Comprehension

This week's reading and discussion definitely made me think more about my own comprehension strategies/styles and the way in which I will teach these strategies. The Applegate (et al.) piece provided a really great way to organize and differentiate between the types of comprehension troubles students have. In the field and in my own experiences as a student, I've observed just about all of the categories of comprehension problems outlined, as well as a lot of the strategies the piece mentioned, but I never really organized my own thoughts on this enough to fully understand which strategies would help which students. From my observations in the field, I know that I would be most thrown off by left-fielders and I admittedly spent more time thinking about how to gracefully bring a class discussion back on-topic than exactly which strategies would prevent the problem from happening in the first place. For my own learning, I definitely recognized myself as having literalist tendencies, at least until my sophomore year of high school when it seemed like the only question my teacher would ask was, "what is the significance of ____?" In later classes as well, we spent a lot of time discussing higher-order questions and I began to move away from this comprehension profile.

I found the Neufeld article extremely helpful when considering what types of questions and models I should be providing for my students. Unlike Erin's experience that she shared in class, although I have always been a good student, I'm not very metacognitively aware. While I do go through many of these processes (establishing a purpose, summarizing, questioning) it is probably not as deliberate as it should be, and I don't do a lot of pre-reading. Knowing this, it is that much more important for me to study these strategies and effective ways to model them for my students. Piper discussed the way in which our CT models these strategies for his students, and we saw a couple of lessons on inferences that stick out in my mind. Our CT often activates prior knowledge by summarizing the strategy, then models the strategy by making his own inference and explaining his thought process ("I think Bradley Chalkers is beginning to trust Carla because..."). I am curious though if he is providing enough scaffolding for the students to really think through the process on their own. He seems to include aspects of most of the instruction strategies discussed in Neufeld (direct instruction on the strategies, modeling, guided practice, independent practice) but I don't really think that they are prepared to use it as a helpful strategy on their own for the purpose of comprehension. The student responses I have often heard are not always very accurate (ex. predictions rather than inferences) and I think that some of his directions don't always make it clear that this is supposed to be a strategy used in reading, rather than an assignment. (He may stop at one point in the book and instruct the students to "make an inference" which, if done accurately, does provide insight into the book, but it isn't always presented that way.) While I plan to continue examining the depth of student responses during reading workshop, I do think I have gotten a lot out of being able to observe this modeling technique...I feel more prepared to use it in my own classroom in a very deliberate way.

Reading Comprehension-Christina

How do today's readings and discussion help you understand your own reading comprehension processes? What are you seeing in the field related to comprehension processes and literacy instruction? Make sure to reference the readings and our class discussions.

I definitely feel as if I can really see which reading comprehension profiles I matched with as a child. I do think that I was a literalist as Applegate explains-that all answers will be found in the text. I used to be certain that everything I could need to know about a book, came straight out of the book, however, I now know that is not necessarily the case. For example, when I am going to teach my ELA lesson, The Story of Ruby Bridges, not everything is clearly stated in this book. It never once says why people discriminate, and it never once goes into depth about the past ideas of segregation. My students will have to come to some conclusions on their own--why the people discriminated against Ruby, why schools were much different in the past. Coming from a literalist past, I will need to work with my students that display these same qualities, so they look much deeper and beyond the text. One way to go about this as Applegate explains, is to do pre-reading activities on the theme that one is about to explore. For example, if I was teaching The Story of Ruby Bridges to my classroom, I might consider teaching a unit on discrimination, or even racism, within my social studies lessons.
Another comprehension profile I felt like I could relate to was the dodger. Sometimes when I didn't like a question, I would think of something somewhat similar, but not exactly the same, in order to satisfy what I felt like was worth answering. When working with Dodgers, I can use strategies such as List-Group-Label, Teacher Predictions, etc.

Within my field I am seeing many different profiles in my students. There are plenty of literalists that look only at the text for answers, fuzzy thinkers that provide vague answers, left fielders that give ideas I, myself, have never considered, and dogders that dodge questions completely. In order to adapt to the many levels of thinkers, as well as their different profiles, it will be important for me in the future to implement a variety of different comprehension activities, so that students are looking deeper into their understandings, so that they can truly comprehend the texts.