OK, Jennifer. I completely get what you're saying here and I have some further questions for thought, both yours and mine, and others' on this list.
As you noted, once you probed your students you realized that they were indeed making connections. And, as you know, we are always making connections to what we read even if those connections lead us astray or don't add anything to our comprehension of the text. Of course, these are not the kinds of connections we want to focus on since they don't help us understand better. Yet, they do happen. It's that little voice that gets in the way of our thinking deeply about text (Chris Tovani). Here are some questions I have: Do your students understand better now (teacher assessment) because they now know that any connection they make is acceptable? Do they understand better now because they can name their connection, ie text-to-movie? Did the quality of their work improve because they could label their connection or because they were given permission to state their connection? Did the quality of their work improve because you took the time to probe and listen to their ideas on a more intimate level? I don't know. I'm just asking questions here. Maybe I should experiment with my own students when I go back next week and ask them to make a connection to the read aloud that day. Then, we can make a chart to illustrate the different kinds of connections that are being made, and name each connection. Will other students rise to the occasion in the future? The reason I ask myself this question is because although I don't formally name different kinds of connections, like you, I have just a few kids who will voluntarily voice their own. Perhaps if we named them (or showed the range of connections that one can make) then other kids might feel like they've been given the permission to voice theirs. Then, of course, we need to look at which ones help us to understand and which don't help at all or get in the way. I don't know. Still thinking. Thanks for sharing this. Elisa Elisa Waingort Grade 2 Spanish Bilingual Dalhousie Elementary Calgary, Canada 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
_______________________________________________ Understand mailing list [email protected] http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/listinfo/understand_literacyworkshop.org
