Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Today's readings: 1/23/08
Carrie Podrasky: After reading today's articles, I thought a lot about the types of things I have seen in my classroom at Gier Park. After reflecting on my time spent in the classroom, I realized I have actually seen a lot of response-centered talks. There have been several instances where I have been in the classroom during group reading time. My CT will gather the students as a class and assemble on the literacy rug in the back of the classroom. He will then read a book from the theme of the unit that they have been currently studying. Usually prior to reading the book, he will have the students make predictions about the story from the pictures on the cover. After the story has been read, my CT will usually open up the floor for discussion. For example, this week's theme is "doing the right thing". So after reading today's story, he asked the class to give examples of doing the right thing in the story. This usually spirals the students off into discussions about other things. I like how he asks a broad question to begin with but this introductory question has somewhat of a right or wrong answer just to get the students started in the right direction. Scaffolding concepts prior to conducting a discussion is necessary. The students must have an idea of how the discussion is going to play out. They must also be familiar with the expectation of going further than just setting, character, theme and so on. The students must also know what to know what to look for in the story beyond the usual traits. If the students do not know what they are looking for it is unfair to ask them questions about concepts they might not have known to look for. As a teacher, you must draw their attention to the important aspects of the story at least for the first couple times this type of discussion is used. After reading this particular article by McGee and learning about the response-center discussion concept, I realize this idea is exactly how I want conduct discussion in my future classroom. Opening up the discussion to opinions and new ideas instead of simply facts quoted from the story is exactly how I want my class to run.
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3 comments:
Carrie- I can relate to this post as I have also witnessed my CT holding many response-centered talks in the classroom. However, I was unable to observe this classroom at the beginning of the year as I believe you were too. Because my response-centered talks seem to be very in-depth, it reminds me of what you mentioned and we discussed in class: students need to be scaffolded. They wont just start the school year off by having response-centered talks. I would have liked to witness these students in the beginning of the year learning how to have response-centered talks and then watch them develop these talks throughout the year.
Carrie, I was very interested to hear about how your CT does the response centered talks with the entire class. My CT often reads to the students during snack and lately she has had me read to them at least once or twice a week. I look forward to taking some of the ideas, such as talking about the cover of the book and focusing more on the theme of the week, instead of just reading it to them well asking random questions.
Carrie – I also like how our CT is able to engage the students in interesting topics and conversation. The children have very creative thoughts about the way the “world” functions. It is often times fun, and most importantly informative listening to their ideas about why things work out the way they do. I really enjoy getting a quick glimpse into the mind of a second grader.
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