Action Research Plan-Week 4

1. The goal of our action research investigation is to discover whether a group of three or less versus a group of 4 to 6 yields greater results in a guided reading group of kindergarten through third graders.
2. Classroom teachers and reading specialists will engage students in small group guided reading activities focused on predetermined needs of the students.
3. Tier 2 and tier 3 students will be administered benchmark exams, progress monitoring exams, and beginning, middle, and end of the year TPR I. Resources necessary for this will include Palm pilots, computer spreadsheets, and manipulatives necessary to administer the kindergarten tests.
4. Progress monitoring will begin in September of 2010 and the last TPR I should be administered in the last week of May 2011. This should give a full school year’s worth of data to analyze.
5. The people responsible for the implementation of the action research plan include kindergarten through third grade classroom teachers, reading specialists, and the reading coach.
6. As a reading coach, I am in a unique situation to monitor the implementation of the goals and objectives of this action research plan. It is my job to collect all the data for the reading programs; therefore, I will be able to access it for the needs of the study.
7. Data gathered from the TPR I, benchmarks, and progress monitoring will be disaggregated to determine the impact of group size on guided reading groups. Student performance will be the indicator.

Week 4

My greatest challenge in implementing my action research plan will be in getting classroom teachers to consistently implement tier 2 reading group instruction on a daily basis in their class. There will be consistency with reading intervention teachers, and I will be in charge of tier 3 instruction, but when teachers are stressed to get their entire language arts program into a 120 minute block, I have found that they will often times do away with the intervention instruction.

I hope to work with administration to address this challenge, not just because it affects my action research plan, but also because RtI must be implemented to meet the needs of our students.