Blog for Dec. 6

1.      What question are you thinking about?

My question at this point is what are the students telling me about what they don’t know. What do the range of my students need to do? What sort of differentiation are they asking for?

2.      What specifically do you want students to learn and be able to do?

I want the students to be able to make appropriate growth and I need to figure out what that growth looks like.

3.      What is something that you have learned about your focal students’ learning that has surprised you or been unexpected?

What surprised me was that when I asked students to do a reading response to show comprehension, my high student/s did not necessarily show their competence in that. My assumption was that my higher students would breeze through and their overall writing competence will reflect in their comprehension piece.

 

What I learned from this conversation is that things are not clear in my own mind. It is not about my own learning but it is about theirs. Teaching comprehension is not about expecting them to fill out comprehension reflections but for me to think about how they can show their understanding.

To attain comprehension they need to learn about the different elements in a text. They need to learn about different kinds of texts and their purposes and learn how to read texts differently. I was mainly focused on sequencing when I was trying for students to do retelling. They need to learn how to pull out the important pieces of the story and separate them from inconsequential details. So, they need to think in terms of what parts of the story if left out would change the story. I haven’t taught them in that way. Before retelling they then need to learn about these elements, create a rubric to refer to before they turn it in.

To me, now retelling has less to do with filling out a sheet so I know that they understood the story and more to do with how they tell the story.

 Retelling is not such a simple process. Students actually do not know the different pieces that make a good retelling. They don’t know the thread that connects the beginning, middle and end. They also don’t have a rubric to use to ensure they can show their comprehension.

My next steps are to clarify in my own mind what I am trying for them to do.

Examples and building rubric