Reflection On Current Practice

Reflection on Current Practice

Currently in my classroom I focus on teaching specific comprehension skills in small groups or in whole group mini lessons. My students spend a lot of time working with other students to discuss and apply strategies taught in class. When reading a text, most of the time I read aloud a piece and have students highlight important vocabulary or important features in the story. We focused a lot last quarter on making predictions and elements of literature such as author’s purpose, theme, mood, plot structure and summarizing. Students are still mastering these skills, so I have also been reteaching them in small remediation groups. This quarter we have been working on examining arguments and citing evidence. In order

Mosaic of Thought had me re-evaluating my own strategies that I use while reading. This text as shown me, that even though I am proficient reader I don’t always think deeply enough about the text. The inferences chapter we read this week really challenged me to think about the types of questions I ask my students about the texts we read. I asked very “on the surface” questions because often times my students struggle with even that, but perhaps if I can scaffold my students and push them to think deeper about the text I can ask more inferential questions and be amazed by my student’s responses. I feel like if I scaffolded my students and modeled the processes of thinking aloud, asking questions, monitoring for understanding and inferring, my students will have a deeper understanding of the text we are reading and be more engaged in the process. In text The Next Steps in Guided Reading, Richardson goes into to great detail about the strategy of guided reading and its ability to help teachers create a balanced literacy approach. Currently, my district uses a program called LLI kits which is similar to guided reading. I like Richardson’s ideas, but I feel like it would be difficult with my language arts classes because my reader’s levels are all over in place and I have only one group that is close to a similar level with each other. Richardson’s program is also designed for a 90 minute literacy block and I only have 45 minute class periods and my time is often interrupted my behavior