). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Ballantine
Books.
Prescott, J. (2018). Elementary school-wide implementation of a blended
learning program for reading intervention. The Journal of Educational
Research, 111, 497-506.