This year in my internship classroom, we will be evaluating comprehension through Reader's Workshop. We have a literacy binder with records of all our students and what they are reading. We conduct conferences with them often which check to see if the student picked a book at their reading level, if they can comprehend the book, and their feelings or questions about the book. We also have them set a reading goal for themselves that they must try to meet by the next time we conference with them. This way of assessing comprehension has been pushed by the school district and is mandated by my placement school. I feel like this way of assessment is meaningful and productive because we are grading them on their progression throughout the year and not what they already know. One dilemma I will have to face is that each student is at a different reading level and have different needs as readers. As we go through the conferences with the students, we will group students by the different needs they have (comprehension, fluency, punctuation, etc.) By grouping the students, we will be able to save time by having the students work with us and each other to strengthen their weaknesses.
I also liked in the Strategies That Work book that they mentioned the importance of interactive read-alouds in relation to comprehension. Read-alouds are not only important for comprehension but for teaching specific strategies too. For my first mini-lesson I am doing a read-aloud where the students will have to answer my comprehension questions throughout the book. They will have to think about the underlying meaning of the story as well as guessing how the book will end. I will also add in my own experience at the end to help the students make connections to things happening in their own life. This will help establish my professional identity and build teacher-student relationships.
I feel confident in planning for literacy because we have a literacy program established at my school. We use a program called Making Meaning, which is scripted and works on a different strategy almost every lesson. I will finesse the "set in stone" lesson by adding stories or examples that the students can relate to. For example, if we were talking about bullying in a story, I would share examples from the "bully free" assembly that we had in the beginning of the year. This will help the students connect with a real life situation. I am still learning about the assessment process and I feel like I need to know more about the students as individuals before I can evaluate them and make decisions. By watching my mentor teacher and sitting in on conferences, I should feel more confident in my ability to assess reading and comprehension.
Heather, I agree with you that interactive read-alouds are an important component of comprehension as mentioned in our reading. My mentor teacher has decided to do read-alouds in fifth grade as she did while teaching second grade to model strategies to students. I think that modeling comprehension strategies during read-alouds is most effective because students can see how the strategy looks or hear how it sounds right then and there with a book or text. Sometimes just teaching the strategy can lose meaning since not all students learn best from instruction about comprehension strategies. For these students, modeling during read-alouds can be more effective. During my MT's read-alouds thus far my MT has focused a great deal on text to self and text to text connections. Students responded really well to her modeling and offered their own connections immediately. The coolest part about this was seeing a students offer these connections during other instructional periods. This observation reinforced the main idea from the first two chapters of "Strategies that Work" that focused on comprehension instruction being most important. It states that it is so important because it enables students to better understand what they read. This understanding is crucial for all subject areas since students will encounter text that they need to use comprehension strategies for in them.
ReplyDeleteHeather and Meagan, I agree with the both of you on the importance of continuing interactive read-alouds with even an older group. Students learn through modeling much better than they learn through telling so using the read-aloud as a model is a much more productive way to carry out a lesson. At my school as well we use the making meaning curriculum with Reader's workshop, which incorporates the mini lessons to help strengthen reading skills. This past week I led a session which focused on the importance of making predictions and understanding meaning of the story. The students were asked to talk with a partner and then share with the group about their prediction and understanding of what had happened so far in the story.
ReplyDeleteI know the feeling about conferencing with students and helping them to find what my teacher calls a "just right" book; it is challenging with all of the different reading levels that we have in our class as well. I think the most challenging part is helping them to find a book that they will enjoy reading and is at their reading level. I have found so far that with the struggling readers they will often choose a book that is way too challenging and will pretend to read it so others will think they have higher reading levels. I have had some difficulty convincing those students to choose a book that will better fit their level. That is one thing that I would like to learn how to accomplish this year and be able to boost student's reading confidence.
In the beginning chapters of the "Strategies that Work" book the main focus was on the understanding of comprehension instruction and I strongly believe that with my school's reading workshop plan and "making meaning" mini-lessons, the students are being exposed to many different ways to understand meaning while they read. During their independent reading time they also get the opportunity to put these strategies to work immediately, which is also good practice.