Week Four: Chapter 4 Explicit Instruction in Comprehension

Chapter 4 of Kylene Beers’ book emphasizes modeling directly and explicitly to students. I think guided practice is an excellent way to model for the students the strategies you want them to be able to use on their own. When teaching a new skill to students you first need to show them how you, an expert, would do it and model it several times. It is also similar to scaffolding because we want to give kids support so that they can build up to doing it independently no matter how many times they have to fail before getting it right. In lessons I have made for my teaching strategies in Language Arts class I used guided practice to model skills like context clues. In my future classroom I think I will continue to use this teaching strategy to help students learn.

At the beginning of the chapter Beers states “We sometimes confuse explaining to students what is happening in a text with teaching students how to comprehend a text” (pg 40). As Beers points out if you explain something to a student over and over again each time they will understand, but they become dependent on your explanation. If we teach students strategies they will be able to come up with their own answers independently and over time will be able to apply their knowledge and skills to other texts. Similar to chapter 2 it is critical to move students to becoming independent readers. It is better to take up a class period teaching a strategy than to merely explain the meaning of one text and move on to the next because by teaching a strategy you are giving students the knowledge they will need to do it on their own in the future. In the latter you are only teaching to one text rather than all the texts they may read in their schooling.

I think the class discussion technique that the student teacher Kate used, “IRE: initiate, respond and evaluate,” tends to be used frequently. I can recall subbing for one of the 7^th grade Language Arts teachers and reading through “A Christmas Carol” with the students. Now that I look back I think I was focusing on this strategy to generate discussion. The story was in a play format so the kids all had roles and read aloud. At certain points in the story I would stop to check for comprehension of the text and pose questions to the students. After a few answers they would continue reading. Although I didn’t have time to prepare for this particular lesson and reading I think it is easy to fall into this IRE pattern. The student teacher Kate also noted that “It’s just easier to, you know, just tell them what the story is about” (pg. 55). Although it may be easier to do this Kate then notes that by using this strategy “Well, I guess then they don’t get any better at figuring out how to figure out a story” (pg 55). In the future I think I will be more conscious of how I teach a text to students from reading this chapter.