Response-centered talk

The more I observe and participate in my TE 402 placement, the more I find I look up to my CT, Mrs. Trice, and hope to one day teach as well as she does. I am often jotting down notes about ways Mrs. Trice keeps control of the classroom, interesting lessons she presents to the students, and also the ways the students and the teacher communicate. Response-centered talk occurs very often in this classroom. I have witnessed my teacher many times asking her students to make inferences about different things they have discussed in class. She also encourages the students to make text to text, text to self, and text to world connections, allowing the students to interrupt the middle of a lesson or reading to share these. Currently, the students are reading the book “Bud, not Buddy.” I was able to observe the students in a discussion about the themes of this book where the students worked in pairs to construct deeper understandings of the book rather than recalling direct information from the book. During this particular exercise, it was apparent that some students still require scaffolding. Beth raised her hand and began reading a passage directly from the book to her partner and Mrs. Trice. Mrs. Trice politely interrupted her and asked her to explain how she pictured this in her head. When Beth continued to struggle Mrs. Trice guided her further by asking questions such as, “what does the woman look like?” “What is she doing while she says that?” “How do you feel when you read this passage?” “How do you think Bud feels?”…etc. Mrs. Trice then asked Beth to think of other parts of the book that made her feel this way and hinted to the two girls to use those passages to think of a main theme of the book. There were also students however, who seemed comfortable with the discussion of themes and the response centered talk. I overheard Kenneth discussing the topic of mothers with his partner, Chris. Kyle suggested that “a mother’s love is always” could be the theme because although Bud’s mother passed away, he seems to always know that his mom loved him. Christ then added that Bud spends a lot of time in the book looking for his father, so he suggested that a father’s love is important too. The two boys made a couple connections to their own families, along with other books they had read in class, got very excited, and decided to agree that a family’s love in general was important and that could be a theme for “Bud, not Buddy.” I haven’t witnessed enough literacy in the classroom to be aware of specific types of students requiring specific types of scaffolding, but it is clear that there is a wide range of literacy learners in the classroom from this one activity and I am excited to observe and learn more.