My Education Beliefs are Researched Based!
* Schema Theory *
Jean Piaget (1896-1980) was known best for his work with development of human knowledge. He believed knowledge was constructed on cognitive structures and he believed we developed our own cognitive structures through schema by accommodating and assimilating information. Piaget thought that schema would be applied to everyday life and therefore you would accommodate and assimilate information naturally.
I introduced schema in my classroom as "the knowledge in your brain". My students knew that we add to our schema every day and that our schema helps us understand what we are reading. But, you must 'activate your schema' when you read. Here is an anchor chart that is similiar to the one I made with my class at the beginning of the school year.
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Louise Rosenblatt (1904-2005) believed that reading was a transaction between the text and the reader. Each transaction is a unique experience and the text does not have the same meaning for everyone. This is because each person has an individual set of beliefs, background knowledge, and context that aids in the reader's comprehension. In the classroom, this theory represents itself as "Reader Response".
Reading Response is important because it allows the student to interact with the text and think deeply about what is happening in the story. Each Reader's Response activity asks the student to examine the text in a new or different way.
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Stahl, Pardo, and Neufeld--Reading Comprehension
Click each link to read these comprehension articles:
Dougherty and Stahl article
Pardo article
Neufeld article
Each of these articles reminded me of the high quality practices we are already doing at BES. There are several aspects that we do with guided reading and mini-lesson read alouds which are described in these articles as effective and important. Both Pardo and Neufeld state that a reader's background knowledge is imperative for reading comprehension. Because our school is 70% economically disadvantaged, this is a big obstacle that our students must overcome. They do not have the world knowledge like their mid/high SES students do. Another challenge for our student population is that they have limited vocabulary and word knowledge. Not all of our students have quality conversations with their family when they are at home. This correlates with Dr. McGill-Franzen's book, Kindergarten Literacy, that stated 'first graders from higher SES knew twice as many words than first graders from a low SES'. As teachers, we discussed some ideas from the articles that we would really use in our classroom. These are: teaching vocabulary words with the use of graphic organizers, incorporating nonfiction texts during a read aloud, asking more open ended questions to facilitate student discussion of text, and literature webbing. I will be teaching first grade next year (down from fourth grade!) and am seriously looking forward to trying literature webbing. It seems like such a simple idea, but it has a positive impact of students' story structure, predictions, and story retelling. I was a little surprised at Stahl's promotion of using quality video for at-risk students. I will agree that they might be able to retell it better but, at the same time, at-risk students are the ones who need a book in their hand and one on one guidance from a teacher. These students do not have a print rich environment at home and they certainly need one at school. Personally, I feel that students who watch a book as a movie are missing out on key elements like author's craft, beautiful illustrations, identifying text structure, fluency practice, and reading comprehension. Overall, these three articles described the necessity of explicit teacher modeling of comprehension strategies. I feel that, as a whole, our school is taking big steps in the field of literacy instruction. In one year, we have moved away from a pure basal model to a differentiated approach with guided reading, independent reading practice, writing, and (coming this year) word study. I am proud to teach at Benton Elem. and feel that we are doing what is "BESt" for our students. :)
Dr. Allington and Valencia & Buly--Effective Literacy Instruction
Click each link to read the article:
Recently, our principal and Dr. Allington have been working closely together. It was exciting to read an article writte by Dr. Allington! In this article, Dr. Allington describes the six T's of effective elementary literacy instruction. These effective components are: time, texts, teaching, talk, tasks, and testing. I was surprised to read that some classrooms only had 10 to 15 minutes of reading time out of a 90 minute reading block! How could those teachers not realize the importance of independent reading? Our faculty is appreciative that Dr. McAbee spent our textbook adoption money to buy leveled texts. He realizes the importance of students reading on their independent level and knew it was a necessity to have more texts for our school. Another point that was brought up was Allington's term 'active instruction'. This reminds me of the mini-lesson that our literacy coaches taught us about. Active instruction is where a teacher explicitly teaches a skill and shows the students the cognitive strategies during a 'think aloud'. This allows that students to clearly see what a fluent reader is doing and the reasoning behind what strategies we used. This past summer we were trained in Daily 5, which is very similar to the tasks element that Dr. Allington mentions. Allowing student choice (limited to a degree) was motivational and encouraging to the students. Not all students were working on the exact same task at the exact same time. In fact, students were given fewer but longer assignments that took more thought and effort to complete.
The second article was Valencia and Buly's, "Behind test scores: What struggling readers really need". This article was telling us to take a closer look at the individual needs of students and see what each child's area of strength and weakness are. Sometimes doing such in-depth assessments can be lengthy and require a lot of time. After using the Woodcock-Johnson assessment with multiple classrooms of children the time required was much longer than we had anticipated. At the same time, we must remember that it is not just about assessing each child; it is about using the proper assessment for each individual. Not all assessments are going to give us the specific data we need. We must be vigilant and think carefully about which assessments we give and to which children.
I believe our school is definitely headed in the right direction. We know that "one-size fits all" instruction will not fit all children, as these articles point out. We are on our way to a balanced literacy model and certainly are working to attain the six T's of Allington's effective reading instruction.
Fitzgerald and Duffy-- Effective Teachers
Click the link to read each article:
Reflecting upon my personal belief of reading, I do feel that it has changed. In college, I don't remember my classes talking about the "various" ways of teaching anything. It was a pretty narrow path of 'following directions' to teach the subjects. There wasn't much room for teacher's discretion or use of eclecticism. Now, I am confident in my belief that there should be differentiation for each learner in the classroom. I also believe that I, as the teacher, do not hold all the knowledge. Nor would I want that burden! Knowledge comes from multiple sources. In college, I do remember learning about multiple intelligences as one of the theories in education. I believe it is important to recognize and incorporate strategies that would appeal to each learner and their learning style.
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