3. Portfolio of Implementation Showing Fidelity

I teach basic reading and English Language Arts in a rural public middle school in Archdale, North Carolina.  I chose to implement the Word Mapping Strategy in a small group special education classroom.  The class is a basic reading content support focused on increasing basic reading skills as well as increasing overall literacy.  The small group has 4 8th grade students in it that have all been previously identified as exceptional learners.  Two of the students are identified as having a specific learning disability and two are identified as other health impaired due to attentional struggles.  The reading levels of this group of students, measured by the San Diego Quick Reading Screener, are between the 2nd and 5th grade levels.   This group of students was chosen for several reasons; they were already scheduled in and require, a small group exceptional children’s (EC) reading class, they all are reading well below grade level, and they all have a history of doing poorly with word part (roots/stems) assessments.  The students in my school are all expected to learn and memorize science stems each week.  This particular group of students has historically struggled with this task as well as struggle to demonstrate a skill set to break apart words and understand their meaning.  Based on reading assessments and classroom observations, this small group of students often do not attempt to read, break apart, or guess at a words meaning, especially within grade level text.  This class, per county expectations, is primarily the implementation of the Reading Achievement Program (RAP) from the Hill Center in Durham, North Carolina.  However, as teachers we have the freedom to embed other research based instructional practices based on student need.  Therefore, this group began the Word Map Strategy once or twice a week for the 50 minute class period.   The lesson implementation took approximately 12 weeks and the students will continue to generalize and practice with the strategy with grade level content area textbooks for the remainder of the school year. 

    I teach at Winkler Middle School in Concord, North Carolina. We are a 6-8 school and I am implementing this strategy with my 7th grade science students.  There are 26 students in the class.  Many of the students in this class are below grade level readers.  I have two students with IEPs (individual education plans) and two English Language Learners.     
    I chose to implement this strategy with my science class during both our weather/climate unit and our air quality unit.  Because these students struggle with reading, we mapped some key vocabulary words prior to reading an informational article.                                                                      
    Word mapping occurs several times throughout the school year. I spent close to 40 minutes the first time I taught the strategy.  After that, we usually spent approximately 20 minutes reviewing the concept and mapping vocabulary words. Students keep copies of the prefixes, suffixes, and roots in the back of their science notebooks.  Anchor charts with word mapping reminders are posted throughout the room.
    During this particular lesson, a few students struggled when working independently to separate the suffix from the root.  I facilitated by walking around the room and assisting whenever necessary.  Students enjoyed making predictions about the definitions.  I asked them to turn and talk, sharing their predicted definitions with a partner.
   On the air quality unit test, there was significant improvement with this group's scores as compared to last year.  Students felt that the word mapping helped them to understand the vocabulary.  Next time I implement word mapping in science, I plan to make sure each of the words maps easily.  If there are some that present challenges, I would model those with the class. 

I have been teaching word mapping for three years to incoming sixth graders at middle school. 100% of these kids have only passed one or two SOLs, none of which are reading SOLs. The students are a mixture of races and abilities. Each class contains 12 to16 students and each class comes every other day for 50 minutes for one semester.

Progress is monitored through the Word Mapping Spreadsheet and students keep a notebook.

Notes are posted in the classroom for quick review each class.

Generalization is introduced early to help students mastery.

Powerpoint with evidence:
https://docs.google.com/a/hcps.us/presentation/d/1b1_A4Mp8j1aNDtVgzL16Dd-lZ6fDjQtlmTkpiFczzAs/edit?usp=sharing