BCTELA

Joanne Panas was a teacher consultant for Richmond last year, with a focus on adolescent literacy. She is currently teaching English at McRoberts Secondary in Richmond and working on her first novel. 

( Click here for Joanne's full article, including graphic organizers.)

Leyton Schnellert and Nicole Widdess' excellent article in the Winter 2007 edition of Update detailed where the idea for Second Shot classes came from, the research behind it, and some of the amazing work that went on in Nicole's class. As a district consultant in Richmond this year, I have been the support person for our Second Shot teachers and classes; as such, I would like to take this opportunity to follow up and share what has been happening this year with Second Shot.  

Overview of the IRI and Second Shot

As you may recall from Leyton and Nicole's article, Richmond applied for and received literacy grants from the Ministry of Education for the 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 school years; we have been approved for 2007-2008 as well. These grants are used to support the Intermediate Reading Initiative (IRI) in Richmond. The overall purpose of the IRI is to improve the literacy skills of all students, with a particular focus on grade 8 students transitioning into secondary schools and the additional literacy challenges that come along with that move. To that end, each secondary school in Richmond has a Literacy Leader, who has time in her or his schedule to support school teams and individual teachers as they work to improve their instruction in literacy skills across the curriculum.

Part of this larger picture, which is represented in the recently-updated IRI graphic (Figure 1), is the Second Shot class, which is part of the "Extend" portion of the triangle. This intensive instructional class focuses on students who "survive but don't thrive" in secondary school; often their reading challenges have been minor or masked in elementary school, but when they are faced with the increased amount and complexity of the reading they are required to do in secondary school, they tend to fall further and further behind. These students are offered, in addition to literacy-related instruction in their regular core classes, a "second shot" of literacy instruction and practice in grade 8 which increases the explicit instruction they need to improve.

It's important for me to emphasize here that Second Shot classes are intended to reinforce what is going on in the rest of the school, not fill in gaps of missing literacy instruction. Richmond schools are working to address shared goals set at the school level and across the curriculum in the regular classes; Second Shot classes are part of that school wide-effort. In Richmond, five of our secondary schools have offered a Second Shot class (as each school has its own name for the class, I will use the generic name "Second Shot" throughout this article). For some schools, this is their second year offering this class, and for some it has been their first year. We had new teachers in this role in three of our five schools this year, and the learning curve has been steep! In the next sections I describe some of our successes and struggles.

Sharing and Problem-Solving Together: October

In October 2007, the Second Shot teachers had a day together to discuss their progress, share ideas, and bring up issues of concern. The teachers shared a number of things that were working well for them, including: having one-to-one conferences with students; engaging students with each other through partner talk; incorporating a reading workshop classroom model; using lots of modeling and think-alouds; using graphic organizers; reading aloud to students; guiding students in their choices for independent reading; and using sticky notes to both hold thinking and communicate back and forth with students. Several teachers brought sample lessons and activities to share with the group.

One of the challenges that the teachers identified was that some of the students who had been recommended for the class (usually by their elementary school) were not actually the clientele for whom the class had been designed. For example, some students were reading quite well and did not need to be in the class; in some classes there were students who were reading at a level well below what the class is intended to address. A few students with significant challenges such as emotional or behavioural issues or severe learning disabilities were placed in Second Shot classes; teachers found that the learning needs of these students could be better met through different, more tailored supports in other settings. In essence, there was a lot of confusion-from elementary school resource teachers and grade 7 teachers, to secondary school counsellors and even whole secondary school staffs-about the purpose of the class and the students who would most benefit from the Second Shot experience.

Beginning in January, I solicited the input of all the Second Shot teachers to create a set of guidelines for student selection. Over several months, and with many revisions from the teachers themselves as well as from district staff, we developed a set of documents (see Figures 2-8). In April, I debriefed the documents with elementary principals, with elementary and secondary resource teachers, and with a team from each secondary school, including the Second Shot teacher, the Literacy Leader, and other interested staff. Secondary schools can adapt the documents as needed to their Second Shot program specifications; however, they are keeping the referral form the same for the sake of consistency across the district. The Second Shot teachers have used the documents in their transition meetings with elementary schools; feedback received from the group in June may result in further revisions of the documents for next year.

Second Shot Classroom Partnerships

Part of the role of district consultants in Richmond is not only to support initiatives and school teams, but also to work with individual teachers and classrooms; indeed, it is one of the most enjoyable parts of the job! From January to June I was privileged to be able to work in varying capacities with three of our five Second Shot teachers and classes. My roles included: co-planning lessons and units; helping teachers find suitable materials for their classes; co-teaching lessons; teaching lessons while the teacher observed; and working with individual students and small groups while the teacher worked with the rest of the class.

One classroom where I was able to have long-term involvement was Ian Felgar's Literacy Dynamics class at Cambie Secondary School. Ian and I co-planned a unit on Looking for X by Deborah Ellis, with the goal of teaching students inferring skills; this goal was chosen based on the results of a school-wide grade 8 performance-based assessment (PBA) in the fall, and the students' progress since that assessment. I was able to co-teach many classes with Ian and got to know the students well over several months. (See Figure 9 for an outline of our unit). This classroom partnership was very successful, and Ian and I will be co-presenting the unit and our experiences with this lovely group of students at the SFU Literacy Continuum Conference on August 23 and 24.

In another classroom partnership with Brenda Dewonck at McRoberts Secondary School, we adapted the basic outline of the unit Ian and I developed for use with another novel, Touching Spirit Bear by Ben Mikaelsen. Brenda's goal was to improve her students' inferring skills as well. As part of the assessment-to-instruction cycle, we created and administered a mini-PBA on inferring partway through the unit (see figure 10); using that, Brenda was able to determine what other instruction the students needed to improve their inferring skills.

At the end of the year, both Ian and Brenda were keen to know how their students perceived the Second Shot class, and very graciously allowed me to interview their students, asking questions about their affect, metacognition, independence, and application and transfer-four of the six goals of the Second Shot class (see Figure 11 for all the goals). This has yielded some rich qualitative and anecdotal data about the class; we will continue to collect both quantitative and qualitative data next year and will share it with all our secondary schools.

Looking Back, Looking Forward: June

This June, the Second Shot teachers met to review our year and think ahead to next year. Some Literacy Leaders, as well as new Second Shot teachers for the 2007-2008 school year, were also in attendance. Once again, teachers shared something they had done that worked well, and we celebrated our successes. We collected feedback on various structures associated with Second Shot, including: the student selection process; connections with elementary schools; connections with Literacy Leaders and the grade 8 team; the assessment-to-instruction cycle and the grade-wide PBA; instructional practices including modelling, scaffolding, and gradual release; and professional development. The feedback will be used to help us support Second Shot teachers in a variety of ways next year.

An important part of the meeting was a focus on the goals of Second Shot (see Figure 11). We had a chance to reflect on how well we had met those goals over the year, and what we might do differently next year. We emphasized that everyone had done some work on the goals, but that it was important to strive to reach all six goals in each unit, and ideally to focus on several of them in any given lesson. Using the work Ian and I had done in his class, I was able to show how we had worked on comprehension goals by teaching inferring; we also worked on goals around application and transfer (using a science-based text to teach fix-up strategies), affect (building their confidence with fun scaffolding activities) and metacognition ("Beliefs About Readers" activity and other reflections/discussions). I also noted how we might have worked on improving their fluency (by having them read aloud to us one-on-one), or their independence (by having them choose among several articles to read for background knowledge). The final piece of the reflection was thinking about the assessment-to-instruction cycle; most teachers used the PBA data to set their goals for the year, but saw the value in doing more frequent and specific formative assessments through the year to check in on students' progress, much like Brenda and I did with the mini-PBA on inferring (Figure 10).

Metacognition: How did we do?

As I mentioned earlier, I was able to do exit interviews with two of the Second Shot classes; a third class filled out the interview questionnaire on their own. I was able therefore to gather data from three of our five Second Shot classes this year (27 students) on affect, metacognition, independence, and application and transfer. Did students improve in these areas over the year? Although this was a pilot survey, the results speak for themselves:

• 63% of students report feeling more positive about reading than they did a year ago.
• 63% of students report that they would have missed learning something about reading or literacy if they had not had a Second Shot class.
• 81% of students report using literacy skills from Second Shot in their other classes.
• 74% of students report using new skills when faced with challenging texts.
• 70% of students report feeling at least somewhat confident that they can handle ("I can do it") and/or understand challenging texts.
• 56% of students report an increase in their enjoyment and amount of independent reading.

The words of the students say as much as or more than the numbers do about the effectiveness of this class in building confidence in the students and developing their enjoyment of reading:

• "I feel good about myself because I read a book." 
• "I feel better about reading because I learned new strategies."
• "I can read more challenging text."
• "I feel good about myself understanding it." 
• "I think I have improved in my reading." 
• "I know I can do this."
• "After I took this class it made me connect to the book even more than before because I understand what the author's trying to say."
• "I didn't read on my own before. [Now] I read a lot! Harry Potter, Bridge to Terabithia, Shiloh; I like mystery the most, [it's] more interesting."

And one final, telling detail that dedicated childhood readers everywhere will appreciate, relayed to me with a sheepish grin by a young man who "used to read a little bit" before taking a Second Shot class: "One time I stayed up too late reading and my mom yelled at me."