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.