Can Messy Learning Make A Comeback?
6 months ago
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Tovani on Strategies to help reluctant readers
Reading Cris Tovani this week in I read it, but I don't get it; I have a better understanding of what is happening inside the heads of reluctant readers. I can also see that simply asking students to re-read isn't too helpful to them. Just like sounding out the word is only one of many strategies to teach word identification; re-reading is only one of many strategies to help students develop their reading comprehension. Tovani tells of her own experience with her fifth grade teacher, " We were doing fractions, and I was struggling to learn how to find common denominators. After many incorrect attempts, I asked for help. My teacher knelt down beside my desk and through clenched teeth said, " Think harder! Thinking harder about something that I didn't understand was a strategy that I couldn't sink my teeth into, and neither can my students"(Tovani, p.50) If our students aren't comprehending what they are reading they need alternate methods of how to understand better. As teachers, it is our responsibility to demonstrate and model how we read for comprehension and guide our students until they can begin to comprehend more fully and independently. By teaching our students how to make predictions, connect text to your real life and retell, we are helping make connections for students to read with better meaning.
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Think harder?!! There are times I thought so hard about math and reading as an elementary student I thought my head would explode!!!! Now that I am teaching students I know that think harder really means, "I don't an other way to explain this so now it's on you." That is truly how I feel when my first response want to be to repeat what my teachers told me. My response is now, "Let's ask our community members if they have a different way to solve this that ends up with the same answer I got." The same goes for reading. I often find myself, with my overly complicated vocabulary, saying to my students, "You know (insert student name here) I think I may be frustrating you with the words I am using. Is that right? (insert visual of student nodding head vigorously here) Do you think someone in our community might be able to help us with this?" They usually pick the strongest reader in the pack and ask them to come help us. I tell that student what I was saying and he or she translates it into what the students often refer to as "our words." It works and so does all of the modeling we try to put forward in our class. I model it, but I also ask several students to model it as well.
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