Monday, February 16, 2009
Conversations and Conferring...
As we continue to work to think this through...I am wondering what you have tried with your students in terms of strategy instruction and conferring. What kinds of conversations or teachable moments have you discovered through this way of teaching? Think about a conversation you have had with a child or a small group of children and write about what you discovered that you did not know before. "Show" us that conversation in words here on this blog. Celebrate these moments by remembering each detail of what was said, the expression on the child's face and the interaction between the two of you. This does not have to be an interaction of great proportions or success, just an interaction you can recount, remember and really reflect upon. Does this interaction demonstrate a "shift" in your thinking and or teaching?
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Lately, I have been struggling with helping my students to utilize questioning as a reading strategy. They can ask question after question, but are having a very tough time realizing whether or not the questions they are asking will help them to better understand what they are reading. I am thoroughly convinced that there is something I am not doing, or something I NEED to do! My latest attempt to break past our questioning brick wall was to introduce the thinking stems outlined in our text. Since I had not previously used the thinking stems in other strategies, the concept of a thinking stem itself was a new one. I really had not come to a clear decision, even for myself, as to how I would define a thinking stem, but I figured as long as my kiddos could figure out in the end that the thinking stems were tools to help them on their road to questioning, I'd be and they'd be) all set. I began the lesson with some blank chart paper and asked them all to describe for me how questions sounded. After some prodding they began to list typical question words: "Why?" "How come?" "When?" "Where?" I would throw out prompts like,"What do the questions we ask while we're reading sound like?" and we added "I wonder if.." So they were getting the stems down, now I just needed to connect this list to how it could be useful to them. And so began the magic...
ME - "Okay, so I am going to call this list my "Questioning Thinking Stems" (I write it on top of the chart paper). "What is a stem?"
KIDS - "It helps a plant alive."
"It gives a flower water." "It brings dirt to the flower."
ME - "What if a flower didn't have a stem?"
KIDS - "It would die!" "It would just lie on the ground."
ME - (thoughts swirling)"Oh, so a stem keeps a flower alive and it also supports the flower?" (okay, I know I am leading a little here...)
KIDS - "Yeah!"
ME - "Okay, I'm starting to get this...I know what a stem is. Now, what is a THINKING stem?"
KIDS - Silence...
KIDS - SILENCE!!!
ME - sweating...
Timmy - "Well, it kinda can keep our thinking alive?"
ME - (doing cartwheels on the inside) That's interesting. How can a thinking stem help keep my thinking alive?"
Timmy - "Ummm. I'm not sure."
ME - (no cartwheels) Does anyone else have an idea about how a thinking stem would keep our thinking alive?"
Kids - Silence...
Lisa - "Well, it sort of gives you a start to thinking... If you have a question you aren't sure of. It can give you an idea to keep your thinking going."
ME - (Catching on to her idea...I think) Okay, so are you saying that if I am reading...and I have a question...but I'm not quite sure what that question would sound like, then, instead of forgetting about it and losing all that great thinking, I can use the thinking stems to help me figure out would the question would be.
Lisa - "Ummm. Yeah."
Well, this is getting long and the lesson itself took MUCH longer than I had originally anticipated. But in the end, my kids seemed to realize how a thinking stem keeps our thinking alive AND we ALSO explored the idea that a thinking stem SUPPORTS our thinking, like a flower's stem supports it. I loved this lesson because I felt like we arrived at this learning TOGETHER! I had started my lesson with an understand of the purpose of thinking stems, but no real definition. I ended it with a clear definition and analogy about thinking stems! Needless to say, the thinking stems for the other strategies will be finding their way into my classroom.
Today I took yet another lesson from the book, Comprehension Connections, and modified it to be specific to me and my class. I was introducing/ reviewing determining importance. I have taken my students through a few lessons of important and unimportant information in reading text and writing. For some, they will make the connection with the skill of determining importance, for others it will be a brand-new concept.
I began the lesson asking the students about how we determine what is important in a story and what isn't.
student 1 - "the important part is the main idea"
"good thought" I say
student 2 - "it's the stuff you hear over and over in the story
whatever is talked about the most"
again I reply "good thinking"
I ask them "so does that mean what is talked about the most is what matters most?"
Many of the students nod in agreement, but some are not responding. I assume they are still trying to figure out what makes something important in a story.
Then student 3 offers his idea.
"I think the important stuff is what I remember from the story"
"WOW" I say, "that is a really good thought."
I continue the lesson by telling them that we are going to do an activity to determine the importance of items in my handbag. I sit at the round table and my students gather around me. As I take each item and place it on the table, I explain what it is, but not why it is in my purse. I leave that part to them. Once everything is out of my purse, I start my questions.
"I have a lot of items in my purse, which of these do you consider to be the most important? In other words, in order for me to carry on my daily routine, which items will I need, and which can I do
without?"
Their responses were very thoughtful!
student 1 "you will need your checkbook because if you go to a store and you don't have your wallet or credit cards, you can pay with a check"
student 2 "this Swiss Army card(similar to a Swiss Army knife) will be very handy if you need to file your nails, so you won't need that other nail file (emery board)"
student 3 "you don't need those receipts, unless you want to return something"
One girl insisted that I keep the lip gloss because I would want to look pretty. Others said the Vaseline lip balm would do a better job.
Another student very seriously said that I should also keep the SHOUT pad because if I had a stain on my clothes and I had to go to a meeting, I could get rid of the stain before the meeting.
There were many more items (it's amazing what one can fit into a small purse), but as we were going through each one of them, It dawned on me (yes, light dawns on marble head!) that with each of these items, as in a story, each student will find certain pieces of information important because of what they, as individuals, bring to the story. It was something I had not thought about before.
So, this gives me food for thought when I am discussing a story or a piece of writing with students. There's always that child who answers a question with some far out response and I always think "where did that come from?" Perhaps I need to probe a little further, to find where those thoughts are coming from. And in doing so, I may discover that the thought was not as far out as I had imagined.
Erina and Janet,
These are two FABULOUS accounts of happenings in your classrooms. It is as though I was right there with you. I can see your faces, your gestures and feel the cartwheels you are and are not doing inside!!
What I notice from each of you is that in this quest for knowledge you are learning alongside your students and discovering more and more about deep thinking WITH your students.
Thank you for taking the time to do this and to reflect upon these experiences...I AM doing cartwheels inside!!
Last week we spent several days reading & learning about Abraham Lincoln. My students created venn diagrams to compare their lives to Abe's life and they were delighted to discover what was the same & what was different. This lesson sparked an idea and paved the way for a new thinking stem to add to the ones they've already been using to guide them with their reading responses during Reader's Workshop. The next day I asked my students to choose a fiction story with a character they would be interested in exploring. I told them I wanted them to find something they had in common with the character in their story. I introduced the new thinking stem. 'I am like the character ________ because_______.'
When we formed our sharing circle to share, I wasn't quite sure what I was going to hear. I had decided to work with a guided reading group to finish work we had started the previous day with their "I wonder..." logs so I hadn't really checked in with anyone but my "teacher eyes" saw that they were all quite engaged & busy reading & writing. I was eager to hear their thinking. Their responses ended up being better than I had imagined! I was so excited. I wondered if I would get connections like "I am like the character Bob because I have black hair too." I did not get any comparisons based on clothes, hair or eye color! I think those lessons we've been doing on sorting connections into categories "BIG" or 'little" must be paying off. Here are 2 of my favorite responses...
"I am like the character Hotdog (name of the dog) because in the summer when I am hot I like to cool off in the pool too." (This was from a struggling reader:) "I am like the character pigeon because I always want a drink of water before I go to bed too."
What my "teacher eyes" couldn't see was the deep thinking they were doing while they were reading & writing. I did have about 2 who struggled to come up with something meaningful but I hope the power of sharing helped them to shape new meaning & possibilities for the future. On a more humorous note, during our Valentine's day party I had asked a parent volunteer to get the whip cream from the refrigerator but I wasn't sure where I had put it or which refrigerator. A student overheard the exchange & said "I know where it is!" and those around the student exclaimed "How could you know where it is?" and his reply...."It's in my schema." I asked, "What schema file is it in?" and he said "My refrigerator file"! We all laughed so hard!
The first thing that comes to mind is when I conferred with a small book club consisting of three girls. (Keeping in mind that I went into book clubs sort of blindly, I presented the idea to my class as choosing 1,2,or 3 people that they can easily work and be serious with.) This group chose a book from a series I had not read before (Willimena Rules - Rule book #? How To Lose Your Class Pet) and was in fact new to me. The direction that I gave was that each of them should read the first chapter silently and then go in the hallway to discuss it. I also stated that I would be talking with them to hear about their thinking. After doing this for three chapters I decided to talk with them about the book. While I don't remember their exact words, they were very excited to tell me what was happening in this story. They commented on the teacher's name, Mrs. Sweetly, who is very mean (and got it), and how Willimena is trying to be very nice to her to stay out of trouble. So she volunteers to take the class pet home for the weekend and proceeds to lose the pet. First what stood out for me was that this group works together really well. They were equally strong students and so there was not a 'leader' who did all the talking and all the deciding. They were all participating in the discussion and at times felt comfortable enough to disagree or change their thinking based on a comment of what happened in the story. Seeing how this group worked together planted a seed in my mind that I need to do some modeling and give more specific directions for what I expect a book group to do.
A second point that stood out was that these girls kept talking about how Willimena lost the pet. Then it changed to a very confident 'well she hasn't lost it yet but she is going to lose the pet'. I needed to get some clarification. When I asked how they knew this they were able to point out some words and ideas in the text that led them to infer. As of this writing I have not introduced inferring but these readers knew to do it even though they probably didn't know the word for it. So of course I told them the word and we are now going to discuss inferring within this group.
As an aside, last Fall when I introduced the 'reading Salad' lessonmany of my students got that 'aha' moment when they got the idea of thinking and reading at the same time. But Molly was a little confused. She just didn't understand how this could be and she commented, "But Mrs. DiPrima, I don't get it. How can you read without thinking about the words? Doesn't it just happen? It just doesn't make sense!" Molly's first grade teacher commented to me that Molly was a little unconfident of herself and will ask a lot of questions. But I am finding, while that may have been tru last year, that instead Molly is more confident than we thought and asking a lot of questions to clarify her thinking.
I did a lesson in a first grade class (I borrowed a class) using wordless picture books and schema. The children had to work in groups, each with a wordless book and then complete schema thinking stems for the story individually. (BTW I like the comparison of a thinking stem to a flower that Erina developed with her class.) Some of the responses that the children had were good. One little girl connected to the story by saying that she remembered when her (parents) were talking and fighting when they were out to dinner. In the story, the parents are very unhappy when a frog hops into their little boy's pocket and ends up wrecking havoc in a fancy restaurant. She had an embarrassed look on her face as she told me very quietly, and I knew that she really connected to the embarrassment that the family in the story faced!
In one of the schools I work in, I was asked to provide a small group model of a guided reading lesson with two students. In this group, both students needed instruction with the sustaining reading strategies and using the three sources of information (meaning, structure, and visual information) in a balanced way. Each was only employing one strategy, for example, trying to sound out every word or only reading using the pictures. Both students needed to learn that they needed to shift between meaning and visual information to maintain and understand their reading.
Therefore, my lesson began with a shared reading. Using the context of shared reading, allowed me to model for the students how to shift between different sources of information using a cloze technique. This was modeled over days to gradually release to the students. The next part of the lesson included the guided reading text. Here the students are able to apply the strategies I modeled on their own reading of a text at their instructional level. I modeled these two contexts (along with the other parts of the guided reading lesson) for a group of teachers.
After each lesson, the following day, I would meet and confer with one of the students to take a running record and discuss the text. About three days into this structure one of the boys demonstrated that he was reverting so some of the previous behaviors (only using visual information), and our conversation started.
Me: "Do you remember what I did when I can to _____ word? (pulled out shared reading book)"
Student: "Yes, you looked at the first letter and checked the picture."
Me: "So when you come to an unknown word, what do you think you should do?"
Student: "I can do that too?"
Me: "Yes. Just like in the book we read together, you can learn to take words apart and think about what makes sense in your own book."
Student: "Oh, like this? (Broke word up with fingers, taking off onset, and looking at the picture)."
Me: "Yes, just like that. When you are reading anything, a book, a poem, a worksheet, directions, you can take off the first letter, get your mouth ready, and think about what makes sense."
Student: "Oh, I thought we only did it in those books."
As you can see, although I thought my teaching was explicit, this reader needed to be told exactly all the places he could use this strategy. He had compartmentalized our instruction to one context, not to "reading" across the board. So, I have been prompting him for three days to transfer his knowledge, but because I didn't explicitedly state that it was his turn to do it on his own, he waited to be told. I would not have had this information if I had not conferenced with this student and listened to his thinking. He knew to use the strategy together in our shared reading, but he did not know he could use it during ALL of his reading. I am happy that the structure of a guided reading lesson allows for conferencing and that the teachers were watching my model were able to hear the conversation.
Today I did the slipper lesson for infering and what I enjoyed the most were the responses of my students as they tried to guess who the slipper belong to. When they first examined the slipper they quickly glanced at it and passed it to the next person. They were very quiet at first keeping their thinking to themselves. As soon as I recorded the first response the student began to share their thinking.
" Mrs. Arnold wears it"
What evidence?
"size of your foot is about the same"
"Mrs. Dunn wears it"
What evidence?
"her favorite color is blue, smells like her"
"someone that's a size 7-8"
What evidence?
"the size on the bottom is 7-8"
Then I asked them to take a closer look. Their responses were a little more detailed.
"person who wears it has dirty floors" What evidence?
"the brown dirt on the bottom"
"it was worn in a garden" what evidence?
" It has dirt on the bottom of it and I know from talking with Mrs. Dunn that she has a garden so I think she worn it in her garden and dirt stayed on the bottom."
"someone with a dog" what evidence?
"there is dog hair on it"
" Now I know it's Mrs. Dunn because she likes blue, has a size 7 foot, has a garden,a dog and it's a women's slipper."
The students determined it was Mrs. Dunn slippers by using schema and facts about Mrs. Dunn that they knew were true about her(text). By charting the student responses and allowing them to "talk it through", helped them figure out who worn the slipper. As more inference were placed on the chart more conversations and responses were given. They owned the lesson and I will be able to cite this lesson and the importance of "evidence" when infering.
Conversations and conferring are important elements of all my lessons throughout the day. We turn and talk, share our thinking and talk to each other. We(myself included) are discovering how it helps with comprehension and with confidence to share our thoughts and maybe spark a classmate to share his or her thoughts. Very powerful stuff!
I did a lesson on inference with my students. We started at the picture level and moved up to a non-fiction article. The students learned to take a text clue, add their schema to it, and come up with an inference based on the first 2. They completed charts of text + schema = inference. For many of them the inferences were straight forward and expected at his level.
The article was "Mountain of a Monument",about a gigantic statue currently being carved into the mountains in S. Dakota. Students drew inferences about the hero who is depicted, the size of the statue, and when it might be completed. Examples
text: "The mountain will be a memorial to Chief Crazy Horse"
Schema: "I know that people make statues of people who do great things."
Inference: " He must have done something important, and must be very famous."
Text: "Once a year people can visit."
Schema: "If I was making a statue I wouldn't want people to get in the way."
Inference: "They don't want people to interfere with the work being done on the statue."
There were several others that were logical and made sense. But, one student came up with one that had me puzzled.
Text: "Ziolkowski (the artist) died suddenly in 1982."
Schema: "I know of somebody who got killed by dynamite."
Inference: "He must have gotten killed while blasting the rock away." (This is done once a year.)
This is a good student and I was confused as to why she would come to such a conclusion based on such an uncommon event. Many of the other students thought this was a reasonable inference too. She referred to the text to show me that the last sentence in the previous paragraph said that he set off the explosives to blast away the rock. Nothing was said about how he died, so they just connected the 2 ideas because of proximity in the text.
I needed to push their thinking further with questions such as "They often blast when building roads, like route 93. When was the last time you heard about someone dying from these explosives?" They hadn't.
"When you hear about someone dying suddenly, what do they often die of?" Answers: heart attacks, and accidents.
"Did the book say anything about an accident?" "NO" "If there was an accident, would you expect it to be mentioned in the article?" "yes"
"So, what do you think was a possible cause of death?" Answers: heart attack or cancer.
His biography says he died of an acute attack of the pancreas.
So, I'm wondering how I can get students to be more discerning with their inferences, without having to prompt them through each one. Perhaps a checklist that asks the questions: Is my inference reasonable? Could I draw other conclusions beside this one? Are there other text clues or other schema to back up my inference, or that will lead to a different conclusion?
I bring this up because this is not the first time students have made outlandish inferences, based on uncommon schema (especially from what they see on TV).
This afternoon I worked with my class on the strategy of inferring. I took an activity from Comprehension Connections and tweaked it a bit. I had a very old and tattered paperback copy of Wuthering Heights that I told the students that I had found while on a walk through a park. I told them that I had no idea who the owner was, but thought the book might give me clues.
We talked about it like it was a mystery. The first thing that one of my students said was that the book looked like it had been "loved" (a saying that I use quite a bit when anything begins to look a bit ratty). I asked him what made him say that, and he said that the owner must have loved the book a lot because the spine was very creased, like it had been opened a whole bunch of times. Another student noted that the book might belong to a teacher or to a teenager, because it had writing in it. Someone else mentioned that they see me highlighting in books, and have taught them to make notes while reading. They also referred to the fact that I had read that book when I was in high school, so maybe it was still being used in a high school class. One student said that the book might belong to a very busy person, because they know that busy people often forget things when they're in a rush (one student said her dad forgets things all the time and her mom has to bring them to him!)
My favorite comment that one student made was that maybe the owner of the book had loved it so much that they left it behind for someone else to enjoy. This was something that had never struck me...When he said this, I immediately thought of the book Flotsam, which I had previously used for the strategy of questioning. A moment or two later, another student's face lit up and her hand was flying in the air. She made the same connection, and was genuinely thrilled at the concept that this idea was possible.
Toward the end of the lesson I did reveal to the students that the book actually belonged to me, and was the very same book that I had read in high school. The book truly was "loved", as I have read it numerous times.
Throughout this lesson, I felt my students understanding grow, but also got a real sense of how well my class and I know each other. I felt like my students were beginning to grasp the concept of inferring, and were seeing that the strategies were beginning to build upon each other. They're seeing how their schema really does help them to understand. They're excited about where the journey is taking them, and I'm excited to help them on the way!
During the past few weeks I have been working a lot with my students on determining what is important in a text. I have read several books to them and had them write down the facts that they felt were important.
Before I did this activity with a story about Volcanoes I asked my student to work in small groups to discuss how they are going to decide what should be written down and what they don't need to write down.
I listened in on one group of four students during this activity. I asked them how are you going to know what you should write down and what you don't need to write down. One student answered right away by saying you should write down information you find interesting. When I asked if he thought he would have all of the important information written down if he followed this rule another student said you should write down interesting information, but you don't need to write down information you already know. That wastes a lot of time he explained. Then another student said you should always write down the main ideas of the story and also some of the details you think are interesting.
This was an interesting 5 minute conversation. The kids came up with a lot of the important information that I would have shared if I had just told my students what I thought they should be writing down, but I think the other students in the group got more out of hearing their classmates than they would have from listening to me.
This short turn and talk allowed all of my students to know what they should be writing down when they listen to the story. Overall the lesson seemed to be very successful.
After one of our LTT classes, I used to book Zoom that Tomasen used with us for a lesson with my students. I thought that it might be a little difficult for my students as they are only first graders, but I was blown away by what I heard from them. We were talking about inferring and for those of you who know the book, this is a great book with lots of room for inferring. I think the reason that I found this to be such a meaningful lesson was that one boy in particular, who I feel as though I have just not been able to "reach" this year was totally involved and focused and was making excellent inferences on each page. It was as if he totally understood what I had asked of him and furthermore what inferring was! There is a page that has a bus on it and the bus has an advertisement on the side of it. I was worried that the kids, not having grown up in a city would not have exposure to this, but this little boy knew exactly what it was and said that he had seen buses like this on TV. Although I was sad that his only connection was TV, I was excited that he was able to make that connection. Again, with the cruise ship, he said he could infer it was a cruise ship because the movie he had just watched had a cruise ship in it and it had the same kind of railings. This little boy made comments like this throughout the entire story. He used the correct terminology and was fully involved. I can't tell you how happy I was and I keep hoping for more days like this...
One of my students read to me as I filled out a record sheet that my first grade colleagues and I designed by choosing what we liked from some rubrics and other scoring sheets. First let me say that the boy that read to me is small, fair skinned, very shy,very bright, loves to learn and just doesn't always seem ready for the big world. Sometimes when he speaks and reads he has a breathless quality to his voice. He chose to read the book "Follow Me" by Harriet Zeifert. The title could not have been more perfect. Brady began reading in that halted breathless voice. As he became more comfortable,his reading fluency increased.
Brady, "They are going to ride the escalator."
Me "That's a hard word to read. How did you figure it out?'
Brady "It's in my schema. I've been on an escalator before."
Me "You are making connections to the story."
Brady "I know!"
Brady reads, "Be careful getting off said Lee's mother. And follow me!
Me "What do you think will happen next?"
Brady "I think he will stay with his mom."
Why?
Brady "Because he will get lost if he doesn't."
Have you ever been lost in a store?
Brady "No, I always stay with my mom cause that would be too scary if I got lost."
Brady continues to read the story, making predictions, connections, rereading for clarity, self correcting and using decoding skills independently. At the end of the story, Brady was able to retell the story accurately and answer questions asked of him. When I pointed out the skills he used when reading, he stated "I know!" with a big smile on his face. It was stated with such pure joy. As if to say I know can you believe it! It was a big confidence booster for Brady. I was glad for this invitation to "Follow" Brady through his reading and his thinking. I gained so much more about Brady as a thinker by spending this time with him. Because he is so shy, he does not always share his thoughts with the entire class. My hope is that spending more time pointing out his wonderful thinking skills, he will be better able to share with the group. We both spent time delighting in his skills while he and I had this quiet time to read together.
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