The student I choose for my case study is a female student in my fourth grade class. Fabiana, the pseudonym I assigned her, is a sweet young girl of Hispanic descent.
I have been keeping track of her progress by jotting down notes on post-its and sheets of paper. A few of the challenges I have encountered thus far is writing down notes while I am teaching. Another difficulty is only seeing my student half of the day. Since I teach in a dual language classroom, we teach science, math, writing, and wordwork (vocabulary) for the first half of the day. Then my classes switch and they take social studies and reading in Spanish and we reteach the same subjects over again.
One huge improvement my CT and I have noticed about Fabiana is her motivation to do school work. She used to come into class tired and it took her a while to get the day started. Now her father has informed us that she has been going to bed early and I believe that has made the BIGGEST difference in her academic life.
Fabiana is an interesting student to conduct this cases study on because she is not the typical misbehaved student. What we are working on is motivation and dedication. I look forward to seeing her progress throughout the semester.
Great Post Claudia- You are in a very unique situation, on the one hand you get to perfect your lessons by teaching them twice and specializing in a few subjects, on the other hand you miss some core time with your students by only having them half the day. I think it is a good idea for you to focus on motivation and dedication with Fabiana. In the brief time I was in 5th grade, I saw that many of the students were already apathetic about school and seemed to have an attitude that they couldn’t care less about school, especially subjects that didn’t interest then. However when I moved to 3rd grade I remember being initially taken aback by how motivated all the students were. While there are behavior issues with a few students, all the students in my third grade class work incredibly hard to try to master material. I honestly see very little apathy towards learning. I wonder if something developmentally happens around 4th grade that enables students to begin rationalizing expanded effort vs. reasonable gain. I am interested to see what you find!
Hi Claudia,
Your case study is very interesting. I definitely agree with Kathryn about the students being apathetic the older they get. In my fifth grade class we have many behavior issues and it is mainly from the lower level students who have struggled with school for most of their career. It could just be sleep deprivation but it could also be so much more. It will be interesting to see how things go through out the study and what she responds to.
Good luck!
Rebekah,
The excellent news is that your student’s parents are taking measures to correct the problem at home. My case study student always does better on the weeks when her mom has reinforced at home what we’ve said at school. For instance, she’ll come in and say “My momma told me to do what the other kids do and what you tell me to today.” Which is exactly consistent with our goals for her. She does worse on the weeks when I can’t pull the “your momma said so..” card. So, I’m glad you have that parental support.
Do you ever have an opportunity to observe the student in the afternoon class? I think it might be interesting to see how she acts in the setting where her primary language (you said spanish was her primary lang, right?) is spoken.
whoops. I read Rebekah’s name on the last comment so I typed it; but I obviously meant Claudia. My mistake.