Rethinking Vocabulary

So, the first that I want to say about vocabulary is that vocabulary is boring.  I am racking my brain right now and cannot think of one single strategy that was implemented while I was in school that was engaging in any way.  I do like that Frey clarifies that not every single word that is unfamiliar should be a vocabulary word.  I have never thought about it in this way and I like that she drew a line here.  

She goes on to talk about students using dictionaries and thesauruses.  Two things here spring into my mind.  First, my tutoring student has a big problem with vocabulary because he has no experiences, and no schema from real life or from books.  He doesn't read outside of school, and even then he doesn't comprehend much.  Vocabulary is a pretty big deal for him.  He also lacks confidence and never quite engages with the vocabulary or the text.  For the past couple of weeks, I have used a strategy called self-collection which has worked great with my student.  It allows him to look for the words that are unfamiliar to him and that he wants to learn more about.  This kicks up the interest level a bit and really gets him engaged with the text.  

Second, thesauruses are great.  But only if they know the meanings of the words that they are using.  There is nothing worse than a student creating a big long sentence that is just a string of synonyms that either all mean the same thing or are used inappropriately.  I also love the idea of using word sorts with vocabulary to organize students' understanding.  When learning a new concept, it is so easy to get overwhelmed.  Having mastery of vocabulary is the first step in the right direction and can help students to feel more in control over their learning process.

Bringing My A-Game

Rethinking Questions

I love the idea of using questions to teach because if students aren’t engaged, then they won’t care what is coming out of my mouth.  They will only be thinking about when my class is going to end.  Once I lose them, it’s much harder to regain their attention.  Quality questions are important to me as a teacher, because I want my students to know that I and the rest of the class values their thoughts and ideas.  In my practicum, my mentor teacher only asks convergent questions and seems angry when the students don’t answer it the way she expects.  Her classroom is like a one way street with heavy traffic.  You are constantly being pushed in one direction and you can’t slow down enough to notice anything around you. 

Most students have no idea what they think, which is why we are doing them a disservice when we don’t have higher order questions.  Anyone can regurgitate what I tell them 5 minutes ago, but creating questions that require them to filter through their own thoughts allows them to compare and contrast what they think with the literal facts that I give them.  It is through this process that they achieve an awareness of themselves as part of the world.  They have a voice and it is an important one.  Most students don’t know that and teachers are training them think in lazy ways, only giving what is absolutely necessary. 

I like that QtA encourages students to go beyond what they are reading.  I think that students think that if they read it in a book, it must be the final word on that subject.  They need to know that authors are not infallible and should be challenged.  A piece of writing is simply a tool for students to build on their ideas and a great way for students to realize this is through discussion that is organized in a way by the teacher so that students are making intended connections.  As important as it is for teachers to ask students “thinking” questions, it is just as important for teachers to teach how to come up with questions that further their learning.  It is really empowering to view myself as a thinker, and this was something never carried over in my school age years.  I never thought of myself as someone who could think in a way that would generate questions to increase my knowledge.  This is something that I would love to change in my own students. 

Note Taking as a Strategy to Learn

I admit up front that I am a terrible note taker, so this chapter immediately sparked an interest for me.  I can remember the first time that I took notes and that was in my 7^th grade social studies class.  Every day when we walked in the room, Mr. Johnson was just finishing writing the notes we were to copy on the blackboard.  The entire board was filled with sentences just waiting for us to write down.  There was absolutely no teaching involved, and this was my first introduction to note taking.  It was no wonder then, why I evolved into a student who hated taking notes.  I had no schema for it as an actual skill that provided anything besides regurgitation at a later time. 

I totally agree with the authors when they say that it is the teacher’s responsibility to set the student up for successful note taking.  I have been in too many classes where the teachers are setting students up for failure by having an apathetic view towards their students’ ability to take notes effectively.  Just as students should be taught how to take notes, perhaps teachers should be taught how to teach in a way that allows notes to be taken!  I think I see a professional development day in the future…  I think the key to teaching good note taking skills is intentionality.  It is important to be deliberate in every part of a lesson plan to set students up for successful note taking. 

I really like all the different strategies that were presented in the chapter, but coming from someone with bad experiences in note taking skills, I felt a little nervous looking at the chart forms.  I just have to wonder if someone that hasn’t developed the skill of note taking might spend more time trying to figure out where to put their notes than synthesizing the information they are given.  Is practice the only way that we can prevent this from happening?

Readers Theatre: Breaking Down the Wall of Learning Disabilities

"Graphic organizers have been shown to be of great assistance to students with learning disabilities". 

This quote struck me as being useful to teachers because most students that have learning disabilities don't really know what they know.  When a student has difficulty in a certain subject, whether it is math or reading or science, they tend to get bogged down in the unknown.  Students have a hard time getting caught up with the rest of the class because they don't know what information they are missing and they don't know where to begin looking for it.  Graphic organizers are helpful because it breaks a topic down into categories of information and shows the student what information they are lacking, how they can access it and they can make connections within that topic.  

I think it is important for students to know that a subject is not a collection of separate and unrelated categories of information, but that things are connected and should be looked at as a whole network of big ideas.  I was particularly interested in the section about graphic organizers in mathematics.  Math has always been my weakest area and I've always felt overwhelmed in class when all the other students seemed to be so far ahead of my thinking.  I think graphic organizers would have been really helpful for me because it would have helped me to know what I was missing and not feel scared to ask the questions I needed to clarify my thinking.

Read Alouds and Text Talk: A New Way To Look At Scaffolding

The first thing in this article that caught my attention was the contrast that the authors made between a student's need for engaging material and their inability to visually comprehend it.  I saw that first hand in my practicum experience today when the students were given independent reading that was on their level, but couldn't hold their interest.  I hear lots of "aww, man!" and "this stuff is so boring!".  The author's suggestion to read aloud to students what they can comprehend aurally but not visually is a valuable one.  The classroom that I was placed in is an inclusion classroom and almost half of the class has a special need of some kind.  One of the first things that I noticed was that some of the children had a lot of difficulty reading and writing, but when it came to verbal exchanges with the teacher, they were out of sight.  When the teacher was doing her whole class instruction, I could see some amazing thinking going on and it's a real shame to let an opportunity with text go to waste simply due to a lack of word recognition. 

The other thing that I want to address in this article is the authors’ section on text talk.  They stress the importance of asking questions trying to connect students to the story during the reading opposed to waiting until the end for any conversation about the book.  Again, my practicum experience today gave me some valuable insight into this.  The student I was working with during my tutoring session hates reading.  I could see immediately that reading was difficult for him, and that he shut down as soon as I started the read aloud.  I read Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion and I could almost see his eyes glaze over as I started to read.  The difference I saw was when I stopped at key points during the story to ask him questions and prompted him to make predictions.  If the predictions were too difficult for him, I gave him scaffolding to help him see a clearer picture of what was happening.  After the story was over, we did a retelling activity and the few things that he remembered were the things that we had stopped to discuss during the reading.  For my student, text talk during the reading was not just beneficial, but necessary for comprehension.  The only question I have is one that is student centered: how do I use text talk and prevent letting my student become dependent on it as a way to avoid his own thinking process?

Read Alouds and Shared Readings: What This Looks Like in the Classroom

The chapter on read alouds and shared readings had a lot of great information.  I really enjoyed seeing how other teachers use different techniques to accommodate their students in their various levels of reading.  I love how the authors described shared reading as an “instructional bridge between the teacher-directed read aloud and student-directed independent reading” and brought it back to Vgotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development Theory.  However, I felt that the next part of the chapter was a little inconsistent when they said that the “text should be at the independent or instructional level of the student”.  Since Vgotsky said that children should be given new information that is just above the level that they understand and should be given support to learn the new information, why are they being given text that is on their current level?  Shouldn’t the text be at the level just beyond what they are on currently? 

                In the example this chapter gives on Lee Mongrue and the book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, I really like that he uses literature circles to help differentiate instruction for each of his students.  It was really helpful to see the author take the reader step by step through the process of a shared reading and a DR-TA so that it was clear what it will look like in the classroom.  I think it is important as well to go over the steps of the DR-TA while telling the students the kinds of thinking strategies they need to be using during the process.  It makes it clear to the students what they are supposed to be doing and breaks down the activity into specific steps.  Speaking from my own personal experience, it is easy to get overwhelmed with a task if it is too broad.  It helps to have the teacher direct us to think about our thinking so that an activity can be broken down into smaller, more manageable tasks.