Theoretical Discussion #3

Articles Discussion: Stahl, Neufield, and Pardo

After reading these three articles, I talked with Shannon and Krista about how much each article reminded me of the high quality practices we are already doing at BES. There are several aspects that we do with guided reading and mini-lesson read alouds which are described in these articles as effective and important. Both Pardo and Neufeld state that a reader's background knowledge is imperative for reading comprehension. Because our school is 70% economically disadvantaged, this is a big obstacle that our students must overcome. They do not have the world knowledge like their mid/high SES students do. Another challenge for our student population is that they have limited vocabulary and word knowledge. Not all of our students have quality conversations with their family when they are at home. This correlates with Dr. McGill-Franzen's book, Kindergarten Literacy, that stated 'first graders from higher SES knew twice as many words than first graders from a low SES'.  As teachers, we discussed some ideas from the articles that we would really use in our classroom. These are: teaching vocabulary words with the use of graphic organizers, incorporating nonfiction texts during a read aloud, asking more open ended questions to facilitate student discussion of text, and literature webbing. I will be teaching first grade next year (down from fourth grade!) and am seriously looking forward to trying literature webbing. It seems like such a simple idea, but it has a positive impact of students' story structure, predictions, and story retelling. We were a little surprised at Stahl's promotion of using quality video for at-risk students. I will agree that they might be able to retell it better but, at the same time, at-risk students are the ones who need a book in their hand and one on one guidance from a teacher. These students do not have a print rich environment at home and they certainly need one at school. Personally, I feel that students who watch a book as a movie are missing out on key elements like author's craft, beautiful illustrations, identifying text structure, fluency practice, and reading comprehension.

Overall, these three articles described the necessity of explicit teacher modeling of comprehension strategies. I feel that, as a whole, our school is taking big steps in the field of literacy instruction. In one year, we have moved away from a pure basal model to a differentiated approach with guided reading, independent reading practice, writing, and (coming this year) word study. I am proud to teach at Benton Elem. and feel that we are doing what is "BESt" for our students. :)