You know, Ellin, I think some of this is a symptom of our fast-paced culture. Even our reading comprehension tests are quick...time is of the essence. I have been experimenting with Fountas and Pinnell's new assessment kit and they have a great piece for assessing comprehension...the comprehension conversation. It is not about firing questions at kids, but instead it is a leisurely conversation about the book. I like this assessment format a great deal and think that perhaps if we did more assessment this way, we would find that kids understand more than we think they do. (It fits nicely, I think with the comprehension strategy interviews that you have published...) Some prompts are provided by the authors as conversation starters...and I find that these prompts are needed for some kids...but the prompts are high quality. They are covering "within the text, about the text and beyond the text.". At the higher levels, the prompts get into author's craft---critical thinking. It interested me to discover that the "I know you don't know, but if you did know what would you say" worked pretty well in this setting too. I do think that the kids really DIDN'T know...but when I waited, they went back into the text, and/or really thought about it and came up with something and those "somethings" were often brilliant. This year, with my third grade "intervention group" I find myself working with a group of struggling to average readers who have very little understanding at all. Most of these students are new to me...I have never worked with them before this year and I am now starting my sixth week of instruction. I am a bit frustrated. We read the first chapter of Horrible Harry and the Green Slime today. Everyone of these kids have good surface structure systems in place. (They sound wonderful...and some of their parents can't understand why the reading specialist is working with them. ) Yet I was appalled at how little they understood. This book is pretty simple. Sentence structures are not complex. The school setting is familiar to children. The kids seemed interested, at least at first, in Horrible Harry. In fact several of them claimed to have read lots of Horrible Harry books. Each chapter is a stand alone...in fact, they don't have to follow the story from chapter to chapter. Usually it is a nice transition book for kids just starting chapter books. Listening to the conversation after they read, it became very apparent that: they didn't understand that the narrator was a central character, they missed important details (like the setting for the story), had minimal understanding of story structure, they missed the humor because they didn't understand how the events in the story built upon each other. There were some word meanings that were unknown but they didn't know they didn't know the words! It seems that everything leads back to the fact that these kiddos are totally lacking in understanding of deep structure systems. AND oh yes, the other issue is reading speed (they are in a hurry to finish) combined with some attentional issues. I don't mean the hyper kind. These kids are multi-tasking in their heads! What I am finding is that in this setting, the "But if you DID know..." doesn't work as well as it does in my other classrooms because they are not mentally engaged to begin with. Maybe if I waited even longer, I would get there, but when I keep waiting, I lose ALL the kids. I have been wondering what to do. They need the deep thinking, but it has been OH so hard to set up the environment for it. SO...here is my plan. The first step is to work on building a sense of urgency in order to get them engaged. I plan to spend more time on WHY deep thinking about reading is so important, give them some more choice and control of book selection and of course more strategy work---lots and lots of modeling about how rewarding it is to put that mental energy into reading. AND I plan to get a whole lot more deliberate about helping these little ones construct for themselves the other dimensions of understanding. I have had difficult groups before...but this group is using up all my bag of tricks at a very rapid rate! Thoughts anyone? Jennifer In a message dated 11/13/2008 1:09:54 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
I just wanted to thank Rhonda for her comments about Chapter 3. I have found the same response from children of all ages when they are given just a bit more time to dwell in the idea. I often think about how I would respond if a teacher said (and they often did), "Answer this question, correctly, brilliantly, insightfully and FAST!" I would, in a word, choke. Yet that's what I see all the time when I visit classrooms. We adults are uncomfortable with the silence that is necessary when someone is given the necessary time to think, so we fill it in with "anyone else?" or "I'll get back to you when you think of something," and they learn quickly to respond with, "I don't know" or "I forgot." ellin keene **************Get movies delivered to your mailbox. One month free from blockbuster.com (http://pr.atwola.com/promoclk/100000075x1212639737x1200784900/aol?redir=https://www.blockbuster.com/signup/y/reg/p.26978/r.email_footer) _______________________________________________ Understand mailing list Understand@literacyworkshop.org http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/listinfo/understand_literacyworkshop.org
