After looking over the readings for this week, I have found myself questioning what areas I might struggle in this year when it comes to comprehension. I feel that when it comes to literacy and how to incorporate effective comprehension throughout the class, I am quite comfortable with strategies and relating readings to my students. Although I feel comfortable, I feel this way because of the relationship I already have established with my Mentor Teacher and my students. Do you feel comfortable within you classroom already? Have you created positive relationships with students? In my classroom, I have already used some of the strategies that are presented in the first chapter of "Strategies that Work". I mostly use text-to-self strategies and will stop and relate the readings to an event that has happened to me. I also like to ask the class if any of the events through the story relate to their lives as well. Creating a strong relationship while reading is one great way to keep my students interested in the reading.
Another area that I feel very comfortable with is my planning. I have been able to write many lesson plans. I have done some from scratch, some right from a book, and some composing ideas from both the book and original. Already within my classroom, my MT has been giving me a lot of opportunities to take the lead on creating our daily schedule and has already had me write small lesson plans for a few small lessons I have taught. I feel that this is really going to help me when it comes time to creating our unit plans. I will know exactly what is needed/ asked of me by my MT. When looking at the article by Jodene Kersten and Laura Pardo, "Florio-Ruane (2002) argued that teachers make nondeterminative decisions because the circumstances of their practice are complex and open-ended. She stated, “Teachers retain sufficient agency to act in new, creative ways” (p. 210)." I feel that this really hits home when it comes to trying to create really good comprehension based lessons for our students. We must be able to captivate and bring home a lesson on comprehension beyond just giving our students something to read and have them write about it. Learning this year will hopefully let us all find new and creative ways to incorporate literacy in a fun, interactive way, that allows our students to experience what the text is truly trying to say and not just telling them to figure it out and moving on.
I'm really wondering on where my group members stand for this coming year. How comfortable are you with literacy? Comprehension? How do you feel you do when it comes to showing text-to-self examples so students can relate? What are you most worried about this year when it comes to literacy? As a group I know we will be able help each with many new ideas. I look forward to working with you and hope you enjoyed my post!
-Cory
I definitely agree with feeling comfortable and have the ability to implement strategies to relate texts to the students, student's experiences, and student beliefs. Through TE classes and countless articles about the importance of reliability to a text and how it influences and strengthens comprehension, I feel like I have the ability to connect students to texts, texts to world... and so on. As far as creating relations with the students, I have created a "lunch bunch" and it went really well with the three students I chose to come have lunch with me. It helps to create stronger ties between me and the students, as well as establish myself as an authority figure, rather than just another student teacher in the back of the classroom. This will help me to get to know the students better, and be able to relate texts to them more specifically knowing who they are and their interests. As far as planning, I would like to be more involved in the process with my MT, but being a hectic first two weeks, my MT wants to establish himself as the head teacher before throwing me to the wolves. As the year progresses, my literacy involvement will certainly increase. For now, I am in charge to SSR management and Conferencing, which is a great first step.
ReplyDeleteFor this year, I feel really comfortable with literacy. I feel like the 400 level classes from last year really helped me to improve my knowledge about literacy, and about teaching literacy, and all of the different ways this can be done. My MT for this year specializes in Math and Science, and Language Arts is not one of her strong points, so I am actually pretty excited for the opportunity to be of assistance to her when it comes to teaching Language Arts. At this point, we really have not really had a chance to do a lot of Language Arts instruction in the classroom, as we have really been spending most of our time setting up classroom rules and norms. Next week our literacy stuff will really start, as we will be launching CAFE with the students, which is a brand new way to assess literacy with students, and to actually go about teaching literacy. I am really excited for this program to begin, but also a little nervous because it is so new to both my MT and myself.
ReplyDelete