Classroom Structures

The articles from this week’s reading consistently stressed the importance of improving teachers and the methods of teaching that they use. While I agree that there are many changes that need to be made in our system of education, some of the significant changes that I believe need to be made seem to be absent from the various lists of “educational improvements”. There are many teachers who could benefit from reading the article, “Every Child a Reader: What One Teacher Can Do” by Gay Su Pinnell. This well-written and informative article presents eight required actions for teachers:

1. Learn about learning

2. Put your theory into action

3. Establish inquiry as an integral part of your reading

4. Use research-based practices and put extra energy into making them work

5. Put your theory to work in the classroom

6. Take every opportunity to create community

7. Enjoy reading and writing with your students

8. Imagine a future and work toward it

All eight of these steps play a key role in the literacy education of students, but there seems to be a piece missing. Many teachers seem to lack this piece, but there is not a step you can take to easily fix this. Today, it seems like many teachers lack the driving motivation to teach that is usually fueled by the relationships they have with their students. To me, the difference in a good and bad teacher is not the way that they teach a lesson but how they interact with their students. When teachers lack this “desire to know and understand their students” that I am referring to, students may learn the material but are they benefitting as much as they could from this education? My answer is no. Teachers serve as constant role models for the students they teach, whether or not they realize this, and it is important that we have teachers in place that are willing to inspire and engage with their students.

1. Do you agree/disagree?
2. What do you believe are the most important characteristics of a good teacher?

 

Assessment

In order for a child to continue improving their reading skills, it is important to first know their current level of reading. Teachers must do this through assessment. Although many people tend to think of tests or exams when they hear the word "assessment", there are many different forms that this could come in. Assessments are simply a way to help teachers know more about their students' knowledge and what they can do to increase this knowledge.

To effectively execute this process correctly, a school first needs to catch any reading problems that a child may have in reading early and have a method for doing this that is easy to use for all educators. In addition, a school needs to have intervening services that will work with the students to address the issues that they may be having. These services need to be effective, efficient, and beneficial. In order to make sure that a student is improving from these interventions, a student must be monitored and tracked. So that a student is effectively monitored, teachers need be trained with this knowledge. There are many teachers today that have a lack of knowledge in what to do for low-achievers. This, of course, is incredibly important. However, teachers do not need to address these issues alone. Teachers and educators should form a skilled team that discusses the student's issues and what people can do to fix them.

All of these components are a part of the RTI approach, which is a systematic method for addressing the educational issues that a student may be having in class. The process is fairly long and detailed, but has provided many students with the assistance they need.

This image displays the three Tiers that are a part of the RTI model. This will make the RTI method a bit easier to understand

1. What are your thoughts on the RTI Model?

Guided Reading

"Guided reading is 'small-group reading instruction designed to provide differentiated teaching that supports students in developing reading proficiency."

In order for students to get all that they can out of reading, they need to approach reading in the way that best allows them to learn and comprehend.To make this possible, students can be put into small groups with other students who are on similar reading skill levels. The teacher then works with the individual groups, catering to the needs most appropriate for those specific students. 

The way that a teacher chooses to teach reading with these skills in mind may change depending on the the students' needs. Here are a few examples of different 'guided reading' activities:

As defined in the article, "An Experimental Evaluation of Guided Reading and Explicit Interventions for Primary Grade Students At-Risk For Reading Difficulties" from Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, "Guided Reading is frequently implemented as a component of classroom reading instruction or as a supplemental intervention. In practice, implementations of Guided Reading vary widely." 

Thoughts to Ponder: 1) How do you remember learning to read? 2)What guided reading activities do you remember doing? 3)What kinds of guided reading activities do you think will be most effective for your students?

Comprehension Part II

Last week, I wrote my blog about Vocabulary, so this week I am back-tracking to go back and write about Part II of Comprehension and Think Alouds.

Part I of Comprehension and Think Alouds covered why comprehension is such a critical part of the reading process. We learned about ways that teachers can incorporate this vital piece of the puzzle into the reading skills that are being taught to students.

Part II of Comprehension featured an article titled, "The Comprehension Matrix: A Tool For Designing Comprehension Instruction". This article explained the way that a teacher can effectively teach and cover each part of comprehension. According to this matrix, there are three main parts to comprehension: the reader, the text, and the situation. In addition, there are three main stages where comprehension is used: prereading, during reading, and postreading. In order to fully comprehend the idea of a text, it is important to focus on all aspects of this Comprehension Matrix.

When students are first reading texts and learning about comprehension, it is important that the teacher guides the students and clearly makes connections in the story apparent. If the teacher models the appropriate way to comprehend and understand a text, students will then pick up these habits and use them while they are reading their own.

In Part II, we also learned about Think Alouds which are when a reader models what they are thinking in their head while reading, aloud. This poster I thought could be a very helpful example, explaining what a Think Aloud may look and sound like.

1. Do you believe Think Alouds are the most effective way to instill good comprehension habits in children?

Vocabulary

"Vocabulary is critical to reading comprehension", says authors, Patricia Cunningham and Richard Allington, in Chapter 6 of Classrooms that Work. As we have read through Chapters 1-6 of this textbook, it is clear that there is not one distinct key to reading to comprehension; there are multiple critical components that eventually lead to successful reading comprehension. Like all of the various building blocks we have discussed before, vocabulary plays an essential role in how well a student will be able to read, understand, and comprehend.

It's a pretty simple concept: if a student doesn't understand a large amount of the words that he/she is reading in a given book, then the student will have trouble understanding the book as a whole. Therefore, a student with a vivid, strong vocabulary will have a greater success in reading. So how do we create "vivid, vital, and valuable vocabularies"?

There are many teachers (in the past and present) who believe that strengthening vocabulary comes from looking up the definition to a set of  "weekly vocab words". I can remember doing this very often throughout my elementary and middle school years. I was recently surprised to see that there are still teachers who assign this on a weekly basis. A couple of weeks ago, I was a tutoring a student and she pulled out a list of vocabulary words that she had to define. Although this can help students learn the meanings and define words, this activity does not really lead a student to better reading comprehension.

There are many ways that teachers can improve the vocabularies of students and, in turn, strengthen their reading comprehension. Some examples of this are the following: (Chapter 6 of Classrooms that Work)
-play show in tell with objects that students might not be familiar with or know the names of, in addition demonstrate the use of new vocabulary in the way that you describe these objects (get objects from both home and school)
-use classroom experiences/stories to develop a greater vocabulary by using descriptions that students may have not heard before
-use technology and media to introduce new objects and concepts that students may not be familiar with and experience in everyday life
-play charades with new vocabulary words
-teacher read-alouds with introduction of three, new vocab words in a story; After learning the new vocabulary words, display a picture of the book and the vocab words that go along with that particular story. An example from Pinterest is to the left.

In addition, the article, "The Vocabulary-Rich Classroom: Modeling Sophisticated Word Use to Promote Word Consciousness and Vocabulary Growth" by Holly Lane and Stephanie Allen, explains the way that a teacher vastly improved her five-year-old students' vocabulary simply through the daily classroom and routines of the students. In the beginning of the year, Ms. Barker used simple terms to describe the classroom jobs for the students and the students used basic vocabulary when executing their classroom jobs, but as the year went on the teacher began using more challenging and descriptive vocabulary--and so did the students.

What do you believe is the best way to improve a student's vocabulary?

Comprehension

When teaching children to read, we often focus on getting children to learn the letters, recognize words, sound out words they don't know. This, of course, is the basis for reading (recognizing the words and being able to speak them). However, we are missing a big chunk of this puzzle, comprehension. As we have discussed in our Reading Education class and read in our textbooks, there is no reading without comprehension. The end goal of reading is to comprehend, understand, and gain some sort of knowledge (whether new or old).

Chapter 7 of Classrooms that Work: They Can All Read and Write emphasizes the critical importance of comprehension and provides educators with ways that they can best accommodate students with this knowledge. In order to comprehend something, the authors explain that a student must first understand the basic structure of what they are reading. For stories, this can be fairly simple because students are very familiar with this structure. However, for non-fiction, informational pieces, this can often times be a more difficult process.

To best educate their students, there is a model for teachers which walks them through the steps that should be taken that first gives responsibility to teachers and then later to students.
The sequence appears as this:
    -I do, you watch
    -I do, you help
    -You do, I help
    -You do, I watch
(I: the teacher, You: the student)
This sequence can be very helpful for any concept or lesson that is new for a student.

Chapter 7 provides readers with 4 different categories of activities that can be used to focus on comprehension:
1. Literate Conversations- Open-ended questions to students about what they read, adult-like questions that allow students to make a connection to what they have read
2. Think-Alouds- Thinking aloud about what questions you have while reading, bring up the topics that you thought in your head while reading the passage to yourself
3. Informational Text Lessons- using graphic organizers to best understand these difficult concepts
4. Story Text Lessons- story maps (and other graphic organizers) to understand the plot, events, and characters in a story

Questions to Ponder:
1. How can we incorporate comprehension easily when students are at a young age?
2. What are some activities that you have had experience using that emphasize comprehension?

Below, I have included two different ways that teachers can focus and actively improve comprehension in their classrooms. The first activity (Pinterest), is a reading log that focuses on different aspects of comprehension depending on which day it is. The second activity (Pinterest) is a Reading Strategy Fan. The students could spend time making these themselves and then practicing the concepts that it addresses (predict, visualize, clarify, evaluate, etc.)

 

Word Study

When a parent sees a child inventing words, using their own brain to come up with a word that does not make sense, parents tend to worry. They sometimes think that their child is not on the right track, surely they are doing something wrong. However, after reading Making Words: Enhancing the Invented Spelling-Decoding Connection by James and Patricia Cunningham, it is clear that if a child is inventing their own spelling they are, in fact, doing exactly what they should be! In general, children who use invented spelling tend to eventually be better at decoding words. They also tend to have better reading skills later on down the road. So, parents should be rejoicing when they see their child is inventing their own words and spelling!

Teachers have even began incorporating invented spelling into daily writing instruction! Some teachers have began using a program known as Making Words. This allows the children to get practice in word decoding and invented spelling while doing their regular writing activities. In simple terms, Making Words allows the children to be given a number of letters and then gives them the opportunity to practice making their own words.

In the article, Supporting Phonemic Awareness Development in the Classroom by Hallie and Ruth Yopp, the authors define and clarify the meaning of "phonemic awareness". For many, this concept can be confusing, but Hallie and Ruth Yopp lay out this definition in a simple and accurate way:
"Phonemic awareness is the awareness that the speech stream consists of a sequence of sounds-- specifically phonemes, the smallest unit of sound that makes a difference in communication." An example that the authors give is the difference between the words "dog" and "hog". The smallest unit of sound that is different between the two words not only changes the sound, but changes the meaning. This idea of phonemic awareness of the larger umbrella, phonological awareness which is the recognition and the manipulate any size unit of sound.

I found a fun activity on Pinterest that allows students to practice their phonemic awareness while playing a game. This game changes the first letter of a simple word, when a student rotates the wheel. They then practice the word with each new beginning letter.

Questions to Ponder:
1. What are some other fun games you could create to practice phonemic awareness?
2. What were your original thoughts regarding invented spelling? Did your ideas regarding this change after reading more about it?