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?

Guided Reading: Simply Explained

This article was very concise and specifically explains what a guided reading session includes. The purpose of guided reading is to have the children in small groups working on a reading strategy together. Some of the strategies are letter-sound relationships, context clues, word structure, etc. This process can be modified and can be utilized in the upper grades. The students are able to pick a book and are grouped together by their reading abilities. The goal of guided reading is effective and improved independent reading. Students get into small groups, typcially 4-6 kids and their duration of the session is usually 15 to 20 minutes. The teacher explicitly explains what strategy they are working on and what she expects from the students. This is a wonderful idea and I truly believe that I will implement it in my classroom in the future. I want to make sure that I know all of my student's reading levels and abilities in order to place them in the right reading group. Here is a link of my article:

http://olc.spsd.sk.ca/de/pd/instr/strats/guided/guided.html

Technology Savvy

Technology is a great tool to use in the classroom and has grown and advanced tremendously in education. Many teachers are afraid to utilize technology because they have very different philosophies about teaching. I, on the other hand, completely think that it should be utilized in the classroom at any time possible. Children these days are so advanced and understand how to use technology at an early age. There are many ways that a teacher can incorporate technology into their lessons. The article written by Dalton and Grisham, talks about an online source called Wordle. Wordle can be used for many things in the classroom such as memorizing vocabulary or brainstorming about a certain subject.

Another example of technology the article talks about is using power point. Power point is a very important tool in deaf education. The students use power point in order to learn to write stories together. The students usually play a game or make something and then use power point to write about it. This enables them to add words in different colors, such as making the words red that are their high frequency words. Power point also enables the students to input pictures and animation. This can help the students pay attention to the lesson or connect what they wrote with to a picture like a story book. Also in power point, paragraphs written or pictures drawn by the student can be scanned in and added to the power point. This is a great way to incorporate the children's work into the lesson. Here is an example of a slide template that could be used to talk about Easter:

What are some other examples of how to incorporate technology in classroom?

Comprehension is a Process

In the article by Gill, it lays out a visual representation of how reading comprehension is a process. There are ways in which you can follow the process and different activities you can do. The matrix was very helpful to me because it shows it as three steps and what each component of each step is. Pre-reading is important because you must be able to get the student interested. What are some ways you can get the reader interested in the book? Also a K-W-L chart is a great way to discuss as a group what they already know and then fill out what they want to know and save the learning part for the post reading. This was an easy to follow matrix and of course you can tweak it however you want depending on your students reading levels.

In the article by Pardo, she talks about building and activating prior knowledge. In deaf education this is crucial because many students come in lacking prior knowledge that we may expect them to know. Some students do not have access to the language or may have a different connection to certain words that will enhance their knowledge. It takes a lot of questions and different ways in order to build and activate their knowledge in a positive and meaningful way. Students need to know that whatever knowledge they have already is important and by building on it, it can effect the way they comprehend new knowledge.
What are some ways to activate their prior knowledge of the example: The beach? What could you ask them, how can you get them motivated to learn about it?

What is a Word?

This article told us to think about our own vocabulary. I sat and pondered and thought about all the words I have accumulated in my vocabulary. I have broadened my vocabulary by hearing different words in my environment and this makes me think about deaf education once again. It is so important that we receive our vocabulary for the most part in an auditory sense. For the children that I teach, it is best to label objects around the room and constantly use different vocabulary when I am signing. This helps them get the words visually and the labels help them put names with objects. This helps them get a sense of why words are what they are. Also for children to notice words that are often used. In my classroom I am in right now, these words are called "High Frequency Words." These are words such as "a," "an," "the," and "with." These are important words that the students need to recognize because they are often used in many sentences they produce.
Think about:
How did you acquire new words in your vocabulary?

Phonemic Awareness Instruction

This concept immediately made me think of deaf education and visual phonics. First when I was reading the article it talked about younger students using different songs or chants in order to focus on different aspects of the phonemes in the different words. Rhyming is also an important aspect of phonemic awareness and can help students predict what the word will be next based on the rhyming scheme. This is a great tool to use in your classroom. As far as visual phonics goes, this technique is used when you are teaching a child with a hearing loss what different sounds are. It focuses on using symbols that represent hand movements on the mouth. This helps the child visual what sound they will make and most symbols represent what movements your tongue makes. However, if some students have some hearing the techniques such as sing song, in the article and book can be used to teach the deaf students phonemic awareness.