Lisa and others, Thank you for sharing. You brought up good questions and thoughts. Yes, I have been extremely fortunate in having access to training. I have attended 3 or 4 session with Smokey, spent 3 days with Ellin in Denver, and have attended a full day session on comprehension with the likes of Debbie, Tony, Ellin, etc... My training as a K-3 Reading Excellence coach with literature discussion groups did not use the role sheets (thank goodness!) but the discussions heavily revolved around a summary, connections, inferences, visualizations.....more about the strategies we were using while trying to tie it into how did it help you understand the story better. My thoughts now are that perhaps these conversations were not where they needed to be...I'm wondering if it should have been more about the deeper meaning of the books. This maybe due to the fact that I am now working with 4th-6th grade students and that I have read Teaching for Deeper Comprehension by Linda Dorn and Carla Soffos. I am fortunate that I am in a district who subcontracts with them for monthly coach training. Linda is very focused on chains of discourse whether it is among adults or with children. They believe that a conversation is a language dance-a set of well-orchestrated moves that are regulated by the desire to c onstruct meaning...meaning is negotiated through the group interactions. In this book, literature discussions are inquiry-driven with the teacher who may use, "Does anyone want to raise any questions about ___'s thinking here?" (clarification) or "Does anyone want to say something more about that?" (elaboration). It is over time that children begin taking on the conversational moves (or use their own language) just as Vygotsky speaks of how children learn in a social context and then internalize the learning and use it as a tool for their own thinking. In Linda's and Carla's book, they say that literature discussion consist of seven components. First, of course the introduction and selection of the book with ownership and choice by students. Children have been talk how to prepare for lit. groups and understand the guidelines for engagin in them...anchor charts are used to reinfoce independent learning. The second component is silent reading of the text by individuals....I can still see buddies though if one needs more support in persisting, etc... I do believe this is much better than teachers who have their groups read one page...I often wonder if they really concentrate by listening to others read/read with or if they are a few pages ahead like in round robin reading. The third component is teacher conferencing. This is a component that I unfortunately have left out due to the need to pull guided reading groups and literature groups. Here, she suggests meeting with students in short conferences before the actual lit. group. She is suggesting meeting with approximately 8 students daily...and yes I'm thinking this would take the place of a group in a schedule because I'm thinking we have to have time for math/science/social studies in upper grades. Here, the teacher might ask, "How did the story make you feel?" Has anything similar to this ever happend to you?" "What does the author mean here?" ""How does the author use words to help us see what he is describing?" and "What is the theme of the story?" "What do you think the main character learnered?" In conferences she prompts her students in three areas...response to story, questioning the author, and assessing comprehension. Kids also use reading logs to track their thinking and to make reflections of their reading. The fourth component is the actual lit dicussion. Here, the teacher provides different levels of support as children take on responsiblity for talk around books. She is sensitive to how the children are responding to one another and prompts them to build discourse chains within the group as I spoke about above. The goal here is for students to develop analytical and reflective strategies for comprehending. Conversations could sound like the examples they give with students discussing The Story of Ruby Bridges on p.88 of their book TDC: Taylor: I agree with you, Marcus. I think she opened the door for black kids to go to school with white kids so they could get a better education. Teal: Yeah, the white kids went to the best schools. David: Why do you think that, Teal? Teal: Well, on the page where they are in court the author says, " The black children were not able to receive the same education as the white children. It wasn't fair. And it was against the nation's law. alexius: But, Ruby kept going and that changed our schools. I love her for that. Matthew: I was wondering why the whites were so mean and did not want her to go to their school. The fifth component is a peer discussions where kids continue to talk without the teacher or the teacher may come in towards the end. The sixth component is text mapping and focus groups where kids with their teacher focus on author's style...leads/ending, voice or text features...setting, episodes, time, character analysis. The seventh component is literature extensions where kids continue talk with peers around the book, read another book by the same author, write a letter to the author, create timelines of events, etc... With all that said...I'm reflecting on the dialogue of the above conversation....I'm not noticing here in their dialogue kids sharing how they used strategies...I believe that they have moved to a deeper level and are discussing the output of the strategies...the deeper meaning. Yes, you could look through their dialogue and infer which strategy use produced their comments/levels of thinking...and that these discuss are truly focused on learning through a group understanding. In my own work with 6th graders I assessed that the students were really just throwing out whatever they found interesting or just sharing strategies but their conversations were disjointed and did not serve the group as a whole. Also, their conversations were at more of a literal level with some inferential/evaluative thoughts. As I continued to read: www.ncela.gwu.edu/pubs/ncrcdsll/epr2 http://www.ncela.gwu.edu/pubs/ncrcdsll/epr4.htm Then, I combined their criteria for instructional conversations and tried to embed it with Dorn and Soffo's literature discussions. What I found was that as I became self-regulated with the use of the Dorn and Soffos Supporting Text Talk Prompts p.87 of Teaching for Deeper Comprehension and the Instructional Conversation Scale, my students moved from just sharing disjointed surface level thinking and moved to deeper levels of inferential and evaluative levels of connected thoughts of the big ideas within text. (I started videotaping myself and rating my conversation moves/students moves or behavior to the Dorn and Soffos Text Talk and raating myself using the IC scale. Talk about a learning events!!!!) Anyway, I'm just questioning myself...and pondering how the strategies might have been my focus for a number of years...and one could say it was because I was teaching them to K-3 students and that in 4th-6th they move deeper....but I am thinking that even in the lower grades my book discussions could have moved to deeper levels than disjointed conversations and strategy use with ...since in reality the focus of the book discussion should have been the book's meaning. Am I going nuts?! Could someone help me consolidate my thinking? I'd love to hear if anyone's thinking has shifted in the use of comprehension strategies/book discussions. How do your discussion sound in your classrooms? If anyone wants an instructional conversation rating scale on a one page form...let me know. I've got one. Thanks for listening and for your future thoughts on this topic. Teresa T.
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