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?

Choral Reading: In Class October 6th

Choral Reading:
When a class or group of students reads a specific passage together, at the same time. A teacher usually chooses a passage that is easy, simple and fairly predictable. This allows the students to easily read aloud with the other students and not have to worry about making mistakes. Before or as the group reads, the teacher models the correct expression that should be incorporated when reading the passage. This activity improves the fluency of the students and gives them an opportunity to practice.

Fluency

Before reading Chapter 4 of Classrooms that Work: They Can All Read and Write this week, I was unaware that the idea of fluency had a specific term to describe it. I had heard the word "fluency" before, but not in the context of reading and education. Now I know that fluency is:
"the ability to read most words in context quickly and accurately and with appropriate expression. 

In simpler terms fluency could be described as:
quickly reading words+understanding those words in context+use of appropriate expression=fluency

This picture was taken from Pinterest.
I believe that it might be helpful for students to be more informed on what fluency is, so that they can specifically work on this aspect of their reading skill. Students could use this check list to evaluate themselves on their reading and fluency.

A student must have fluency in order to actually enjoy the story or book that they are reading. Without fluency, a student is unable to comprehend or understand the important concepts and the meaning of what they are reading. Why would one choose to read if they do not know what they are reading?

Poor fluency is the reason that many students have trouble with reading and end up disliking reading. Reading cannot be a fun activity for someone who has to sound out every word and not even understand those big words that they are having so much trouble with. In order to improve fluency, one of the primary things students can do is read books that are easy for them. If a student practices reading the books that they have no trouble with, this practice will work on their fluency and eventually improve this. Because one of the key elements to fluency is expression, another way you can improve fluency is through echo reading. Basically, a teacher reads a story with an expressive voice and the students mock the tone and sound that the teacher is using to read. This allows the students to hear how a book should be read and gives them the opportunity to give this a try.

This picture was taken from Pinterest.
Teachers could incorporate this fun reading activity/game in their classroom in order to practice expression, an important element of fluency.

Discussion Questions
1. Were you aware of fluency before this class? What are your experiences with fluency in school?
2. Do you remember using activities in school that focused on fluency?

Clues for Comprehension

What Can I Say Besides "Sound It Out"? Coaching Word Recognition in Beginning Reading by Kathleen Clark asks a question that I believe is more important than I once thought when teaching children to read: what can I say besides "sound it out"? This summer, I worked at an inner-city day camp for elementary school students and had a great deal of experiencing helping these children work on their reading skills. For 40 minutes a day, each child had the opportunity to read one on one with a adult volunteer, getting the attention and help they needed to improve their reading. I spent a good portion of the summer (8 week program) working with a 6th grader who continued to struggle educationally and socially while in school. This student, Louis, was on the reading level of the average first grader, so it was very important for us to take baby steps to help him be successful. We would read very short picture books and he would have trouble recognizing the words and being able to read him. Louis would pause and I would sometimes say, "How about we try to sound this word out?" I would walk him through the process of sounding out a word. He had no trouble with this, but it seemed that he never retained this information. Louis was having difficulty recognizing the words and making connections.

After reading the article by Kathleen Clark, I have been enlightened on some great coaching skills that could be used for students like Louis. Unfortunately, I was not fully aware of the different techniques of coaching that could be used before last summer. I was very interested to learn about the two instructional cues that can be used when coaching: general cues which help guide a children to an idea or thought and focused cues which lead a student to the next step. 

In Chapter 5 of Classrooms that Work: They Can All Read and Write, Patricia M. Cunningham and Richard L. Allington explain some great activities that can help a student learn to recognize words, the similarities between words, and thus using this knowledge to spell new words. I really liked the various activities where a teacher would put a sentence on the board and would cover up one or a few words. The students then had to look at the context of the sentence and figure out what the hidden words were. 

This photo that I retrieved from Pinterest helps a teacher guide a student through reading in 3 different ways. A student can start by just looking at the pictures and talking about what the meaning of a word could be. They can use their memory and previous knowledge. Lastly, they could read the words and the letters to try and figure out the meaning. Because context is so important, I thought these ways of reading could be useful.

Questions to Ponder

1. What experiences have you had with assisting a child to read (coaching)? 

2. What instructional cues have you found are more effective (general or focused)?

Reading Experiences: Good and Bad

What past experiences have brought you to have a passion for reading? If reading isn't your thing, what experiences have caused you to dislike reading?

I believe that asking these questions can help future teachers figure out what encourages students to love reading and what makes children or youth sway away from the idea of "reading for pleasure". Sure, not every student is going to enjoy sitting down with a nice long book, but I believe that educators need to do the best they can to make sure all children experience reading in the most positive and beneficial way possible.
In the article, Letting Go of the "Letter of the Week", Donna Bell and Donna Jarvis discuss their reactions to similar questions to the ones I asked above. Jarvis stopped reading because her teacher moved her to a lower level reading group. Bell doesn't ever remember getting read-to until she was in seventh grade. These stories stuck out to me because they were such small things. Such small things that caused two girls to hardly ever want to pick up a book. If something so small can affect a child's desire to read, this is clearly something that teachers need to dig deeper into.

In a second article, Learning to Read and Write: Developmentally Appropriate Practices for Young Children, the International Reading Association (IRA) and the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) discuss their position statement on reading and writing for children. A key issue that they bring up is that preschool educators have not had the extent of the education they need to support literacy development these young children. This is an age group that I believe needs more attention in order to develop stronger literacy skills in students. How do we improve literacy practice in the young preschool years when their teachers are not required to be specialized in this area?

This activity is for preschool students who are getting ready to go to Kindergarten. Parents or teachers allow a child to retell a memory or story, and the adult writes it down  on a large sheet of paper.  The child can look at this and begin to identify with the words they have said.

Source: coffeecupsandcrayons.com

Firm Foundation

Since beginning the Reading Education class and reading the article, The Jones Family's Culture of Literacy, I have been extremely interested in the way that a student's history, upbringing, and culture can shape their future in education. Before, I had never really considered the significance these things can have on the way that the child sees reading, learning, or education in general, but it is clear that the way a child has first experienced reading as a major impact. For some families, reading their children a bedtime story is a natural occurrence, but for other families (let's say a single mother working two jobs), these children may not have the luxury of getting read to regularly. Some families may see education as a priority, the pathway to success, while others may not put such a strong emphasis on education. Whatever the situation may be, a teacher is expected to be able to effectively teach them and provide them with the best education possible.

When a child enters kindergarten, it may be more difficult to figure out the background or history of a student and their family. Some children may have had the experience of pretend reading, a concept introduced in Chapter 3 of Classrooms That Work: They Can All Read and Write. Pretend reading is when a child acts like they are reading by looking at the pictures and mocking what an adult may do when they read to them. Although it is not real reading, this is still an important step for children who will begin learning to read soon.
So what happens to those children who don't pretend read? What happens to those children who are never read to by their parents?
While pretend reading is important, if a student has not experienced this as much as others, they will still be on the write track to learning to read. Chapter 3 discusses many concepts and activities that can build a firm foundation for reading.  One activity particularly stood out to me, because I can remember doing it when I was in the first grade: student interviews. This activity involves picking one student each day to be interviewed in the classroom. The student for the day gets in front of the class and is interviewed. The teacher asks them questions so that the children can get to know one another in their classroom. The teacher also takes this opportunity to discuss the child's name, the letters that compose it, the letter arrangement of the name, etc. These basics introduce the students to concepts that they will need to begin learning.
What activities in elementary school were memorable for you and also incorporated basic literary concepts?

This picture shows an activity that I found on Pinterest, originally sourced from activity-mom.com.

Students can practice matching the words they find on bottle caps to the sentences that they have written on strips of paper. This will help them in recognizing the basics of sentence structure. Students can see that a bunch of words come together to form one big sentence. They can count the words that form the sentences as well. This activity is similar to the activities discussed in Chapter 3 of Classrooms That Work: They Can All Read and Write. 

Fifty FIfty

In chapters one and two of Classrooms That Work by Patricia M. Cunningham and Richard L. Allington and the article, What I've Learned About Effective Reading Instruction by Richard L. Allington, there seems to be an obvious underlying theme: students need more reading and writing throughout the day and schools need teachers who make this a consistent goal.

In the article, What I've Learned About Effective Reading Instruction, the author explains how half of the school day needs to be devoted to some form of reading and writing with the rest of the day being used for other "stuff". Reading and writing, instead of being limited to the Language Arts and Reading periods, needs to be a routine used in all subject areas. When I reflect on my elementary and middle school years, its hard to imagine at least half of the day being spent reading or writing. Maybe this is because we did not actually do that much reading or writing or maybe its because my teachers engaged us in ways so that we did not even realize the extent of reading and writing that we were doing. While I agree that the amount of reading and writing needs to increase, I wonder how teachers across the board can do this in a way that is enriching while entertaining and engaging. Effective and exemplary teachers are ones who have perfected the balance of these things. To you future teachers, how do you plan on incorporating reading and writing into half of the school day in a way that is fun and exciting for your students? Chapter Two of Classrooms that Work provides a great example of a way that children can enjoy reading, get excited about the books they are reading, and have fun sharing with the other students in their class. Through "reading parties" students have fun reading and explaining to their peers what they like about the specific book they have chosen to read. At the same time, students can lounge around in their groups and eat snacks. This creates a positive reading environment and causes students to associate reading with something entertaining.

The following chart effectively summarizes many of the main ideas that were introduced in the articles and chapters from this week's reading. The Education Ins section of the chart explains many of the habits of an exemplary teacher, while the Education Outs shows us the habits of an ineffective teacher.

Chart found on Pinterest and originally gathered from usergeneratededucation.wordpress.com: