Elisa I think we are closer in our views than you think... Let me tell you about some work I did recently with some of my fifth graders. I work in a coteaching situation with a whole class of students who struggle with comprehension. They struggle with comprehension for many reasons...some (about 50% ) truly have oral language delays or weaknesses, others have attention issues, still others fluency problems. We have been using the Comprehension Toolkit and had been working for about 3 weeks on making connections. When I sat down with my coteacher and looked at student work, there were several students who said they "had no connections" and others who seemed to be making less than authentic connections.(When I was on the Titanic once.... :-) ) We decided we need to investigate. When I sat down with these kids, what I discovered is that some of them had some serious misconceptions about making connections. They thought that connections had to be something that they had personally experienced (those text to self connections) but totally did not get the idea that other kinds of background knowledge mattered. I had modeled other kinds of connections too, many times...without naming them at first...and showed them how they helped me understand the reading but they just were not getting it. That's when I realized that these kiddos had no mental hook to hang their thinking on. When I decided to go ahead and teach the names of the kinds of connections (text to world, text to text---and their own idea---text to movie!) it was like a light bulb went on. They had a mental hook on which to organize their new concepts of what connections can be. These kids were making connections but until I named them, they didn't know they were important enough to express. Well, the floodgates opened and all the sudden, the quality of their work improved tremendously and so did their understanding of the toolkit texts (which are not easy, by the way!).
Now I will never go and ask the kids to go back and label their connections as text to text or text to self for a grade, but by 'noticing and naming' the kinds of thinking that connections include, the kids were able to then begin to recognize the connections they were ALREADY making in their heads but didn't consider important. This was an important learning experience for me. I think that because I work with so many kids who cannot find the words to express their thinking, I totally understand Ellin's concern that without the language to express themselves, we as teachers may think that our students are not thinking at high levels when the problem really is they don't know how to say what they are thinking. The naming of the strategies is not the end goal...it is a tool that opens up the possibilities for a child to compare his or her thinking with others---to develop conceptually what readers do to understand. Jennifer Jennifer Palmer Reading Specialist, National Board Certified Teacher FLES- Lead the discovery, Live the learning, Love the adventure. Reading furnishes the mind only with the materials of knowledge. It is thinking that makes what we read ours. -John Locke From: Waingort Jimenez, Elisa Sent: Thu 3/27/2008 12:05 AM To: Special Chat List for "To Understand: New Horizons in Reading Comprehension" Subject: Re: [Understand] Cathy Jennifer, I think it's important to be able to use language that names what we are trying to do but it is way more important to be able to do it. I think that instead of asking kids to make T-S connections we can let them make these connections as they arise and just name these as connections. I never differentiate the type of connection that is being made or request a particular connection. That seems overkill. However, naming it for kids and having them use the terms as they feel comfortable seems to me a much more natural way to go. I don't think you have to know the correct terms to be metacognitive. I think thinking about our thinking happens naturally if we encourage it. Our job could be to help kids name their thinking if this seems like it will help them get their point across succintly. Elisa Elisa Waingort Grade 2 Spanish Bilingual Dalhousie Elementary Calgary, Canada _______________________________________________ Understand mailing list [email protected] http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/listinfo/understand_literacyworkshop.org
