How do today’s
readings help you understand your own reading comprehension processes? How do
the readings help you understand the reading behavior of the learners in your
classroom? (2/25)
Through research, Applegate developed 8 profiles of learners,
the description of those learners and an intervention for each. One of the 8
reminds me of one of my students in my 1st grade classroom. We will
call him John. According to Applegates profiles, John is a left fielder. This
means he generates unpredictable ideas that seem to have no real connection to
the text. My MT and I have noticed this numerous times throughout his journal
when he would have a prompt, but would be writing about something not even
related to the prompt. Ideas for intervention include story structure
activities, think-aloud, context clues, detecting relationships and induced
imagery. Applegate mentions that left fielders, though their answers are not
related, answer with great confidence, which is a characteristic of John.
I think as teachers, we have students who fall into one of
these readings comprehension processes. Letting these students stay in these
phases is what we need to change. Taking the interventions and adapting them
for each student will pull the students out of the negative processes for
comprehension and if done correctly will make them able to more accurately
comprehend readings.
Reading comprehension interventions can start even in kindergarten,
according to Gregory and Cahill. Kindergarteners begin to learn about reading
comprehension with visuals. In the article the teacher used an example of
visualization for snowflakes. The kids read a poem and them to the left of it
they drew what they were visualizing. They would have to practice good reading
comprehension skills in order to drawn an accurate picture.
Overall, teaching good reading comprehension skills/strategies
at a young age can only benefit students. There are ways to help each type of
learner at any age, you may just need to be a little creative as a teacher.
As a reader in elementary, I struggled with being able to retell the teacher what I read through my writing. I guess I would have been a Author, I would tell what I thought the story was saying, or from what little I could remember.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you Val, I think teaching good comprehension strategies at a young age will help the students in the long run. These are also things that they can learn with easier text before they get into longer books.
My mentor teacher has her students do a various display of comprehension of the books that they read. They have a book club discussion book, its like a workbook where they have a chance to draw a picture, write a short summary, or talk about main points, also listing important things that happens. She only has them reflect on short parts of the book, which I feel is easier for students to do then to write a book report on the whole book.
I don't have any recollection of my reading comprehension when I was young, which I guess could be a testament to the lack of reading that I was engaged in during my Elementary years. There certainly wasn't a lot of high order thinking going on.
ReplyDeleteMy mentor teacher does a lot of great drop everything and read times with comprehension packets designed for each book. One thing that doesn't correspond with what we are talking about very well is that we go through scripted whole class readings. These do ask the higher level thinking questions but they don't allow enough time for adequate thought and discussion and they don't follow up answers or probe thoughts deeper, reading just continues.
I think it is such a challenge for a teacher to try to manage a classroom full of different types of learners. The activities you do usually have to follow a common goal and purpose, along with assessing somewhat similarily or else our lesson planning will be 20+ times longer to cater to each individual. However, while reading all the different strategies, I think it may be helpful to let them choose what strategies to use (with our guidance and own assessment of course!). Like for John, he seems to need a more structure throughout the readings that provide him opportunity to connect with the text, rather than at the end. Perhaps, he needs to imagery...or just more practice and teaching on HOW to communicate what he has comprehended. I find the expressing what you read can be the difficult part. Thats why we have to set up steps all along the way to make that part the easist of all, because they have set it all up from the beginning to lead them to a conclusion.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed chapter 8 in Tompkins and all the comprehension strategies that were expanded on. I really prefer these steps:
1. Activate prior knowledge by starting to connect their backgrounds to the story (connectting)
2. Determining the important parts of the text by setting a purpose of what you want them to get out of the text
3. Predict how you will go about your purpose
4. Start reading--then draw inferences throughout the text
4. Evaluate using the above steps as a comparison
5. Question the text due to your evaluation
6. Then summarizing---which will be much easier as there have been activities to keep them engaged throughout.
HOW they do these things is up to them as what they think will work best for them...but I do think that you have to teach them their options.