Issues

When writing my proposal in the summer, it never occurred to me how difficult implementing my methodology would be due to time constraints. I am a content area teacher and my job is to teach my students social studies content. Obviously I teach reading and reading strategies in my class but I had grand illusions of conducting repeated readings at least 3 times a week. This is an impossible task if I want to keep my students on track with my other classes and make sure I'm on track timewise for content. Not to mention, because of maternity leave, I came in three weeks behind the other social studies teacher and had to reteach a few important concepts my sub didn't cover well enough and of course teach and reteach expectations and procedures. When I have used repeated readings for this study, I did not use the specific strategies that I mentioned in my proposal, again due to time. Using Do You Hear What I Hear?, pulled vocab front loading, and chunking graphic organizers is very helpful BUT again, all three of those take most of class period and the concept has to be extremely important for me to spend that kind of time on just reading it. Instead I have used more informal whole class first read, then give "lookfors" and ask them to reread with the "lookfors" in mind. As of now, the observational data that I have collected shows a decent percentage of students that because of the lookfors and repeated readings, feel confident enough to volunteer to answer comprehension questions in the whole-class setting.

When thinking back to my earlier proposal and literature review, I was surprised that I did not find any studies that discussed the affect of repeated readings in middle or high school content areas. Now, however, after seeing the problems I have run into, it is starting to make sense...