1 Running head: READ NATURALLY IN THE CLASSROOM

Adoption of Read Naturally in the Classroom

Project 4 Ashleigh Rohan University of West Georgia MEDT 8461

2 READ NATURALLY IN THE CLASSROOM Description and Need for the Innovation Over the past few years, new Georgia Performance Standards (GPS) have been set in place across all content area curriculums. Teachers are struggling more than ever to fit everything in during the allotted instructional time they are given. This is especially true for Reading teachers. For numerous reasons, students are entering middle grade levels with weak basic reading skills despite earlier interventions. Because the focus of the updated middle grades GPS reading standards is weighted more towards reasoning and higher order thinking skills, fewer standards are dedicated to maintaining and improving the five essential components of reading including: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. Since few middle grades standards focus on these foundational skills, less time is allocated for student mastery. This creates an immense problem. Students cannot correctly answer higher order thinking questions if they cannot read accurately and fluently and retain the information they are reading. Developing reading fluency and automaticity is an essential skill to academic success in reading across the curriculum. Read Naturally is a fluency and comprehension intervention and supplemental program derived from current scientific research on reading fluency. This program was designed to develop fluency, support vocabulary development, and promote comprehension using the powerful, research-based Read Naturally strategy, taking advantage of the benefits and functionality of computers (Read Naturally, n.d.). Students read passages and answer vocabulary, inferencing, and comprehension questions through timed readings and basic review assessments. Students begin the program by completing a placement test to ensure that students are working at their appropriate levels. Then, an individual program is developed by the software

3 READ NATURALLY IN THE CLASSROOM based on the students current zone of proximal development, which is identified in the placement test. How the impact of this innovation will be evaluated? The impact of this innovation will be evaluated in two different ways by two sets of key stakeholders. The two stakeholders are the students and the teachers. First, ongoing student progress reports measuring improvements in their individual work will be generated on a weekly basis to determine if consistent progress is being made and/or if additional reading practice is necessary on a specific reading level. The Read Naturally program produces these as often as the teacher requests. Second, an informal survey will be administered to all participating Reading teachers to assess specific needs, level of satisfaction, and suggestions for improvement. Statements will be rated on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 would mean Strongly Agree, and 1 would reflect Strongly Disagree. They will include the following: y y y y y y My identified at risk students use this program on a daily basis. I am able to quickly retrieve reports and assess student progress using this program. Technical support is easily received for this software. This program delivers measureable results in reading fluency. I am satisfied with this intervention innovation. I am willing to use this software next school year.

Who will be responsible for collecting ongoing data assessing the implementation of this innovation? As this innovation is designed for use with students identified as needing intervention, it would be plausible for the teacher responsible for reading intervention to be accountable for collecting the ongoing data. That teacher would already be responsible for monitoring each

4 READ NATURALLY IN THE CLASSROOM students progress. It would stand to reason that the reading intervention teacher should also be responsible for collecting and analyzing student and teacher data relating to this innovation. What windows of opportunity exist for reviewing the effectiveness of this technology innovation? The grading periods for this school are nine weeks with progress reports being generated halfway through the grading period. Review of this innovations effectiveness would be done at the progress reporting period. This would allow those involved to determine 3 things. First, it would be decided if the student is progressing and their intervention course of action should be continued. Second, it would be determined whether or not the student is having difficulty or needs additional intervention to address fluency weaknesses. Third, it would be decided whether or not the teachers implementing this innovation continue to buy in to the program. As progress monitoring within the software is individualized per student, it would not be necessary to change the assessment procedures. How will you assess the level of technological proficiency gained by teachers? The teacher survey should be consistent from one period to another to track continued progress of this innovations implementation. As there will be a specific resource person designated for ensuring implementation of this software, he/she would naturally be the contact person assigned to address specific problems related to software. These reports would be documented, along with the found resolution for each documented issue. That documentation could be analyzed along with survey responses to show ongoing improvement in technological proficiency with this software.

5 READ NATURALLY IN THE CLASSROOM How will technology be used to evaluate teaching and learning? Each student has their own individualized path to follow assigned by the software program. The software can create several types of reports that monitor student progress in the areas of fluency and comprehension of basic reading skills. These reports can be generated on a basis determined by the teacher. They can also be used to analyze overall class progress in the same areas. As students progress through each story and reading level, the difficulty level is increased to continue challenging them. Therefore, the program is constantly accessing student learning. What will be the key indicator of success for the component(s) of the plan? The key indicator of success will be an overall reduction in the need for further intervention in the Response to Intervention (RTI) Pyramid Model followed by the RTI team at this school. This will be due to more students rising up to grade level expectations by demonstrating increased reading fluency and automaticity, as well as comprehension and vocabulary acquisition. What are the funding requirements and how will this innovation be funded? The Read Naturally Program can be purchased in two ways. It can be purchased either as software for a single computer, which costs $125.00 per computer, per reading level ranging from 1.0 level to 8.0 level. Or, it can be purchased as a site license for up to 130 seats, in which case the cost would be based on how many computers should have it installed and how many levels are needed. The program is supposed to be used by a student at least thirty minutes per day and at least three days per week. As remedial classrooms can only accommodate up to eighteen students per state mandate, there should be ample opportunity for all students to use it in their own classroom having at least 5 computers. All remedial classrooms at this school

6 READ NATURALLY IN THE CLASSROOM currently have that many computers. The intervention reading teacher will have approximately 10 computers in his/her classroom to allow for short term individual intervention that will be facilitated during the allotted Reading class time. Overall, a site license to cover 40 computers should be sufficient for the software needs. The cost of this innovation would have to come from several sources pooled together. The bulk of it would hopefully come from grant sources awarded through local and national philanthropies. Any remaining cost could be absorbed by the special education department budget combined with Remedial Education funds. Hardware Requirements Read Naturally is compatible with Windows 98SE, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, and Windows 7. It is also compatible with Mac OS and OSX or later. At least one of those options is already installed on all school computers at this school. Printers should be networked to all computers installed with Read Naturally for reporting purposes. This will be done by the technology department from this school system. How will you know if this innovation has failed or needs to be abandoned? This innovation would be considered a failure based on two different variables. It should be abandoned if students do not demonstrate improved fluency and comprehension skills after participating consistently for a minimum of 9 weeks, or if teacher surveys indicate that the program itself is not being used. What organizational mechanism will be created that allows changes in the implementation of technology and of the plan itself? As the technology department is responsible for monitoring the use of technology in the classroom already, there would be no additional monitoring of the technology usage. However,

7 READ NATURALLY IN THE CLASSROOM as the software itself would be a resource tool for students referred to the Response to Intervention (RTI) team, the monitoring of usage would be the responsibility of the reading resource teacher. Should the implementation of this innovation appear to be falling below expectations, the reading resource teacher and technology department would collaborate on different methods of modifying this program based on stakeholders responses. How does the implementation of this innovation align with one of the change models described in our text? In his book Surviving Change, Ellsworth (2000) explains that the change process itself cannot be examined until the idea, or innovation, contains the attributes of Rogers Diffusion of Innovation model. He also explains Elys model describing certain conditions that should be in place before the implementation of an innovation can occur. As this innovation contains the attributes of Rogers components, and the conditions exist as described by Elys Conditions of Change model, the innovation is ready to implement. The C-R-E-A-T-E-R model, developed by Havelock and Zolotow, is also described by Ellsworth (2000). This model would best describe the stages of this innovations implementation in the following ways. Stage 0: Care The responsibility of providing students with the skills and knowledge they need to not just pass a state mandated test, but also be able to apply them to solve real world problems lays largely on teachers. For the most part, all teachers are constantly searching for new techniques to do this in the quickest amount of time that will harvest the best results. This holds true for remediation tools for middle grades reading students as well, which lines up with the Care stage of this model.

8 READ NATURALLY IN THE CLASSROOM Stage 1: Relate The relationships between and among key stakeholders and the change agents distinguish this stage. It is critically important that the key stakeholders are seeing eye to eye or united in working towards a common goal. In this case, that is demonstrated by the joint desire for improved reading skills demonstrated by improved test scores. It is equally important that the change agent and the stakeholders have an established rapport in order for the agent to be viewed as a probable facilitator. This is already established by the reading resource teacher who is one of the stakeholders own members acting as the change agent. Stage 2: Examine This stage is described as the diagnosis stage of change implementation. A consensus was reached by the stakeholders and change agent as they carefully and thoughtfully reviewed educational trends and changes brought about by the updated GPS. The diagnosis of the problem has been made and there is a need for remediation in basic reading fluency and comprehension, but there is little to no additional time or opportunity for teachers to address this through whole class instruction. Stage 3: Acquire This part of the change model is the collection phase, where possible resources and solutions are researched and gathered together for comparison. Over the last few years, individuals within the stakeholders group, the 6th through 8th grade teachers, have been doing that. After examining and identifying the source of the problem, they compared the information available on current standardized test score trends in the area of reading. Teachers also shared their own previous experiences with various possible solutions during professional learning breakout sessions. As Read Naturally is a program already in use by 4th and 5th grade teachers

9 READ NATURALLY IN THE CLASSROOM within this school system, the intended adoptees were able to hear first hand experiences with this software in similar school settings with similar school equipment and technical support. Stage 4: Try Because the 4th and 5th grade teachers already had the software for Read Naturally on their computers, the reading resource teacher and a few 5th through 8th grade students were selected to pilot the effectiveness for students in the middle grades during the previous school year. This proved successful as the resource teacher was able to provide individualized intervention through Read Naturally simultaneously while teaching other reading content. The students involved were also successful in demonstrating steady improvement in fluency in a rather short time. Stage 5: Extend This is the point at which the innovation is going to be piloted on a grand scale. As this is the stage where the implementation is going to occur on a school wide basis, this would be the place this system is at in regards to implementing Read Naturally. Once this occurs, this school will be ready to move on to the final stage of the change process model. Stage 6: Renew At this point, the stakeholders and change agent(s) will collaborate again on any tweaks that need to be made to the innovations implementation. This will involve reflection and honest feedback from teachers through their responses to the survey mentioned earlier. Review of individual and collective student performance reports will also be made by the teachers and reading resource person. This would be the after action review component explained by Havelock and Zolotow (Ellsworth, 2000).

10 READ NATURALLY IN THE CLASSROOM Another component of the renew stage is self-renewal in which the stakeholders begin to take more ownership of their own role in the implementation and extension of an innovation. Teachers and students together, through measurable success with the Read Naturally program, may begin their own search for additional software that could broaden the uses and capabilities of the software initially utilized. It is hoped that the program will create such success and satisfaction that continued financial support for the site license would be provided in the future through designated budget funds instead of only through grant funds applied for, yet unable to be counted upon.

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11 READ NATURALLY IN THE CLASSROOM References Ellsworth, J. B. (2000). Surviving Change-a survey of educational change models. Syracuse NY: ERIC Clearinghouse on Information and Technology.

Read Naturally. (n.d.). Read Naturally. Retrieved from http://www.readnaturally.com

http://www.readnaturally.com/products/se2info.htm

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