Bonita I know what you mean about standards. It is where I start teaching. But try to develop a letter grade on some standards and the holistic nature of reading strategies starts causing issues. Okay, say we want kids to find the main idea...or to determine importance. What do we expect a first grader to be able to do? a 4th grader? a 9th grader? How does it look at each of those levels and who decides? We run into this at our school all the time. If I have a third grader who is reading at a second grade level who has learned to make great inferences in second grade materials...and can do it when you read a grade level story to him, but can't do it independently in grade level materials because of decoding issues, has he met the standard for inferences? We are grading thinking here and that gets really fuzzy. I wonder if there is something of a developmental continuum based on the sophistication of strategy use which has more to do with the nature of understanding and the ability to use language more than the level of actual thinking. For example, I don't think there is an optimal age/grade to teach inferring. If you think about it, a very, very young child can infer that mommy is angry because of the look on her face....through lesson study I saw five and six year olds make amazing inferences...but those inferences may not seem any where as sophisticated as what we might do as we read To Understand or any other book at an adult level. Is that due to psychology or simply because they don't have the language/experiences yet to express themselves? Is the thinking PROCESS there from the beginning? Inferring is a thinking process that, perhaps, is used throughout our lives, in math, reading, social relationships, etc... The sophistication of our thinking might depend on our experiences, what we have read before, our brain growth and development, our motivation, engagement and perhaps especially upon the development of the language needed to share our thinking. Maybe the level of thinking depends more upon what our kids know about what it means to understand...the depth to which they know they should throw ourselves into the learning, the willingness to wrestle with ideas, to be uncomfortable for a while, to dwell in ideas. The same might be said of teacher learning...if our teachers are not actively seeking to deepen their understanding of what it means to teach effectively, then it doesn't matter what the quality of the curriculum is. If they don't understand the content in depth, they miss opportunities to explain what it means to understand math, science etc. Whew... Lots of thinking for a Saturday afternoon... Jennifer In a message dated 5/3/2008 3:30:45 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Now I will go back to my question on the previous email. Is math instruction the same as reading comprehension? Or are some subjects more linear/spiraling (like math and science) and other subjects more holistic (like reading comprehension and writing)? In math, you do need to understand what a fraction means before you can step up to relating the fraction to other things. Is this so in reading comprehension? Do we need to know how to do context clues before we can infer? Would a spiraling or linear curriculum make sense in reading? (Is that already how we do it and I am too much of a dolt to get it?) :)Bonita **************Wondering what's for Dinner Tonight? Get new twists on family favorites at AOL Food. (http://food.aol.com/dinner-tonight?NCID=aolfod00030000000001) _______________________________________________ Understand mailing list [email protected] http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/listinfo/understand_literacyworkshop.org
