Joy--- I bet you found, as you wrote your very thoughtful response, that you understood better by having the chance to think, reflect quietly and then compose your email. Think about what you did to try to understand the posts on this thread and how you feel about all those wonderful questions you keep getting in your struggle to understand. :-)
I would just give you one thing to continue to think about---what would happen if we model not only strategies and language to speak about the strategies, but also model what changes in our heads and in our lives when we understand. What would happen if, tomorrow, you go back to your kids and told them what you did to understand this thread?...what emotions you were feeling, how you were changed or how your thinking was changed...the questions you still have and what you are going to do about them? This is the powerful missing piece in my own instruction to this point. I can't wait to get past "state testing season" so I can start playing with these ideas with students. I feel I need to model the thoughtful literate lifestyle---the joy in the learning and the struggle so that the kids feel that passion and drive to understand that I do. 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: Joy Sent: Thu 3/27/2008 1:06 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Understand] Understand Digest/Guiding discussions and articulation Ellin, Elisa, Jennifer, and others (sorry if I forgot anyone who responded to me in this conversation), While I'd like to think that teachers at my very progressive school would never do this, I am concerned that they might think that naming the strategies is "the end goal" as Jennifer stated. I'd like to thank all of you for helping me understand and think about my question. All of you have expressed the essence of what I was getting at. Let me see what I understand so far, please correct me and help me come to a deeper understanding. It seems that the consenses of the conversation is the key to strategy instruction is teachers having ongoing conversations with students. It also seems we need to guide students to the knowledge and make sure the guidance leads to a name that they can take with them. Scaffolding them to this end is tricky. We need a better method of talking about this with each other. We teachers must be explicit yet guide discussions in a thoughtful manner. We also must give them time to have these authentic duscussions with each other, and these discussions need to cross subject lines. In some ways I think we are talking about teaching kids tools for thinking and articulating their thoughts as well as tools for reading. Self expression is something my students struggle with, whether it is in reading, math, or science. These are subjects where I require them to discuss or write their thoughts and observations. I get so many blank stares at the beginning of the year when I ask them to describe what they are thinking or what they observed. Leading them to expressing their understanding can be quite challenging. I'm often amazed at who the "usual suspects" turn out to be. In my experience, sometimes they are not who you would think. When I was teaching second grade, the "usual suspects" were the ones who could provide the most detailed synthesis of the story, despite the fact that they were struggling mightily with decoding. They were able to think quickly and get to the heart of the matter from the read aloud. What makes these kids different from the students who could decode and were fluent readers, but were not fluent thinkers? Now I wonder about my fourth grade students this year and last. (I've taught 2 years of fourth grade students that I had in second grade.) What has happened to them in third grade so they come to me less able to think and articulate than when they were with me the previous year? Am I feeling like I'm having to work harder because my expectations are too high, or am I asking them to think back to far? It seems like the more I think about this, the more questions I have! Joy/NC/4 [EMAIL PROTECTED] How children learn is as important as what they learn: process and content go hand in hand. http://www.responsiveclassroom.org --------------------------------- Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your homepage. _______________________________________________ Understand mailing list [email protected] http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/listinfo/understand_literacyworkshop.org _______________________________________________ Understand mailing list [email protected] http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/listinfo/understand_literacyworkshop.org
