Peter says: "I think that sometimes it's better to ask students how they think we should organize the information so that they can remember it; let them try it to see if it works, and then try. As Ellin says, savor the struggle."
and he also says: "It's our job to help them see that. Simple strategies such as the T-chart with: What the author said / What it means / What it makes me think helps them to see that pattern." I agree... this is so true... I think by using the simpler organizers, or asking the kids to create their own, we are doing less of the thinking for the kids and asking them to use their heads to find the patterns and make sense of what they are learning. What I am wondering about now is a powerful statement made by a colleague of mine last week. She said to a group of colleagues that she had thought that her students lacked background knowledge. What she discovered was that they HAD the background knowledge, they just didn't see the relevance of this knowledge! Many of us on this list have read Peter Johnston's work : "Choice Words." He talks a lot about the use of language to help students 'notice and name.' When we ask students to label their connections as 'text to text' or 'text to self', our intent might be to help students realize that they know a LOT about the world that will help them to understand what they read, but the message they might be getting instead is that the end goal is to name the strategy rather than gain meaning. I think it is extremely important to help kids realize that their connections can come from many places. What if, instead of us telling the kids what text to self or text to world connections are, that we model many kinds of connections and then let the KIDS notice the similarities and name the sources. It would be easy to record a variety of connections on post it notes and then let the kids move them around into groups that are similar. So what if kids group the thinking "text to movie" or "text to Mom" connections instead of text to world??? Letting the kids notice and name the kinds of connections might help kids see all the many places connections come from. THEN we as teachers model noticing and naming what we UNDERSTAND as a result of all these kinds of connections...what we know now that we didn't know before. Then we have to keep presenting that same question to our students as they begin to use the strategies. "What do you 'get' now...that you didn't 'get' before?" It is all about how we use language to convey what it means to understand AND giving the kids some more of the responsibility for defining for themselves what understanding really means. There is a new book out that my principal recommended to me that is fantastic...it is called "Getting to Got It". It talks about this very thing...helping kids to build the cognitive structures needed to make sense of the world...to see patterns and relationships. Good stuff and a great companion read to "To Understand." Jennifer **************Create a Home Theater Like the Pros. Watch the video on AOL Home. (http://home.aol.com/diy/home-improvement-eric-stromer?video=15?ncid=aolhom00030000000001) _______________________________________________ Understand mailing list [email protected] http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/listinfo/understand_literacyworkshop.org
