Acting Toward Fluency!

In full costumes and with bright accents, Folsom 8^th grade students performed scene five from Shakespeare’s A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream  before students in the 5^th-7^th grades on Thursday, 5/26.  The performance is the culminating activity for this challenging reading assignment, which stretches the limits of each student’s reading fluency.

Reading fluency refers to the speed and accuracy with which students read. Folsom teachers measure students’ fluency throughout the year so that students can monitor progress, which has been instrumental to the goal setting process on the 7/8 team.

For the past three years, all graduating students have participated in a goal setting process where students select a reading, writing and problem solving goal based on their strengths, weaknesses, interests and future plans. Students receive weekly class time to work on their goals, document their progress with videos and pictures and to reflect on their own learning. This goal setting process is instrumental in helping students learn to take charge of their own learning.

Numerous students select fluency as their focus for their reading goal because reading faster makes reading less daunting to students. This cascades through the entire reading process because students can understand more and more as they feel more confident. For many students, the only way to improve fluency is to read more and to read out loud.

Reading out loud is a routine on the Folsom middle level team during book clubs and during language arts classes. During these opportunities, students receive coaching on how to read more expressively and how to read like the character might speak. This process helps students evaluate the context of a book and more richly engages their imaginations.

Shakespeare’s writing is exceptionally challenging for students to read, never mind read before peers. Mrs. Pidgeon, the 7/8 Language Arts and Social Studies teacher, masterfully balanced the stress and excitement by matching students to roles that speak to them. She also placed students in roles that were at the edge of their comfort zone, which made the activity rigorous.

The GISU initiated a transition toward the “Rigor/Relevance Framework”  (R.R.F.), this past year in order to better meet the needs of all students. The R.R.F. aims to challenge all students, but not necessarily in identical ways. For example, some students in the play received prominent roles with pages of text and other students performed smaller roles with lines of text. This is popularly known as differentiation, which allows heterogeneous groups to collaborate simultaneously at different depths.

Mrs. Pidgeon created an audience for the students, which elevated the base level of rigor and relevance to a greater degree because the students often read more seriously when they are observed and students know that Shakespear’s works were meant to be performed, not read like a novel. Folsom is fortunate to have such a talented teacher as Mrs. Pidgeon because she seamlessly manages to integrate the arts, promote reading and honor each student while at the same time students are smiling, laughing and learning.