Blog 20: Exit Interview

1. What is your essential question and what are your answers? What is your best answer and why?

My EQ is How can an elementary school teacher most effectively produce fluent readers? My three answers are: providing students materials and time to develop fine motor skills, using visual arts to stimulate response and understanding, and expanding vocabulary and tracking any to all progress made. After researching and accumulating 80 sources, my best answer is expanding a student's vocabulary and tracking any to all progress made because there were a numerous amount of studies conducted proving how beneficial this instruction is for students.

2. What process did you take to arrive at this answer?

Initially, the idea of documenting a student's reading progress originated from one of my first mentors, AnnMarie Krall. Each week, she sent out short stories to her students and instructed them to practice reading them home. The following week, she would assess the students using Fluency and would fill in a bar graph on a take home folder/data sheet. This method was great for my mentor for multiple reasons so I decided to look in to it. I researched for studies done that proved that monitor progression was effective and found significant credible sources agreeing that this method works. 

3. What problems did you face? How did you resolve them?

The only major problem I can think of had to do with researching itself. As stated before, there were studies done on monitor progression by specials but they were slightly out dated. The studies published ranged from 1980 to 2005 and I felt that not all of the studies done were still relevant to my topic. In order to resolve this issue, I had to find more in-depth research by visiting libraries and looking through several online databases.  

4. What are the two most significant sources used to answer your essential question and why?

The two most significant sources I used to help answer my EQ was a book by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo titled Great Habits Great Readers and an eBook tilted Teaching All Students to Read in Elementary School. The book Great Habits Great Readers immensely helped me with answering my EQ because it presented examples and real-life scenarios on my third answer. Teaching All Students to Read in Elementary School was an exemplary guide that helped me answer my EQ because it explained the critical elements needed for an effective reading program.