Expert Teachers

First I read the article by Pinnell, which was entitled, Every Child a Reader: What One Teacher Can Do . This article focuses on how one teacher implements her strategies and theories on teaching her children how to read. First the article mentions that a teacher must understand learning in order to make sure her children will be able to learn through her teaching methods. The teacher then must utilize their theory, investigate and observe the students progress and use research to support their methods. I believe this to be completely helpful because teachers need to always explain why they are teaching a certain concept to their students. It needs to be reflected in the standards and it should be supported by research. Also if you document the observed progress by your students this is an easy way to effectively help improve their abilities and show administration their improvements. The article also harps on enjoying reading and writing with your students and making community involvement essential in your classroom. You should have times when you are assessing the students and having them work hard, but time should also be set aside for reading together as a class in enjoyment. This is a great quote to live by and seems to summarize to me effective reading.

The second article I read was by Frey and Fisher and was title, Identifying Instructional Moves During Guided Learning. This article talks about how teachers use a four-part scaffolding process to help students learn, grow, and understand during guided learning. One of the features of this article that I enjoyed most was the section on pause and pondering. This little chart was a chart that a teacher could use to evaluate themselves on whether they are asking important and relevant questions to their students during guided practices. It talks about problems that you may encounter when asking students different questions. This is important because you may not succeed the first time you ask your students different questions while they are in a small group. They may not understand the questions and you may have to ask it in a different way. All students will respond differently to the type of scaffold you provide during their guided learning. Here are the questions so you can quick reference it. What do you think about these questions? What questions would you add or omit? Why?

PAUSE AND PONDER
■ Why is it important
to ask a range of robust
questions (e.g., divergent,
inventive, heuristic) during
guided instruction?
■ What misconceptions
and partial understandings
do you commonly discover
with your students? How
do you repair these?
■ Novice teachers
sometimes focus on the
physical arrangement of
guided instruction (i.e.,
tables, books, number of
students) at the expense
of the cognitive purposes.
Why do you think this is so?
■ What cues (e.g.,
verbal, visual, positional,
gestural) do you find to
be most useful during this
phase of instruction?
■ In what ways can a
reading coach support
teachers in developing
guided instruction

Real Life Inquiry

For my real life inquiry I observed in a residential K-12 school in a first grade classroom. The class sizes were small, so there are more opportunities for one-on-ones and observations. The students really benefit from these experiences and the teacher tries to take full advantage of them. I observed a guided reading lesson that was not exactly like the video we saw in class. The teacher presented the book to the students and asked them what they thought the book was going to be about. They had a small discussion and then she let the students read the book together. The students took turns reading each page of the book. The students helped each other with words that they could not identify. If they both were unsure of the word the teacher tried to help them use context clues and letter sounds to identify it.

This worked very well and I loved seeing the students working together. They were cooperating with each other and were very engaged in the lesson. They enjoyed helping each other and were proud when they knew the word and they got to help their friends. It was a great experience seeing this integrated into the classroom. The grouping of the students was really effective because one of the students was on a slighter higher reading level than the other student. After they finished the reading the teacher had a small discussion about it but mostly the students talked about the pictures and what they liked or did not like about the book.

This seemed like a positive experience and something that I will definitely integrate into my classroom. I want my students to become independent and associate reading with pleasure. This was a relaxing but engaging activity that the students were very motivated to participate in. I was wondering if the teacher should have maybe had more interactions with the student. How much involvement do you think is necessary by the teacher? What do you think the teacher could have done to make it more engaging?