Sunday, February 1, 2009
Inferring
In the process of inferring we have to take the time to really slow down our thinking and retrace the path we went through in our minds automatically that allowed us to infer. Identifying this process and the schema involved can be a challenging one. As one person stated in class after our work with the wordless picture books, it is almost like we can infer and then have to think back to what the schema was that led us to this inference.How does this fit in with your thinking about emerging readers? What about all of the other strategies and processes you engaged in with a wordless picture book where there were no words to decode or pronounce? How much of reading is deeper level thinking versus the surface work of decoding etc.? What does this make you think about in terms of our instruction
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Reading your blog makes me think of the 'Reading Salad'lesson I tried last fall. This lesson was a great way to show the difference between 'real' reading and 'fake' reading. While decoding is important, you need both to be doing real reading. As I was thinking about the wordless books we looked at in class, it made me wonder about the difference between our students actually doing the reading themselves or having a book read to them. With young or struggling readers it can make a big difference. Some struggle so much to figure out the words that very little thinking about the story takes place, yet they can be interested and be thinking about a story read to them and try to 'guess' what is going to happen. I am curious as to how these same struggling readers would infer with a wordless book. These books might be a great way to assess comprehension in struggling readers (or at least give an insight as to what is going on in their brains based on their thoughts!). I am also reminded of how we are 'supposed to' take a picture walk through our anthology stories. Most often I don't have time for it but when I do, my students just want to find out who was right and I feel that they are missing the point. Since I don't want this to be a competition I don't worry so much about not getting to it. But now I am curious enough to include some wordless books in small groups and see where it leads. In taking this class I have learned that I need to try some things that I may not necessarily enjoy - such as wordless picture books - because I can see the benefit of it.
When teaching emerging readers I infer that many specific skills will need to be explicitly taught in class. I base this inference on my schema surrounding my class, my students, my past experiences teaching reading, and learning to read myself, to name a few. As I teach my emerging readers, I use A LOT of this schema as well as evidence (my students' performance while they are reading and discussing) to make ever-changing inferences about the skills they will need to learn next. So the inferences I make in teaching are very much like the inferences we make while reading.
As Liz mentioned, picture walks through books with words in them have been a great way for me to begin having conversations with students about inference. I might begin a story allowing the students a short 2-3 minute period of time to look at the pictures only. We read the title and they begin sharing their inferences, often citing the evidence to support their inference in the story's pictures. Sometmes I can recognize when an inference might be coming from their schema as well as evidence in the book and I will pint it out. For example, as my class picture walks through a story titled "Snakes" that also includes a picture of a snake shedding its skin, a child that has a pet snake makes an inference that the story will tell us about why snakes shed their skin. He sights the picture as evidence to support his inference, but I am pretty sure that students who have not seen a shedding snake before have no idea what this is a picture of. I ask, "Is there anything in your schema that helps you to recognize what this is a picture of?" And he smiles, "Yeah, I've seen my pet snake shed its skin before so I know that this is what it looks like." I point out,"So your schema about snakes AND the evidence in the book helped you to make that inference." Usually, the next day we will read the story together. We might even have time to discuss whose inferences were proven correct, and if any students added anything from the story to their schema. Sometimes a fact is new schema, like "Baby snakes have an egg tooth to help them hatch out of their egg." But it can even be a social lesson or new idea. I recently read a story with one of my leveled reading groups where a character "got the last laugh." after much discussion about the meaning of this phrase, students decided in was a new piece of schema! Isn't it nice when a plan comes together?
I love using wordless picture books with the children that I see. It frees them from the print so they can focus on what is happening in the story. They really enjoy this. I can see the benefit in using them for comprehension strategy lessons. I think the answer to the question "How much of reading is deeper level thinking?" is dependent upon the reader and how proficient they are with the level of the text. When readers are so involved with decoding, it is difficult for them sometimes to actively monitor for comprehension as well. There is too much going on for them. Most of the comprehension lessons that I do are with read-alouds or wordless picture books. When a reader is using a book that is at their independent level, they should be thinking about the text which will help them to figure out the few words they don't know, combined with their knowledge of phonics and structure of our language.
Okay, I have to admit I am a bit scared of wordless picture books. I told Tomasen this and she laughed...but it's true. I don't know quite what to do with them. I've never used them for instruction and feel like I would need to be shown how. I like questioning, wondering, imagining and inferring about things but in the end I just want to know if I'm on the right track. I often do picture walks with my emergent readers to prepare them for reading the text and we observe & talk about how writer's match their words to the illustrations all the time during our writer's meetings and read alouds. While on these picture walks there is a lot of "wondering" and "inferring" going on and I think this builds the excitement and sets the purpose for the reading too. I'm learning that explicit instruction is necessary for teaching the foundational decoding skills for the emergent reader but explicit instruction in how to THINK about what they read is vital. Nancy, I'd love for you to show me how you use the wordless picture books with the students you service.
Working with the wordless picture books was interesting because it made me really pay attention. In some ways, I found it more difficult than reading text. I had to rely on my background knowledge to actually infer about what was going on in the pictures. Again, I was put in the same place I put my students when I ask them to interpret an illustration or a photograph from a story. I realized that I had to rely on my schema ( years and years of experiences and knowledge). How much schema have my students acquired in their short lives?
As I "read", I made connections. Did my students do the same? I tried to predict what would happen next, although it was tough to do without the text. What I struggled with the most was that it took me a long time to determine what was actually important in the illustration. I was taking everything in and that was exhausting. It made me think of my lower level readers, could this be what they experience on some level?
Once again I was reminded of how important it is for us as educators to provide our students with many experiences to achieve success.
When I did this activity with my students they actually had fun with it. They laughed spontaneously (so they must have been making connections with what was being presented) and they found the books to be interesting and "hilarious". (We looked at Zoom, Re-Zoom, and The Other Side) I thought about emerging readers and I wondered if their response would be the same where their schema is not as developed as a fourth grader.
In terms of our instruction I think I need to do more of this kind of activity with the wordless picture books. I think it helps students take all of the strategies to a deeper level. It engages them in a way that text cannot. They tell the story in large part by their own interpretation. Students in the same group had varying interpretations. And each time one student shared something different, another student would have that "AH-HA" look on their face as if to say " Oh ya, I never thought of it that way." It was great to see this happening.
Working with the wordless picture books was interesting because it made me really pay attention. In some ways, I found it more difficult than reading text. I had to rely on my background knowledge to actually infer about what was going on in the pictures. Again, I was put in the same place I put my students when I ask them to interpret an illustration or a photograph from a story. I realized that I had to rely on my schema ( years and years of experiences and knowledge). How much schema have my students acquired in their short lives?
As I "read", I made connections. Did my students do the same? I tried to predict what would happen next, although it was tough to do without the text. What I struggled with the most was that it took me a long time to determine what was actually important in the illustration. I was taking everything in and that was exhausting. It made me think of my lower level readers, could this be what they experience on some level?
Once again I was reminded of how important it is for us as educators to provide our students with many experiences to achieve success.
When I did this activity with my students they actually had fun with it. They laughed spontaneously (so they must have been making connections with what was being presented) and they found the books to be interesting and "hilarious". (We looked at Zoom, Re-Zoom, and The Other Side) I thought about emerging readers and I wondered if their response would be the same where their schema is not as developed as a fourth grader.
In terms of our instruction I think I need to do more of this kind of activity with the wordless picture books. I think it helps students take all of the strategies to a deeper level. It engages them in a way that text cannot. They tell the story in large part by their own interpretation. Students in the same group had varying interpretations. And each time one student shared something different, another student would have that "AH-HA" look on their face as if to say " Oh ya, I never thought of it that way." It was great to see this happening.
I have used many wordless books in my classroom and I have found that each one I have used has been a successful lesson...sometimes taking off and going in directions I had not planned, which is great!
After our last class I used the book Zoom with my first grade class. I introduced inferring and was unsure how it would go. I have a very low group of students and 3 in particular who do not read at all. I have to say that this lesson was amazing. the student in my class who is struggling the most and has made the least progress made the best inferences, connection and almost ran the show. Micki Rhodes our Principal was observing this lesson and she later pointed out that even the times that he was talking out without being called on and interrupting, he was "doing it properly." Meaning he would stand up and say, "Can I tell you what I'm thinking?" or "Can I tell you a connection I have?" This book in particular really hooked him. He has never been on a boat before, but he was the one who pointed out that there was a cruise ship in the book when all we saw was the railings. I asked him how he knew this might be a cruise ship and he said he has seen one on tv. He used what he knew and made his connections.
I think this exposure is so important for emergent readers as well as higher level readers. My struggling students came away from this lesson understanding the story just as well as all the other students. They were excited to "read" more books and do more inferring.
The first wordless picture book I did with my class was Tuesday and the children loved it despite the million of times they have looked through it. I had the chidren ask,write and respond to questions they had and their classmates had while reading the story as a read a aloud. My readers who have difficulty with decoding were the first to question and offer their thinking. With the words gone they relied on their strength of interpreting pictures. I was amazed by their abilty use their schema to infer. They encouraged the others to dig deeper and search their schema to infer. My higher level thinkers were able to explain some of their inferences which helped other to explain. The modeling that goes on with peers during wordless book "read"
alouds is amazing to witness. As Janet noted that "ah ha" look and "I never thought about that" makes me realize how important it is to get my students to share their thinking.
Last week I did a mini lesson on inferencing with the book Zoom with my 4th graders. At first I had a few students say right off that they had already read this book, but I quickly discovered no one knew what was going to happen in the story.
First we discussed what the word Zoom means and then we started looking through all of the pages trying to discover what this story was about. I was quickly amazed by the discussion. This was one reading activity that all of my students could participate in regardless of their reading level with confidence. I only have one student this year who attends title one and she was one of the students who participated the most in our discussion. She was able to notice the smallest of all details in the pictures and then make predictions about what was going to happen.
This activity showed me that I want to do this type of activity more often. It really gave me a good idea of which student could make connections, inferences, and have a good schema about a topic in a very quick way. It reminded me once again that to be a good reader you must be able to read the words, but more importantly you need to be able to discuss what you are reading by connecting it to things we already know.
I have to admit that I have always been a little afraid of wordless picture books as well. I'm not sure where that fear comes from? Throughout the years I've always been an average/good reader. I didn't struggle too much and therefore probably didn't rely on pictures as much. So the idea of relying ONLY on pictures without knowing what is actually right/correct makes me a little uneasy. Ok, so there's the fear. At our LTT class when we 'read' the wordless books, I HATED my book. (The Other Side) I think our group had the more difficult book out of all there, but I still had a really hard time figuring it out and I was very uncomfortable with it. Because I didn't know what was "right" I didn't want to share my ideas! Having that experience and reading everyone's responses to this blog has helped me to see the importance of wordless picture books. Cecilia's lowest student relies ONLY on pictures because that's all he has. Ellen's title 1 student and Carol's lower students ended up being the 'stars' during the wordless read aloud because that's what they know. It's important for all students to use pictures the way those students have learned to, because the inferring that comes along is sure to be amazing.
My class has still recently been working on visualizing (yes, still) but I would like to do a lesson with Zoom to see where it goes. While I'm a bit nervous about leading the lesson, I think my students will be able to direct the discussion.
I have tried using wordless books a few times. The lesson was more successful when planning it than the actual lesson with the kids. I think I need to try a few more. In theory, it should be easier for the nonreading and struggling readers to read the pictures without having to work so hard to decode the text, but then, those are our students usually without enriching backgrounds to draw the prior experience from to make those connections. I believe the thinking is at a deeper level than "fake reading the words". To make inferences that make sense, the students must comprehend the story.
Reading the comments, thinking about the post, and reflecting upon book study group comments, I find it interesting when we grapple with "what is deep reading/understanding?" At our book study group the comment came up about what is the goal of strategy instruction? The question was, when teaching the strategy of questioning, is the purpose to be able to provide a question or to be able to explain the strategy? This lead to wonderful conversation, but in the end it comes down to, what leads to deep, thoughtful thinking? Being able to merely state the strategy does not demonstrate application. Providing questions demonstrates application but is there deep level understanding? Therefore, in my small group we determined that the main question that always needs to be asked is "how does that question (strategy use) help me understand the story?" Deeper level conversations are key to deeper level understanding.
Using wordless pictures is such a wonderful context because you automatically create a language/story line in your head, and sharing helps deepen the understanding because you do draw upon your schema, background knowledge, and inferences that you are making while "reading" the story. We didn't have to label them as we read, but we did as we tried to justify why we were interpreting the story line or making a prediction about the next page. Our conversations helped me think deeper about the text and myself. Therefore, I understood, how it helped me understand the text. Every teacher's primary goal of instruction.
I did an activity on inferring in my class where we broke down the thinking process to get at the schema. We looked at a NOrman Rockwell picture of 4 kids and a dog sledding down a hill. We recorded on a chart the students' thinking. First we wrote what the text (picture) clue was. This was tricky because the students kept jumping right to the inference. ex: "The boy is excited." I had to prompt them to say what do we see in the picture that tells us that? (eyes wide open, smiling or laughing, arm in the air). Then we had to think about our schema that helped us know that these visual clues mean that he is excited. Students were able to tell of situations in their lives when they, or someone else, felt this way and looked this way.
For the most part, students were very good with coming up with inferences and sharing their schema. Describing the picture clues was more challenging and needed more prompting on my part. In our adult group we were better with description than with schema.
Sometimes students take one clue, relate it to their schema, and then jump to an unjustifiable conclusion. One girl thought that the arm in the air meant that they were in a race and had won, because she has seen people in races do that. So I think we need to think about how we can know if our inference is a reliable one. Should they look for multiple clues? How can they check themselves? Is one clue enough sometimes?
If most of reading is really about deep thinking, then we should see a close correlation between overall intelligence and reading comprehension. Conversely, by helping students develop their thinking skills through reading, we could expect to see some improvement in overall verbal intelligence
I did an activity on inferring in my class where we broke down the thinking process to get at the schema. We looked at a NOrman Rockwell picture of 4 kids and a dog sledding down a hill. We recorded on a chart the students' thinking. First we wrote what the text (picture) clue was. This was tricky because the students kept jumping right to the inference. ex: "The boy is excited." I had to prompt them to say what do we see in the picture that tells us that? (eyes wide open, smiling or laughing, arm in the air). Then we had to think about our schema that helped us know that these visual clues mean that he is excited. Students were able to tell of situations in their lives when they, or someone else, felt this way and looked this way.
For the most part, students were very good with coming up with inferences and sharing their schema. Describing the picture clues was more challenging and needed more prompting on my part. In our adult group we were better with description than with schema.
Sometimes students take one clue, relate it to their schema, and then jump to an unjustifiable conclusion. One girl thought that the arm in the air meant that they were in a race and had won, because she has seen people in races do that. So I think we need to think about how we can know if our inference is a reliable one. Should they look for multiple clues? How can they check themselves? Is one clue enough sometimes?
If most of reading is really about deep thinking, then we should see a close correlation between overall intelligence and reading comprehension. Conversely, by helping students develop their thinking skills through reading, we could expect to see some improvement in overall verbal intelligence
Inferring is one of the most difficult skills to teach. It's one of those skills where an answer like "I just know" makes sense. When we teach children to infer we really have to dissect the inference and help students to look at what in their schema helped them to "just know".
I was one of those people in class that talked about how we infer and then go back to our schema.
I think of myself as a reader when I think about the skill of inference. I think that when I was an emerging reader at a very young age, I inferred what the words I saw were before I was actually reading them...I saw the letters that I had seen before and assumed they must form a certain word. Is this so for emerging readers...and does the understanding come later? I think of the students in my class who struggle to decode words and of how when the pressure to decode is taken away, their level of understanding is so much deeper. By explicitly teaching the phonics skills we are building schema for words that will appear in students' reading. When students' foundation for decoding becomes more solid, the understanding comes. Without the schema for phoetics, the decoding is more difficult, and the unerstanding can't come.
As someone who teaches at the upper elementary level, I always assume that the foundation is solid and the students are ready for the deeper understanding that comes. I have such respect for the primary teachers because I often become a "struggling teacher" when working with struggling readers.
When working with the wordless picture books, it is so much easier for students to identify the meaning. The pressure of identifying the words is taken away and students are able to make their inference and then identify why they "just know". They're able to sift out the schema that helped them to make their inference.
When I think about inferring, it makes me think about the fact that many of the strategies need to be used, to infer. Before I began learning about these reading strategies, teaching students to infer was very difficult for me. It was always hard to get students to “find” the answer that was not easily identified in the text. It is much easier to teach a student to go back to the story and locate the answer that is clearly answered in the text. But thinking back, I had a very difficult time teaching students this concept, and often times, it was overlooked and not taught. Now my thinking about the important part of reading has completely changed and my main focus on reading is their thinking and not the “right there” answers. Often times, I find myself saying, “There is not a right or wrong answer here, it is what you are thinking.” To me this statement is so important for my students to understand that their schema is all different and their inference is made from the “files” in their brains. Also, that their schema will help them to infer and this will help them to better understand the text.
So now when I think about my lower students and how much they have to offer during some of our class/group reading discussions. It makes me think that reading is really just the deeper thinking that students are sharing. However, without a good foundation of decoding it will continue to become difficult to continue to have the deeper thinking on an independent level.
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