How I used Newsela Pro’s actionable insights to improve students’ reading comprehension from Darin Johnson on Vimeo.

TRANSCRIPT:

This last semester I was fortunate enough to use the advanced features of Newsela Pro with my students in my Additional Instruction Reading class. On the Newsela website, they write: “Newsela builds reading comprehension through leveled articles, real-time assessments and actionable insights.”

One of the first things I appreciated about Newsela was the leveled articles. At first I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the leveled articles. As an English and journalism teacher, I liked the timeliness of the articles and the ability to search for articles by topic, general category, and by Common Core standard.

However, it wasn’t until my students had taken enough quizzes and Newsela was automatically adjusting the reading to their lexile level that I saw the power to easily differentiate instruction in my classroom. Because my students were working on summarizing their reading, I searched for an article that would assess Standard 2: Central Idea. I did a Think Aloud as I focused on turning the headline and headings into questions and then highlighting the specific details that answered my questions. For the second section of the text, I asked the students to replicate what I had done. As I was walking around the room monitoring their progress, I was concerned when I realized my students were reading the text at three different levels.

I was relieved when every student was able to share his or her highlights and thinking. And suddenly it struck me that having students using the text that is closest to their level with the same Common Core target is similar to having golfers select the tee box according to their skill level.

The sign at one golf course reads: “The different tee markers are there to make play between golfers more fair and pleasurable so play the right tees for your skill level.” Likewise, having the leveled texts makes reading more pleasurable.

It wasn’t until I had this positive experience with differentiation that I really started to pay attention to some of the Pro features Newsela offers. And what I discovered is that the real-time assessments make it easy to “use student performance data as a guide for decision making.”

Let me open my Newsela Pro account and show you what I mean. When I open my binder, I can get an overview of how my classes are doing. When I hover over my AI Spring 2016 class and then click, Newsela Pro allows me to Expand to View All Student Activity.

This is where I can start digging into the data to set individual goals. One difference between Newsela and Newsela Pro is that PRO goes beyond composite scores for the whole class and allows teachers to see individual scores as well as each student’s responses to annotations, responses to open-ended questions, and quiz question responses. And I’ll get back to the annotations and responses later.

In the mean time, let’s focus on Leslie, which is not her real name. After we returned from spring break in March, I encouraged students to read at or slightly above their Lexile level. Here’s one of the features that I like about how Newsela graphs these overall scores in that Leslie and I were both able to see a trend that shows she’s tackling more challenging reading . . . . sometimes with mixed results. Unlike the in-depth progress monitoring that I tried to do with each student every 2 to 4 weeks, the Newsela graph made Leslie’s learning visible on a weekly basis. This was very motivating for her.

If we zoom in a little, notice the dots above the dashed line. The dots above represent stories Leslie read in the 11th grade and 12th grade lexile levels. Unsurprisingly, as a ninth grader who is struggling to read on level, Leslie has 6 red dots and 5 green dots. Newsela marks proficient scores of 75% or 100% correct in green. Scores below 75% are marked in red. And so you’ll notice that Leslie has 5 green versus 2 red at ninth grade and 6 green versus 2 red at eighth grade. Visually, it’s apparent that Leslie is doing better at the ninth grade level than the 11th/12th grade level. And these scores actually confirm the results of my district-developed progress monitoring because in May, Leslie was struggling around the 1120L level.

Now you’re probably saying, how are these data points guiding your decision-making process?!? Here’s where Newsela Pro allows me to gain insights on Leslie’s development as a reader with just a few data clicks.

Before I do that, I’m going to narrow the data range to show you what I saw at the beginning of April. Note Leslie’s reading level and her average quiz score. Next notice how easy Newsela Pro makes it for me to check on Leslie’s performance by each Common Core standard. With just a few clicks, I can find which standards are the most challenging for Leslie. As you can see, Leslie is having the most problem with standard 1 and standard 2. Each week I decided I would target my activities with Leslie on one of her challenge standards.

Now the great aspect about measuring performance with Common Core standards is that it gives me, a veteran English teacher but an aspiring reading teacher, a solid foundation. I have a better understanding of the teaching targets when they are aligned to the Common Core because it’s using a language I have studied.

Turning back to Leslie, in April I put my focus on strategies that would help me see what she was thinking as she provided textual evidence and made inferences about what she read. Part way through the month, I started to have Leslie work on summarizing strategies. One of the best aspects of having this assessment data at my fingertips is that I could look for patterns within my class and form logical small groups.

So after an opening activity about vocabulary and a short Think Aloud, I might then have Leslie and Marcus read a story in Newsela that is asking questions dealing with Standard 1. Meanwhile, another small group of students might read an article that asks questions about the meaning of words and phrases. Or with Newsela’s search features, I could find an article that addresses both challenge standards for my two groups that day. I even had students search for articles that centered on their challenge standards that they found appealing.

But let’s dig deeper with some of Leslie’s data. To do that, I’m going to click on this third red dot. It’s telling me that Leslie scored 25%. With the click of a button, it takes me to Leslie’s responses to “New campus darlings: Your pets.”

Equally important to having the real-time assessment data is having the Pro features to offer explicit instruction and to highlight text and have a dialogue with students through Newsela Pro.

In his Improving Comprehension with Think-Aloud Strategies, Wilhelm writes: “To teach in the zone of proximal development, Vygotsky says the teacher must first generously model how to work through a task, highlighting and naming how a particular strategy or strategies can be used to successfully complete it.” On the day we read this story, I began annotating my Think Aloud.

I’ve taken Beers and Probst’s signposts in Reading Nonfiction, and I narrowed myself to two signposts: Numbers and Stats in Green and Quotations in purple.

For whole-group instruction like this, I’ve color-coded their signposts using the colors in Newsela and in the Kindle application. When I pause and reveal my thinking, I’m highlighting the text and putting what I say outloud in the margin. With the PRO package, I can share all of this information with a simple click. Likewise, all of the students’ annotations and short-answer responses are are shared with me. Having a record of their highlights is helpful because it reveals their interactions with the text; it makes their thinking visible.

Recently I was asked if I could do the same activities on paper. And in the fall, I was printing out Newsela stories and attempting to dutifully file the students’ responses and annotations into each of their folders. But what I noticed this spring is that the facile nature of clicking on a data point in Newsela Pro encouraged more analysis on my part. Newsela Pro did the busy work of connecting the student data with the students’ interactions. Newsela Pro allowed me to cut through the data smog and MOVE efficiently to analysis and evaluation. And in the end, it also gave me and my students the creative scaffolding to have richer conversations in class through our annotations and our comments. And the customizable writing prompts are a natural fit for an English teacher.

And so in the end, Newsela Pro gave me the tools I needed as an English teacher striving to be a better reading teacher by allowing me to better differentiate and customize my students’ reading instruction while expanding their knowledge of the world.

And for students like Leslie, Newsela Pro was the scaffolding we used together to help her grow this semester from the seventh grade reading level to the ninth grade level while improving her overall comprehension.