Focus Student 1 Reflection

[Focus Student 1 has made a substantial growth throughout the learning segment. I align my feedback to the learning objectives in lesson 4 and address the students’ strengths by telling her what she did well. For example, I state “You have grown in your ability to compare and contrast fiction/nonfiction books using the key words ‘but’ and ‘both’”. I also identify the areas for improvement when I suggest using concrete words to better describe similarities and differences between fiction/nonfiction texts. I suggest that she should refer to our anchor charts in order to find appropriate vocabulary words; I also push her to think what other strategies she could use to strengthen her description of commonalities and differences between fiction/nonfiction

In Focus Student 2’s work sample, I also aligned my feedback to the learning objectives from lesson 4. I state, “You did an excellent job describing how your texts are alike and different”, and then I continue with describing student’s strengths, “One strength of your compare/contrast sentences was using key vocabulary words from our charts”. I also praise a student for incorporating the words describing nonfiction text features. This clearly show me that the student was able to apply previous knowledge in order to compare and contrast his fiction/nonfiction texts. I also identify some weak points of his descriptions. For example, I suggest that the student should use concrete, specific words while describing similarities and differences between fiction/nonfiction. That would help strengthen his writing. I guide the student to reflect on the strategies he might use to improve his future descriptions by ending the feedback with a question. For Focus Student 3, I also addressed her individual strengths and aligned the objectives from lesson 4 by stating, “Your sentences focused on listing accurate similarities and

Because my feedback for all students pertained to similar improvements, my suggestions for students were also similar. On the other hand, I decided to conference with students individually to give them my attention and focus on their personal strengths in order to improve the quality of future compare/contrast assignments. At the beginning of each conference, I read the feedback and went over the student’s responses. I also asked each of the students to explain why they gave themselves a smiley face or a sad face on the self-assessment. When students were explaining, I added my comments related to their strengths and needs (English language learners have language needs not language weaknesses). For example, I suggested that they used great words in their descriptions, and they should continue incorporating interesting words from our anchor charts when they compare and contrast fiction/nonfiction books. I explained to them that using precise language makes writing clear, more interesting, and helps readers understand the text. We focused on the areas that needed improvement. I asked students the same questions, which were included in my feedback on the work samples 1, 2, and 3, and then students discussed what strategies they might use in order to strengthen their descriptions of similarities and differences between fiction and nonfiction. Focus Student 1 answered that she might try rereading