Pg. 109 in Strategies
that Work introduces the chapter by stating the importance of students
needing to see us, as teachers, both answering AND asking questions. Being
teachers means that we have the opportunity to set an example for our students
as learners, and its important to show them that we don’t have the answers to
everything. Asking questions is an important part of the comprehension process,
and using authentic questions to further investigate a piece of writing allows
learners to consider their own thoughts in new and different ways. Chapter 9
brings up the idea of using one book to teach a variety of different
strategies. Page 131 (Figure 9.1) displays an example of using post-its as a
comprehension tool, practicing visualizing and inferring. Do you think
integrating visualization and inferring techniques simultaneously within the
comprehension process is a good idea? What does practicing them both at the
same time allow learners to successfully accomplish? How does one impact the
other in terms of making implicit material (implied information) explicit
(clearly expressed)?
I think Madi makes a great point when she says that its ok, as a teacher, not to know the answer to a question and use that as an examlpe to show students that they are not expected to have the answer to everything. I also agree with what Madi said about using questions as a way for students to consider their own throughts in new ways. While asking questions to get stuedent to think about theri thinking and generate discussion is important, i also think there needs to be scripted questions that we already have the asnewr to, so that we can monitor student's progress and comprehension of a certain topic. The book calls these, assessment questions, and I believe they are essential to any teacher who wants to track their student's progress. As alwyas it is important to retain a comfortable balance between assesment type questions and questions that generate discusion and curiousity in amongst students. Moderation of both is alwyas key and based on what you learn from assessment questions and informal/formal assessments in your classroom you can make a decision as to what type of balance to maintain with questioning.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Joey that there has to be a balance between questions that probe thinking and questions used for assessment. To answer Madi’s question about allowing learners to integrate visualization and inferring techniques together I think it can be done. I think sometimes students need to visualize what they are reading to be able to infer. I think it is important that if students are struggling with either aspect that we as teachers break them down and divide them but eventually we want them to be doing both simultaneously. I agree with both Joey and Madi that is very important to let our students see us questioning and answering because it shows them that it is a natural part of life (like making mistakes). One of the things that my MT does is create a bank of words that are categorized by the 5 sense to help the students be more descriptive in their writing. This bank of words grows over the year as students and/or teachers add words to the categories. To me this would help support the unit “Creating Mental Images That Go Beyond Visualizing” (pg. 137). My question then becomes How can I get my students to use these descriptive words in their other classes (like science)? What are ways that I can get them to make connections between what they are learning in language arts and apply this across their curriculum?
ReplyDeleteI love how Madi brought up the idea of post-its as a comprehension tool. They are a great tool to use while reading because you can move them around and organize your thoughts in a way that you can understand. I think this would be a great tool to use during our book club groups so students can think about what they're reading without having to flip back and forth between a piece of paper and the book. This is a comprehension tool that we, as teachers, would need to heavily scaffold for our students because they may have a difficult time understanding how to arrange and write adequate notes on the sticky notes (without writing paragraphs).
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