When I think about comprehension instruction in my placement classroom I find the activities my CT does similar to the topics discussed in the Applegate article, comprehension depicted though question asking that leads to discussion. Although my CT asks text based questions, or questions that require students to restate information cited in a text as the majority of the questions when the students are reading from their literature or social studies textbooks, she does encourage critical responses, or require her students to share their ideas or think about the significance of a text when she is reading a picture book to her students during literacy on the carpet. One recent example of this is my CT reading “January’s Sparrow” by Patricia Polacco to her third graders, as this text required the students to share their ideas about what was going on in the text and think critically to understand the story.
In addition to asking questions I also see comprehension instruction in my placement classroom when my CT has her students write summaries, talk with their elbow buddy (a partner)or table mates about a specific topic or question, use graphic organizers, or complete various writing activities.
In relation to comprehension activities, I have really only worked with students in my placement classroom on reading short stories and creating summaries, or organizing the information from the story into a graphic organizer in small group settings.
I think that my CT does a good job of providing a variety of methods which allow her students to show their comprehension. However, I wonder how my CT can allow her students to show their comprehension through critical thinking more often than them just providing text based responses. I think one thing that my CT could do is use a variety of the intervention activity suggestions from the Applegate article such as use Semantic Feature Analysis Grids, extra vocabulary instruction, concept mapping and more discussion following a reading.
I have the exact same question as Jenn in relation to comprehension outside of directly text-based. Prior to reading a story, she asks the students what they think the story is going to be about based on the title and cover of the book, and then tells the students what the book is going to be about. After, she asks if the students have ever experienced anything similar to the experiences she stated the story was about, and allows the students to create text-to-self connections with the story. While she is reading, she stops and asks questions in addition to allowing the students to chime in with their own stories that relate to additional text-to-self connections they might not have thought of or had the chance to say prior to beginning the story. After she has finished reading the story, she asks additional questions that assess the students' comprehension. However, I haven't seen much assessment of comprehension outside of this. The students never do comprehension activities such as graphic organizers, writing or creating summaries, etc. I think it would be extremely beneficial to assess comprehension during writing time. During writing time, my CT has the students take out their writing folders and either continue writing and illustrating a story they have already started, or create a new one. There are never any given prompts--it is always simply a free write. I think that because my CT reads to my students at least 3 to 4 times a day, a beneficial prompt during reading time would be to either pick a story or give the students a choice of 2 of the stories already read that day and ask them to write or draw their interpretation of the story in order to assess their individual comprehension. In addition, creating summaries as an entire class following writing time would also be beneficial, in order to collectively put together each of the students' writing responses. Graphic organizers would also be beneficial, but I think that because my CT doesn't utilize them at all, creating graphic organizers as a class would be better than individually creating them. Because my CT isn't really utilizing any other method of comprehension outside of text-based strictly within reading on the carpet, how is she truly assessing individual comprehension? Is this a "fair" way of assessing comprehension?
ReplyDeleteSince Kaitlin and I are in the same classroom, I am seeing the exact same things that she described. I have also wondered the same things about comprehension and how my CT assess comprehension. Like Kaitlin mentioned, my CT reads to her students quite frequently throughout the day, but she never really does anything with these books. Sometimes, the book will have a certain theme, such as groups of three, or rhyming, and my CT will ask the students to use that theme in their own writing, during their writing time, but she never really enforces it. Some students choose to do it, and other students choose not to, so I do not think this is a very effective method.
ReplyDeleteThe only time I can think of that my CT assesses comprehension is when she works with groups. During their "Read to Self" time, my CT works with small groups of students, depending on their reading level. She uses different books or different passages of the same book to assess students with fluency and comprehension. She will ask students to read pages either out loud, page by page, or silently to themselves, and then she will ask each student individually what they just read about. If a student has trouble, she asks the student a guiding question, and if they still can't remember, she has them go back into the book and see if they can find the answer, and she moves on to the next student. I feel that this is more effective than the writing method, however, I feel that sometimes students just listen to each other and say what they heard from the last student. I feel that my CT should work with smaller groups so that she can get a more concrete answer of who is comprehending, and who is not. Even though my kids are only in first grade, they have figured out ways that they can "beat the system," which is something that I have learned to always keep in mind when teaching.