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