What I take away from this, and try to live up to with every new English class (especially in the Fall), is how do my students’ feel about their place in the classroom — how long has it been since they had any comprehension of comprehension in the English classroom? What I discovered was my math teacher was employing the “Point of View,” first-person approach (Laureate Education, Inc., 2005) and presenting mathematical progression built upon asking the right questions.
Learning any new language becomes the conscious construction of meaning from an information source. My focus on comprehension research this week leads me back to reevaluation of how I ask questions in the classroom. Croom (2004) stresses the importance of avoiding “convergent” questioning, instead focusing on asking “divergent,” or open-ended questions. By asking the right questions, I can determine student background information, and develop effective question-answer relationship strategies where students will develop within the “what and how” to ask the right questions (Vacca & Vacca, 2005). When teachers choose the proper question base for enabling student comprehension of reading, they will be equipped to make those important decisions about how to teach AND assess their students.
Chapman and King (2009) remind us to ensue our students understand the purpose of reading (p. 135). A good way to do this is give the student the opportunity to ask the questions they will eventually answer- decoding the words to find purpose in a text. This will also give these learners the means to a higher level of engagement and comprehension when they can develop questions on what is being read. When I see my students struggling trying to read, I go back to my days in the math classroom when I was struggling to solve inequalities, and give them the opportunity to seize the question arising from their own questions.
References:
Chapman, C., & King, R. (2009). Differentiated instructional strategies for reading in the content areas (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.
Croom, B. (2004). Are there any questions? [Online article]. Teachers College Record. Retrieved October 7, 2013 from http://www.tcrecord.org 11282.
Laureate Education, Inc. (Producer). (2005). Comprehension strategies [Video webcast]. Retrieved from
https://class.waldenu.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_2_&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3F%26id=_2822226_1%26url=
Vacca, R. T., & Vacca, J. L. (2005). Content area reading: Literacy and learning across the curriculum (8th ed., pp. 78–90). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.