Exhibit 1
Exhibit 2
Exhibit 4
After observing Ms. Jane’s classroom for a week, I have pre-selected a group of boys whom I am going to work with in my research. This group of boys is all J/K readers, and they meet twice a week for book club/guided reading. Ms. Jane says to me that this particular group needs to do guided reading because a couple of them are at the level where they can carryout book club conversation with limited teacher support. Therefore, she has been doing guided reading with them so that these boys can get more attention and more explicit instruction through modeling, scaffolding, and questioning. These boys are: Sam, Jon, Nathan, Jesse and Ken.
On the side note, I feel that Ms. Jane (host teacher) really sets up her classroom well with reading and writing charts that provide useful information to her students. Her posters are all over the classroom and she even posts some salient teaching points that she has taught in the past on the wall. Charts such as, 'what is a book club?', 'what reading partners do?', and 'what is good book talk?” makes me wonder how often do these energetic boys look at them and practice them when they read. During guided reading today, Ms. Jane and I have spent a large amount of time getting this group to begin reading. As I refer to a piece of interesting fact from the Gurian and Stevens' article (2004), that boys generally have less serotonin and oxytocin; chemicals that allow humans to have the ability to maintain a bonding situation with other human beings. Having this piece of assumption in the back of my head, I am considering how I should approach this group of energetic boys in doing guided reading or book club. A possible strategy is to set them up for conversation by preparing a list of topics and issues before each class so that they receive some degree of structure and scaffolding. Another way is to break the big group into partnerships so that they have less attention for each other; each of them will only have to pay attention to what his partner says and respond to him.
In exhibit 1, and 2, Jesse is showing some unmotivated behavior during guided reading with Emily (a staff developer). Nathan, as well as other boys in the group are not in the mood to reread a section as requested by Emily. From this incident, my inference for such behavior is that this group of boys does not enjoy structured learning; where they are told to do things that are repetitive and 'boring'. Group reading may be factor that hinders that motivation and stamina in reading. Exhibit 4, on the other hand, describes Nathan's interest in reading magazine and Arthur series. This tells me that in order to elevate this group of students' motivation and stamina in reading, I should provide them a variety of reading materials for them to choose from, and break away from traditional guided reading structure (groupings, instruction, and materials).
No comments:
Post a Comment