Week 3 Comprehension

Synthesis

Ch. 4 (Jetton and Shanahan)

This chapter focuses on the idea that teacher planning is an important part of the learning process.  Planning involves the preplanning ideas and organization that occurs before presenting a lesson.  Research has shown that more experienced teachers use a skeletal planning framework, while newer teachers are more detailed in their planning.  Planning can be effected by a multitude of factors: school budget, class size, ongoing activities, culture, and types of students.  There can also be different types of planning; long term or short term.  Teachers  understand that as much pre-planning that goes on, it’s crucial to be able to make quick decisions during the lessons.  

Keeping student identity a key component while planning, will help lessons be more applicable.  Students come to classrooms with an identity, but their identity is always changing depending on their surrounds and what they are learning.  By using a culturally responsive pedagogy, you will immerse your students in the lesson.  

The classroom environment influences decisions in pre-planning.  Having a “norm of practice” for each content area will help student learn and understand the process, procedures, and discourse of each subject.  Involve students in the subject’s learning goals.  They will be more likely to want to learn.  They will see the whole picture if they are aware of the end goals.  Allowing students to be a part of unit planning and assignments, will lead to motivation and ownership of the classroom material.  

When planning lessons, it’s important to implement strategies that help with the following areas: activating prior knowledge,  text importance, mental imagery, text structure, questioning, and inference making.  These areas all help with comprehension.  As teachers, we should try to incorporate learning segments that focus on comprehension and give students opportunities to practice.  By giving students specific goals and strategies while reading, they will learn to comprehend better.  

As teachers plan, they need to reflect on their planning practices.  Looking at the learning goals long term is vital to student success.  Seeing the whole picture, instead of tiny blocks of time, will generate a more cohesive and integrated lesson.  

D2L (Fisher, Frey, and Ross)

Background knowledge and comprehension accompany each other.  What a readers knows about a subject predicts what they will learn.  Students need to be able to read things they understand.  Books that are above their levels will not teach them more.  They will likely not understand the books. 

When students read, they need to have a purpose.  Many times students are assigned a book but don't read it with purpose.  Therefore they don't know what to pay attention to.

Students must have a large vocabulary to figure out what the text is about.  Simply increasing vocabulary helps student's grasp what they've read.   Using semantic maps and graphic organizers can help improve vocabulary.  

Modeling helps students think in a variety of ways.  Students who see  teachers explaining their learning process will help students learn new ways to comprehend.  The article suggest 4 ways teachers can model.  They can use comprehension strategies.  Show students how to decode unknown vocabulary.  Teach students to decipher between text structures and text features.  When these strategies are modeled, students will begin to use them in their own learning.  

Another comprehension approach is using reciprocal teaching.  Allow students to be the teachers and guide their peers.  They become the leader in their own learning.  The following are 4 steps to reciprocal teaching: summarizing, questioning, and clarifying, predicting.

Ch. 8 (Hinchman, sheridan-thomas)

Comprehension is  essential for adolescents to have success in learning.  "Simply surrounding students with complex texts and then expecting something to happen is magical thinking- if that was all that was necessary, we could merely send students to the school library and be done with it" (p 140).  This sentence from the chapter stood out to me.  Many teachers assume this to some degree.  If we never allow time and teaching of strategies for comprehension, students will learn nothing.  

Research has shown that an extensive vocabulary helps students comprehend various levels of text.  Teachers need to realize this is an area of literacy that needs attention.  Vocabulary lessons should be incorporated daily.  

Letting students know what the purpose of learning certain material helps them take ownership.  Everyone want to know why?  When students know why, they can  focus their attention.  The material seems relevant to their lives.  

Middle and high school material becomes more difficult as they progress.  Modeling helps apprentice students to show them how something is done.  This guides students in to different ways of thinking.  

Response

After reading all the articles and chapters  it became evident there were major themes.  One that stood out to me was vocabulary.  Students must continually broaden their vocabulary in order understand harder text.  Another theme I saw was reading with a purpose.  Students are always asking "why do I need to know this."  As teachers, we should have an objective with what we teach.  Keeping students involved with that objective helps them understand the whys.  Even when I was teaching pre-k, I always put up an objective.   It was a pretty simple objective, but students began to be explorers of their learning when they knew the objective.  Each week they'd come into class and look for the new weekly objective.  They also began exploring outside the classroom for those objectives.  I found it interesting that in the readings the authors mentioned that text complexity wasn't always a good thing.  If students can't read and understand, then they won't comprehend.  They must be able to read and grasp the ideas.  

Questions

1.  What are some of the ways you build background knowledge?

2. In a room of diverse learner with different reading levels, how do you resolve the issue of text complexity?  Certain books are required at different grade levels, how do you get through those books when some kids can't read them.

Re: Week 2 Vocabulary

Synthesis:
           This weeks reading got me thinking about my own vocabulary teaching and how I have taught vocabulary in the past.  The chapter and D2L readings inspired me to dig deeper and have a better understanding of how teaching vocabulary, even in the younger grades, has a profound impact on one's life.  I felt the over arching theme of all the readings was there has been a decline in teaching vocabulary.  All the readings seem to hit on the fact that vocabulary development is essential for success in school and life.
           Hinchman-Thomas:
This chapter discussed how important having a large vocabulary is.  The authors go on to explain what tier I,II, and III words are and how they are crucial for the understanding of subjects.  Words are learned many ways.  Good teachers understand that  students learn through a multitude of lenses: schema, modeling, mentors and coaches, socioeconomic status, reading, and relevance.  Active engagement is necessary in mastering new vocabulary.  The chapter gives 5 specific strategies for engaging vocabulary learning
          1. K-W-L charts (know, want to know, Learned)
          2. Teach-Teach- Trade
          3.  A Word a Day
          4. Root Words
          5. Digital Words

           Manzo, Manzo, Thomas:
This article stresses the importance of low and high frequency words.  I found it startling to read the statistic of students in 1940, knew the meaning of 80% of the words on the standardized test.  By the mid-90s, an average student scored 30% on that area.  Understanding that standardized testing uses a lot of low frequency words, teachers/districts need to get on board with teaching vocabulary.  Vocabulary instruction has been neglected.  The article seems to suggest this has happened over time.  Research has shown the importance of sustaining a rich vocabulary as a culture.  For example, research suggest, "word power is painlessly acquired way to feel and be more effective and, therefore, to raise self-esteem."  That is one aspect of the research suggest in this article.  There are many more that are convincing arguments as to why we need to sustain vocabulary development.  The two approaches to teach vocabulary are community of language and hybrid cultures and media.  The community of language approach suggest having a list of words that everyone in a school is using at a given time: principals, lunch helpers, crossing guards, everyone.   This would allow children to hear words over and over.  The next approach is hybrid culture and media.  The author suggest that the new literacy world is a common ground for students.  They come to share and learn through different modes of technology; their bias, cultures, and social status are not as big a deal.

               Harmon, Wood, Medina:
This articles discusses the importance of teaching vocabulary in content areas. Teachers  in content areas (mathematics, science, and social studies)  report having trouble explicitly teaching vocabulary.  The words are abstract and limited to mathematics, science, and social studies.  Many times students will only hear those words within those class.  Teaching vocabulary in these areas rely heavily on prior knowledge in those content subjects.  Though each subject has unique vocabulary, there are some similarities.  Each content area has technical terms, non technical terms, function or word clusters, unique representation, and common root words.  Knowing the significance of each area according to the  subject will help teachers teach the vocabulary better.  There are  key understandings that are essential to content vocabulary instruction.  They are as followed:
      1.  Vocabulary learning is closely tied to conceptual understanding.
      2.  Explicit instruction in content-area vocabulary builds and supports conceptual understandings.
      3.  Explicit instruction involves multiple, varied, and meaningful experiences with words.
      4.  Vocabulary learning occurs implicitly in content-area classroom.
      5.  The structure of expository texts can impact vocabulary learning.
      6.  Classroom instruction time for learning vocabulary is necessary and must be sufficient.
      7.  Metacognitive awareness of vocabulary learning fosters independent learning in the different
           content areas.
      8.  Different content- area words require different types of instruction.

A student who knows words and knows them well, will have a better understanding of the world around them.  As teachers it is important to continually seek new and interesting ways to incorporate vocabulary instruction.  If teachers do not make it a priority, we are at risk, as a society, of losing the essence of our beautiful language.  
       
Response:
These articles and chapter got me really excited and thinking about my own teaching of vocabulary while growing up and how I actually teach vocabulary.  I honestly only remember seeing a list of vocabulary words at the beginning of my text book chapter.  I then was suppose to go look up each word and put it in a special note book.  This was boring and mundane.  I learned very little from it.  To me it seemed like a time suck for the student and teacher.  I realized that in the older grades, my teachers did very little in explicitly teaching vocabulary.  I guess they assumed it was the elementary teachers job and I should already know everything or at least have the skills to figure it out.  Luckily I had them, but I'm sure that wasn't the case for a lot of student.  Therefor, they went on reading, having no understanding of the content.
       As an early childhood teach I feel we do a pretty good job of teaching vocabulary.  I know this is because students have the drive to want to learn and the excitement.  It makes teaching pretty easy.  When your audience is constantly asking, "why, why, why," they have the desire and the teaching just happens.  I do not have the experience of teaching older students, but I can imagine each year a student progress through the grades, it becomes more of a challenge of how to present vocabulary in a new exciting way.

Questions:
1.  How do you "not" teach to the test when all the standardized testing is tier 2 and 3 words?  It just seems like somehow teachers always get roped back into teaching to the test.  It feels like a trap teachers face daily.  I feel like all you would need to do is get a hold of the supposed testing terms for the test and just teach those.  Seems to diminish learning and teaching.  I know this question is rhetorical but I can't help but wonder this question throughout all the readings.

2.  As an early childhood teacher,  I'd love to hear some of the explicit ways you teach vocabulary in your classroom.  I'm always trying to add to my resource database.

Testing!!