In reading this week's readings I was very interested in the questioning. As a teacher I believe that sometimes question after question sometimes make us a little crazy. However I believe the big take away that I got out of the readings are that questions are important. Questions are just like mistakes. We need to make or ask them in order to learn.
In reading the narrative piece for 2nd grade in the Writing Essentials book I have some questions on Narrative writing:
In the case of Owen (a student that complains of his head hurting while writing, so the teacher gives him less work to accomplish) how will that affect this long term performance in the classroom? Will it impact his success and motivation to try to do as much work as other kids?
Can you tell me more about your thinking of spending a whole day of writing on celebrating writing, I understand the importance in praising children, however that is a long time to take away from working on lessons? The students are learning, but can you say that they are learning enough for that day in observing others writing and if they are really paying attention?
In reading the visualizing section I also have a couple questions:
Is making an assumption about what you think will happen based on an inference between the text a type of inferring or is a prediction what would be the difference between these too?
How do you judge someones visualizations because it is a basis of what they are personally seeing?
It is so true, questions ARE like mistakes. This reminds me of myself as a student. I remember back in elementary, middle, and high school I was always afraid to ask questions. I felt like during classes, I always had more questions than all the other students. As I got older, I realized I wasn't alone. Lots of students had wanted to ask questions, but were afraid to sound stupid. But questions are great for learning and like people say, "there is no such thing as a stupid question." It is simply a clarification to help one understand better. Teachers need to remember to always give the time for questions to be asked and answered. If a student asks a question that is off topic, tell that student to "put that awesome question in your pocket and save it for later." Therefore, students won't become discouraged.
ReplyDeleteFrom our reading in Strategies That Work, I took away that there are different types of questions that tell us different things. "Teachers asked these questions to check on us, to see whether we had done the homework, read the chapter, or memorized our facts." And these types of questions can be intimidating to students, they are the questions I remember from early education school.
Something else the reading reminded me of was, what happens when a question is asked but never answered? What is the point of that question? Well, pointed out on pg. 113, "in most cases, the unanswered questions were the more intriguing ones, the questions that dug toward deeper themes and bigger ideas." As teachers, it is important that we model such questions and discussions. And explain this idea to kids, that questions help us find deeper meaning.
In response to Kelly's post, I found her questions to be intriguing. Especially her questions about the student whose head hurt. I don't think it is appropriate for the teacher to give that student less work. Immediately that child will feel like he doesn't need to do the work.
Kelly, you raise some good questions in your blog post. The question you brought up about Owen is a very valid question and one that I believe we as newer teachers struggle with. Thinking long term we cannot be sure how his performance will be affected but because we did give him less work he may not be ready to take on the amount of work that is going to be given to him in third grade. I think in this circumstance we need to try and assess whether Owen is a student who struggles with writing or he just finds it to be boring. This leads us to another question, how do we assess whether a student is struggling or is just bored? I understand your thoughts about how giving a whole day to celebrating to a student's writing seems like too much but I think that because we are dealing with students who are so young they need that whole day of praise. Plus if the curriculum calls for a whole day, why not take it! There is a lot you can do within a celebration of writing too. Students can read their writing to a parter or to the class. You could also see if another grade would want to come in and you could pair your students up and have them read their writing. When students read their own writing aloud they feel a sense of accomplishment and I think that it is important for them as inexperienced writers.
ReplyDeleteThe questions you raised for the visual reading section are actually some of the same I had written down, one I want to add is: When you first show students a book with no words and only pictures how do you introduce it to them? In answering the last question you posed I would say that we do not use visualization lessons as assessments. We know that each visualization will be different and we cannot judge or assess students based of one another because every student is different. I think that if we used a visualization activity it would be just to see what each of the students notice and experience within the picture book.