Effectiveness of the Concurrent Education Program

Findings:

This 3-week practicum block seemed to be much busier and the time seemed to fly by much quicker than my other practicum placements. I did not have the chance to spend as much time on my Action Research Project as I would have liked because I spent a lot of my extra time organizing the Jump Rope for Heart event. Not all of my questions were answered, but even though the time was very short, I do think that Student A made progress. I ultimately gained a lot of insight into my teaching and how to better differentiate work to reach these learners who are often ignored because of time restraints or lack of support.

Validation:

The fourth grade slump is a term that is used to describe the phenomenon where students who previously did well in school before grade 4 have a large performance drop in achievement. Many researchers and educators believe that this transition period from grade 3 to grade 4 is a critical moment in any students education as we shift from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn’ ideologies (Sanacore and Palumbo, 2009).

So what does the research tell us about addressing this slump? There is not a one-size fits all approach because students learning styles and needs vary with each child (Sanacore and Palumbo, 2009). Early intervention and proper reading instruction must occur in the primary grades prior to the transition into grade 4. Vocabulary work is really important to easily identify common words, but this is not sufficient because, “by one estimate, explicit vocabulary instruction can teach, at best, about 400 words a year, a far cry from the 5,000 or so words students need to add to their vocabularies each year to build the 80,000-word vocabularies they need to be successful in college” (Goodwin...

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...t education trends as more research studies are completed. Teachers must embrace lifelong learning to be effective and not become redundant. As with any profession, we expect that professionals are always updating their skills and informing themselves with new techniques. Becoming an educator means that you will be learning for the rest of your life and for myself, I think this is an exciting part of the teaching career.

Works Cited

Gee, James Paul. Getting Over the Slump: Innovation Strategies to Promote Children's Learning. Rep. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, June 2008. Web.

Goodwin, Bryan. "Don't Wait Until Fourth Grade to Address the Slump." Educational Leadership 68.7 (2011): 88-89. Print.

Sanacore, Joseph, and Anthony Palumbo. "Understanding the Fourth-Grade Slump: Our Point of View." The Educational Forum 73.1 (2009): 67-74. Print.