Monday, January 28, 2008
Choral Reading 1/30/08- Carrie Podrasky
The activity consisted of listening to other groups present their choral reading to the class. The audience members had to listen to specific items like tone, pitch, and rhyme as the group presented. The benchmark that relates to this activity is (first grade) L.CN.01.03 (listen to or views knowledgeably while demonstrating appropriate social skills of audience behaviors (e.g., eye contact, attentive, supportive) in small and large group settings; listen to the comments of a peer and respond on topic adding a connected idea). This benchmark relates very closely with this activity for obvious reasons. As an audience member during this activity, I was responsible for actively listening to all of the other groups. The McGee article related closely with this activity as well. McGee talks a lot about staying away from general fact based questions and relying more on probing conceptual questions. The questions that asked and centered on the choral reading exercise were probing why questions. The questions were not simple factual questions, they were questions like “why do you think you changed the pitch at this certain point?” These questions make you think and have to dissect your own behavior. This allowed for conceptual change. I felt supportive within our community during this activity. I thought everyone was really involved and participating in the activity. For my future lessons I want to pay attention to my students’ personalities as I plan. If I have a very passive class, I will make sure I take extra care while promoting discussion based lectures and lessons. If my class is very outgoing and does not need a lot of coaching from me I will let them take the lead and stay out of productive conversations. I also want to pay attention to their own likes/dislikes and interests. Many of the students make sure similar interests and I can use that to my advantage. As I reflect on my own learning it makes me realize the importance of exposing students to various ways to discussion and learning. Every day needs to be different for them. There are many different discussion formats and many ways children can feel involved. Since every student learns differently and feels comfortable doing many different things, changing up the routine can be very helpful for everyone in the classroom including the teacher.
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3 comments:
Carrie- It took my group some time to answer these probing questions such as "why did you change your pitch at this point?" We found ourselves reading and re-reading and changing around our pitch, tempo, tone, and rhyme to see which was most normal and figure out why. I think we learned more because of those conceptual questions as oppose to straight-answer questions.
Carrie, I like the way you consider the activity found ways to, "dissect your own behavior... [allowing for]for conceptual change." I think it is important that you were able to connect to the material in such a thoughtful and engaging way. It sounds like you will be able to utilize these activities in your furture classroom better because you have been able to develop a better understanding of the material through your evaluation of the activity.
Carrie, I like how you were taking into consideration the personalities of your students. I believe in every class there is a mixture of passive and outgoing students. It would be key in this type of activity to try and mix them up a little. However you would not want to put an extremely out going student with an extremely passive student. I believe the outgoing student would not give enough opportunity for the passive student to participate.
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