Background Analysis: For this project, I decided to make a change in my curriculum that would correlate with our school goal this year. Over the past three years of my teaching career, my school has been trying to improve our students reading skills and comprehension. At first, our language arts teachers took the goal under their belt to try to solve our low reading scores on the ISAT test. After the first year, our school saw very little improvement. The next year, our building decided that other staff members should jump on the bandwagon. So staff members, like our principal and our learning consultant, joined in the effort to improve reading. Our school also adopted a twenty-minute school wide silent reading time to help out with this goal. Still, the goal was only in the hands of about ten staff members.

During the year, our principal and other staff members tried many different techniques. One, for example, was starting a book club that met with mentors from the school and community to discuss certain books that interested students. At the end of the year, though, very little had changed in our school in the improvement of reading. Upon receiving our current ISAT score this year, we realized that once again, our reading score showed little improvement.

So at the beginning of the year, our school decided that reading was going to be a building wide school improvement. The problem couldn't be solved by just a few staff member but would take the whole school working together as a team to solve the problem. For many teachers, this was a shock or a surprise. It wasn't due to the fact that they did not agree that the goal was important. The main reason was many didn't know were to start to solve our reading problem. Even teachers who had been in the business for years were having problems trying to find solutions to our reading problem.

This was also the case for me. I had never really focused in on reading in my class. I mean, come on, I am a social studies teacher not a language arts teacher. After my first reaction, I decided that this goal would be a good thing for me to focus on. I realized that not only would it improve our school ISAT scores but also improve some of my students' grades. I figured that reading was very important in every class. Comprehension of text and stories is one of the main keys for success in my class. So if students' reading skills improved, then their comprehension would improve. If this happened, then grades would improve; because students would know more information or facts about history and be able to understand it better.

My analysis of problem was not only from ISAT scores. Our district also has a district wide standardized test that they have been using to identify student achievement on Illinois State Learning Standards. The test is known as SAI or Standard Assessment and Instruction test. It is administered in three cycles. The first cycle is in the fall, the second is in the winter, and the third is in the spring. The idea behind SAI is that it gives teachers a photo album of assessment on how students are doing on state standards throughout the year. Where as ISAT only gives teachers a snapshot because students are only tested in the spring and scores don't return until the following year. SAI, on the other hand, is given at the beginning of each cycle so that teachers can have the scores back which show them standards that their curriculum needs more focus on. Our school's SAI tests have found similar results. Reading scores over the past three years have shown little improvement.

Proposal: For this change to occur I have decided that first, I need to collect data. I am doing this in two forms. First I have given my experimental classes reading inventories so that I can get an idea of what kind of readers they are and what skills they use while reading. The second form of data collection is school wide. During silent reading over the past six weeks, students throughout the school have been reading a short passage and then answering questions about the passage. The questions analyze things such as finding the main idea in the story. Next the scores have been recorded so that the school can find out the areas that our students need help. In fact, we have just finish the last data collection. Starting next week, we will be studying the numbers as a school, trying to locate the areas that we need to work on.

Next, to make this change, I have started to incorporate more reading strategies into my lesson plans. In fact, I have tried to set an average of two a week. So far I have done the following:

1. Have students create political cartoons about a subsection of a section of a chapter. For ex. Section 1 Paragraph over the "Democratic Way". This requires a higher level of thinking, because students are supposed to locate the main idea(s) of the subsection and put into a drawing. Students also have to have a created caption that ties the cartoon main idea(s) into a simple phrase that their classmates can remember.
2. Students in my class have used a graphic organizer to take notes over a section. For this, they basically created a word map using a program Inspiration. This helps students link ideas together to a main idea.
3. Students have done a KWL over the War of 1812. For this lesson, I brought in our school's reading specialist to team-teach the lesson. KWL is another tool that helps students link ideas and also take notes. Our reading specialist helped me explain to my students the ideas behind this reading strategy. We have plans to team-teach some other reading skills.

• Note: All of these skills have been assessed by either a rubric, quiz, test, or observation. (Ex. Played stump the student. Students were called in front of the class and students tried to stump them by asking them question from a section. If they stump the student, they received a piece of candy. If the student couldn't be stumped, then they got candy. The students, who were trying to be stumped, got to use their inspiration. (Of course, not one student was stumped, and I did call on students and not just volunteers)
• Other strategies will follow and assessment results recorded as the project continues.

Overall, I have seen improvement on certain students' overall grades. Students' test scores have improve on reading sections that the strategies were used for. Some students have even expressed that they are using some of the skills taught in my class in other classes, for example, the KWL technique. I have also seen that their attitude has change about reading material in my class. I am interested in comparing responses from the first reading inventory to the next one I will hand out, which will be in November.

• KWL and ISAT scores will be listed for the November 9^th assignment along with other data collection.