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. 

Writing to Learn

After reading chapter eight of the textbook, I appreciated that Fisher and Frey explained the difference between writing to learn and learning to write.  They said that it helps the teacher and the student to see what is unclear, so it helps the teacher see what level they are on and it helps the student “know what they know”. 

I also loved the section on writing to learn in mathematics since I have struggled my entire life in that subject area.  I know what it is like to feel that you are missing some information to be able to learn at the same pace with the rest of the class.  Fisher and Frey talk about the importance of teaching students to ask themselves questions such as “What’s the rule?” and “What’s the first step?” and I think that this has value because students need to be able to think about their thinking in order to fill in the gaps. 

I also love the idea of writing what they are thinking as they go through the thinking process.  It is easy to move through that process and get to the end without realizing how you got there.  So, if a student is unable to find an answer to a problem, then they need to understand where they are off track in their thinking.  This why I think the students’ ability to write about their thinking process is so important.

I enjoyed reading the Knipper and Duggan article much more than the Moss article since writing to learn is more of a tool meant to help students learn.  The information concerning the different ways to assess writing is helpful since that seems to be one of the only drawbacks to these strategies.  I thought the microthemes strategy was a great idea because it gives the teacher a way to assess what the students actually know and it also gives the students a way to review for their tests.