Strategies that Work
Chapter 1 Strategic Thinking
• Read Chapter 1 Strategic Thinking from Strategies That Work that was included in your syllabus packet.
• What areas discussed in Strategic Thinking do you feel you do a good/have done a good job modeling and teaching in your classroom? Share any areas of improvements that you would like to focus on.
Please click on the comments icon below to leave your message.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
While I reflect on the discourse "Strategic Thinking", I realize how much there is to think about for me. I teach all subjects to grades one through eight; therefore, pretty much everything said relates to me.
To begin, there are some references in this chapter that validate work that I currently do. As our last assigment called for sharing reading we love, this assignment calls on me to share how I share reading that students do not love. When I teach social studies and science, I read outloud and I show what thinking readers do, as discussed by Harvey and Goudvis. I read segments of chapters while students watch me draw sketchy pictures of the events or concepts. When they see the whole picture, we can vizualize the "story" of what we are reading. In doing this students watch me #1 determine importance as well as synthesize information. Once the pictures are drawn - one whole picture remains in the child's mind. The reader becomes a writer, as the authors discuss. In my case, the reader becomes an artist too. And, the odder the picture, the better it stays in the child's min d. Lastly, I conclude with them, "See, reading is not so bad. Reading is a picture story.". Sometimes I pair up students, one reading and one drawing, each getting turns. In doing this, I attempt to "model learning".
"Content or process: why not both?" As a resource teacher, I have to teach both with 42 minute class periods and several subjects cover.
I could improve on pointing out ares in our reading that make inferences. Since time is scarce in my job, I seem to concentrate too much on decoding, teaching content and making reading come alive that the subtle parts of reading get put to the wayside,. I need to point out inferences and clues in our reading. Also, I should made connections between prior knowledge and the text better. When I teach social studies, I neglect to refer back to the prior chapter(s) and relate. Again, I think time contraints put my work in the here and now. Connecting information and relating is a definite area of improvement for me in my teaching.
There is a lot to stategically think about.
After reading and reflection on the article "Strategic Thinking", I've determined that I do a good job at teaching readers to think about the text in relation to themselves and to think about what they are reading and to be aware of their thinking. The area that I think I should do more is to model my own text to self thinking. I tend to do this in the beginning of the year and then I rely on the students to make the connections. Really, I could be thinking aloud while I read aloud throughout the year and get make even more connections like text to text or text to the world. I guess you can never model show students how to be readers who construct meaning and make inferences.
As I read this chapter, I feel good about what I have done so far in the areas of reading strategies. I spend quite a bit of time modeling the stategies such as visualizing, asking questions, making connections, inferencing, self-correcting, and predicting. I feel that I do a good job with the "gradual release of responsibility approach" when it comes to these areas.
I would like to do a better job of helping my kids "determine important ideas" when reading nonfiction. I was just talking to a fellow fourth grade teacher about helping kids become better readers of nonfiction. When we are doing classroom research, we always model notetaking for the kids. We usually use an example on the overhead, and we highlight important information. Then we demonstate how we would take notes on the information. Yet, our fourth graders still seem to really struggle with this. They also stuggle with picking out important details when reading in science and social studies.
It is much easier for kids to get involved in fictional stories. I also feel that it is much easier to teach many of the reading strategies within the context of a fictional story. This past year, I tried to tie more nonfictional reading in with our fictional stories. When a group of girls was reading the American Girl series Felicity, we also researched the American Revolution with one of the Magic Tree House Research Guides. This worked really well, and I need to do more of it.
I'm looking for more resources on the teaching of reading strategies with a focus on nonfiction. I would love to hear if anyone is aware of some great resources out there.
Our school prescribes to the book, Strategies That Work. I believe each teacher has a copy from when we had workshops throughout semester called Frameworks. I feel I work the most on connections besides decoding and understanding what is read. I work hard to model, guide, and then give independent practice, however, the students I work with tend not to have the patience or attention to listen to me model an entire picture book. They seem itchy to share, share, share! And, being in a smaller group of six-ten students, they tend to have that discussion feeling atmosphere.
As stated earlier, we work hard on the connections. The students tend to struggle with connections of importance. For example, the character may have a red dress. The student may say, “I have a red dress, too,” instead of grasping the connection of the importance of the red dress. On the other side, the students have a sense of ownership when they connect a similar concept from a current book to another text or movie.
Students I work with tend not to be good readers as they cannot easily figure strategies to use as they read. They tend to worry more about decoding than comprehending and thinking about what is being read. So, as stated in chapter 2 of the book, I encourage them to stop, reread, and think about what they are reading. I have been teaching for ten years, and just recently I’m having students stop themselves and say, “That didn’t make sense.” I reply, “Well, what should you do to make it make sense?” It’s SO exciting to hear them say such comments, because they are beginning to think about what they are reading, not just reading to decode.
In the first several years of my career, I’ve made great strides in the gradual release of responsibility the authors spoke of. I don’t feel my undergraduate preparation prepared me for much more than mentioning how to be a good reader. Now I feel I do very well modeling most strategies most of the time for my students. With incorporating Literature Circles into my classroom and seeking out assistance with guided reading groups, I’ve developed some good classroom opportunities for guided practice. In recognizing what I’ve done, I still look toward what I want to do.
As I read through Strategic Thinking I was pleased to find a correlation with how I teach in my classroom. Much of what I do in class was presented in this chapter.
With so much information out about brain based learning I've worked hard to model think alouds as I read to help children understand that their brain has an active role in helping them understand what is being read. Before reading stories I always try to tap into their prior knowledge hopefully to help make a more natural connection to self or to another text.
There are times after reading a chapter book that I have children fill out a reader response sheet. On this sheet it begins with a brief summary of the book. It has a section called this reminds me of... and a section where they can draw a picture of something they visualized in the story,and a section where they can write down words they found interesting or didn't quite understand.
A familiar phrase I use with my class is last year you learned how to read, now your reading to learn.
With emerging readers in my class making inferences and determining important ideas is always a challenge. I've been incorporating more time to model and use guided practice in this area, however it is still a work in progress as I look for new material to use in class.
We have been using Strategies That Work as a model for our comprehension instruction for the past 3-4 years, so feel we are getting the hang of it pretty well. In my classroom, I feel like I do a good modeling and teaching the following strategies:
-connecting
-questioning
-inferencing
-predicting
-visualizing
-determining importance
There are a couple of areas I would like to improve:
1. Repairing faulty comprehension - While we do model this some through read-alouds and small-group lessons, I think we could provide a better framework for our kids to use with their independent reading. Maybe we could provide bookmarks with reminders of strategies the kids could use. We do have a poster of fix-up strategies, but maybe we could refer to it more often so that the kids will refer to it more on their own.
2. We could also do a better job helping our kids monitor their own comprehension. Currently, we ask them them to keep a reading log in which they write a short summary after reading. The summary is structured around answering the five W's and 1 H. While this has been effective for mmany of our kids, some still are unable to write a summary that demonstrates that they are truly monitoring comprehension. For some kids, we simply have them retell after each page or two to help them, especially if they have poor writing skills; unfortunately, this is hard to do consistently with a full classroom.
An area of strategic thinking that I model and teach well is making connections between prior knowledge and the text. Before reading most novels, short stories, or poems, I usually do a prereading activity, whether it’s a journal connecting the themes of the material to my students’ lives, or an anticipation guide that asks them to decide their beliefs on various themes of the story. Sometimes, I’ll have the students draw pictures or make lists of what comes into their minds when I mention a certain topic. While we are reading a piece of literature, I will stop and ask the students if they can relate to a situation or a character; and they share their stories. For the post-reading question and answer session, I ask students what would you have done in that situation or what have you done in a similar situation.
Another reading strategy that I teach and model is drawing inferences. When we read aloud in class, I stop at key points and I ask, “Does anyone think they know what is going to happen in this situation.” After students make their predictions, I ask, “What evidence up to this point in the story leads you to believe this will happen?” Also, when we start to read where we left off the previous class period, I have the students list what they know has happened and then what they think will happen in each situation.
An area of improvement that I would like to focus on is the asking questions strategy. It seems like only a small percentage of students ask questions while we read aloud in class. There are students who either feel shy or aren’t really trying to understand the story. I try to engage these students by stopping at confusing points in the story and clarifying, as well as asking students if they know what’s going on. An idea for increasing the use of the asking questions strategy would be to have students keep a questions log while they read. In a notebook, they can jot down any words they don’t know or elements of the story that confuse them. These question logs can be shared periodically throughout the story.
I feel I do a good job working on visualizing and inferencing. We tend to do a lot of this when we complete our creative writing or discuss certain aspects of writing. It is exciting to watch their ability level in these two areas increase and expand as the year progresses.
An area I need to work on is connecting and predicting. Since a lot of my projects are creative writing activities, the children don't always connect it to themselves. It would definitely be something that I could expand upon and make a more conscious effort to incorporate that piece in to my lesson. It is also hard for me to always incorporate predicting since we aren't always completing work from written material/ books. It has challenged me to create some lessons that I could pull this strategy into though.
Post a Comment