Deveries, B. (2019). Literacy assessment and intervention for classroom teachers. New York, NY. Routledge.

  Lohmann, M.J., Hathcote, A.R., & Boothe, K.A. (2018).  Addressing the barriers to family-school collaboration: A brief review of the literature and recommendations for practice.  International Journal of Early Childhood Special Education, 10(1), 25-31

Working with my mentor has been an amazing experience.  She’s someone I’ve got to work with in the past, and she’s very experienced with working with students that require interventions.  She was supportive for every step of the process, and I highly value her advice.  She’s a special education teacher with a master’s in education.  She also works with students that have a variety of needs every year, so she’s used to creating, modifying and analyzing the needs and interventions of every student.  I used to have to write IEP’s for some of my preschool students, so she was the perfect person to remind me how to analyze data in order to plan for the next steps of a student’s learning process.  I will continue to use her as a resource for my future teaching career.  

The areas of strength in my intervention plan were communicating with the student and parents.   The parent contacts me with other questions now about the upcoming school year.  Relationships are important to me because I want families and students to feel comfortable and confident in what I’m doing to help them.  I want them to be able to have an open communication plan with me, so they can/will contact and discuss any concerns with me at anytime.  When collaborative relationships form, parents are more willing to provide support to their children at home.  We also agree that I did well providing obtainable goals for the students.  When a student is showing a deficit, you should write goals that they can obtain.  You should never put the grade-level goal as a goal for them to obtain first.  The parents and students need to see the process of growth, so it’s important to show that by providing step-by-step, obtainable goals that will eventually lead to grade-level goals.  

Areas of improvement include describing “how” I will teach the skills.  Dr. Gale and my mentor helped me to realize that it requires more than just describing “what” I will do, but “how” I will do it too.  I also want to become more efficient in this whole process.  I want it to become an easy process, so I can spend time provided the services needed to all of my students.  The steps I need to take to improve on these areas are to keep doing them.  It’s just like you would tell a student, “practice makes perfect.”  The more time I spend working on this, the more efficient I will become at it.  

I effectiveness of this intervention plan would be amazing.  However, it was not near as effective as I wanted it to be.  Completing interventions over a phone is not a convenient way to support young students.  They need an environment that is suitable for learning, and they need their teacher.  However, the collaboration between my mentor and myself was not effected by the situation.  We were still able to effectively collaborate on the instruction and adjustments of the intervention.  This experience will definitely assist my in my future career.  I’ll definitely use it as a reading specialist, and if I don’t obtain that role, I’ll practice within my classroom.  It’s a process that could assist any educator.   

The intervention process was a great experience.  It taught me how to implement a very effective strategy that would help me as a literacy specialist.  It creates a system that benefits the teacher, the students, the parents, other staff members and the administrators.  I’ve had to write IEP’s before, and it gave me a process that is similar to that.  It’s perfect because I’ve always wanted to view every student as having an IEP in my class.  This process gave me a way to provide it on paper.  It’s definitely a process I will utilize as a reading specialist.  When using this process for the assignment, I learned a significant amount of knowledge.  However, I wish I had the opportunity to complete all of it in person.  We’re dealing with crazy times right now, so I only had the opportunity to complete the intervention process on one of the students.  It would’ve been great to see how all three students improved with the process, but I really believe that all struggling students need to have in-person instruction.  Providing interventions through technology provided too many opportunities for distractions that the I had no control over.  This process actually helped me to see that.  The one student that I worked with, would’ve had a much more effective learning experience with me in a school environment.  

It’s essential to communicate with families throughout the intervention process because they are the experts of their child.  As educators, we need to always view the parents’ as important members of the child’s educational experience.  We often forget about the parents’ role because they might not have the educational background.  However, if we included parents in the process, they would understand and learn more about the process.  Therefore, they could provide more supports in the home environment.  Parents often want to help, but they just need support in learning how to help.  

This process will assist my in my future practice as a reading/literacy specialist because it has taught me the importance of having an effective and efficient intervention system in place, in order to provide the best educational services for children who struggle in reading or writing.  It can become a habit to use the same data collecting techniques or programs.  This process holds you accountable to show exactly the steps you took in order to collect significant and useful data on each individual student.  It also makes you realize that each student will require different steps, progress monitoring techniques, teaching strategies/approaches, and assessments.  That’s important to remember as any type of educator.  We can often get stuck in a teaching cycle that makes us feel comfortable, rather than evaluating what each individual student needs.  

I feel as if the colleague experience went well.  She actually commented on how surprised she was with the support she received with the little information that she was able to give me.  I feel like I listened to her concerns and catered to them.  She’s with her students for a majority of the day, so she knows what they’re lacking in skills.  When I looked at her assessment data, it matched her concerns.  A teacher needs to feels as if you truly value their opinion and concerns, so it’s important for me to always listen and create interventions that support those concerns.  She also said there wasn’t any additional support that would have been helpful.  She felt as if what I provided was adequate. In the future, I would want to provide the services that she would prefer.  I asked her what she would want from a reading specialist, and she wants support within the classroom.  Her students are pulled out for instruction daily, but she’d prefer having the reading specialist push into the classroom.  She believes that a reading specialist should be able to work side by side with the classroom teacher, and that they shouldn’t be demanding or “in charge” of the teacher/classroom.  She also believes that a reading specialist should be flexible when working with teachers and students.  I couldn’t agree more with these ideas/thoughts, so this is exactly the type of support that I’d want to give my fellow colleagues. 

This would be one of my favorite aspects of working as a reading specialist.  I would want to break the cycle of having no interaction time with the teachers.  I think this role should be viewed as a support system for teachers and students.  I would never want my colleagues to feel as if I was telling them they were doing anything wrong.  I would only be there to be an extra pair of hands, eyes, and ears, and let’s not forget the brain.  Two brains coming together to work on teaching strategies for struggling students would benefit everyone involved.   Being a classroom teacher is difficult.  Your balancing the needs of 20+ students, all with different abilities, while trying to find appropriate resources and materials, and still teaching the district’s curriculum.  Assisting the teachers with finding quality resources and materials is also something that I’d want to focus on.  Being available in the room and providing resources to the teacher would assist the interventions being completed inside the classroom, which should be a priority for the school district.