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.