Entry #8

What does the teacher do to promote comprehension?

• Teacher has the CLO is posted at all times and reviews with the class
• Teacher reviews: key vocabulary, content, strategies, objective at the end of the lesson
• Teacher conducts a front loading lesson about inference 
• Teacher explicitly instructs how to write questions and how to phrase questions
• Uses a parking lot strategy where students use post- it notes to record I'm confused/ I'm reminded of... thoughts from the night's homework and then reviews at the beginning of class.
• Models Reading and Strategies
• Promotes metacognition while reading with various strategies
• Has students annotating the text through post it notes with questions they have while they are reading.

What do you see the teacher do?

• Reviews reading strategies and makes connections to students' background knowledge
• Previews key vocabulary pre-selected by the teacher and supports with visuals
• Uses anecdotes to help vocabulary make sense
• Uses key vocabulary in students' native language to establish connections
• Uses pictures, headings, titles to preview what the text is about and make connections to background knowledge
• Speaks clearly and slowly
• Explicit direct instruction around during reading strategies
• Asks questions and provides scaffolding around strategies
• Creates sufficient wait time

What do you see the students do?

• Collaborative learning-- clarifying in native language
• Asks students to make connections and understand their background knowledge of culture
• Interacting with difficult texts
• Generating questions
• Making connections to background knowledge
• Implementing reading strategies
• Asking questions
• Participating in discussion

Coming from a content area classroom, I have experience implementing a reading lesson at a much smaller scale such as an article, but I have never seen or been able to see how it can be implemented with an entire text over a unit so I found this to be very informative and interesting to watch. What I noticed, is that it seemed the students trusted their teacher and that they had built an environment where it was ok to make mistakes and talk about books in a very authentic way. This to me is extremely important for any student but in particular for an English Language Learner at the secondary level. Furthermore, I observed many strategies that I use in my own classroom so it was very validating to know that I am supporting ELL's in an effective manner across various contents.