RRS #6 | teachingblog

Text Title and Author(s): Differentiating Reading Instruction by Laura Robb – Chapter 4

Key Points/Quotes/Page Numbers:

Page 102 – “…organize your teaching around a theme or topic rather than one book.” I liked this quote because it’s a good way to get the students involved by having them pick the theme for the week and the teacher can go all out to make it fun and enjoyable for the students. It’s definitely something that I would do in my classroom.

Page 104 – “You’ll know whether a student has or hasn’t read a book by the amount of specific details in his or her response to questions.” I liked this quote because it’s keeping things simple rather than giving the students huge long chapter tests that makes more work for both the teacher and the student. It gets to the point.

Page 109 – “It’s important to note that I don’t ask students to do more work on extra books that they read.” This quote really stood out to me because it’s reminding teachers that if you make students do more work on books that they are reading for fun, they’ll start to resent reading. They won’t want to read for fun anymore and they’ll not put as much effort in. You don’t want to punish students for going above and beyond.

Responses to the Prompts

How did this chapter help you understand how to use whole group instructional reading and differentiation?

This chapter helped me understand whole group instruction by giving a lot of simple pointers that you would think is common sense but it’s helpful because they are written out for you. It’s easier to remember when they are a list. The chapter taught me that you have to build trust with students first in order to get them to try reading if they don’t like it. The book said that you reassess how students are doing and where they need to be placed in small groups at the beginning and in the middle of the unit which I thought was clever because it gives students the incentive to do well and improve so they can move up in groups and work. It also ensures that the teacher doesn’t allow students to become bored or comfortable with easy work. The book said that when you give the students books with biographies to tell the students to use specific details to answer questions. The author said that it is important to adjust the assignments for those that struggle with reading and to use a separate criteria when evaluating their work. I also felt that the example of the week by week plan was very helpful because it is a good guideline for when I’m creating my own. It has a lot of specifics.

Discuss two types of conferences that the author mentions and tell how you might use these with lower grades.

The conference where the students are assessed through retelling the story can be utilized in many ways when done properly. You can use these in the lower grades because the best way to help improve students’ ability to retell is to model how to do it. If the teacher reads a story and then retells what happened in a shorter amount of time to kids, they’ll know what they have to do. It is easier for teachers to monitor the types of books kids are reading at a younger age so they can help the students pick a less difficult book to read to ensure that they will comprehend the content better and still be able to retell the story when they are done. You can model for younger students by giving them step by step instructions. This can be done in bullet points and it can be put on a bookmark that they can use when reading. You can also show students that they can retell a story by acting it out or drawing the main idea of what they read. It would benefit students more by using fiction books because they are magical and catch the younger students’ attention.
The second conference that I liked was peer book conferences. This not only gives students the chance to gain feedback from their work, but it gives students the chance to improve their academic and social language skills. They can improve academic by reading their peers work and then their social by conversing with them. This is also a good way for ELL students to work on their English because they are reading and writing and can be paired with a student that does well with reading and writing. This can be done with younger students by allowing them to draw their work and keep it fun for them. Just because they are younger doesn’t mean that they can’t show that they understood what they read.

Questions for Discussion

Will it burn students out if you constantly have questions for them to answer about books that they’ve read in class?
Will they lose their interest in reading if they associate it with having to write and answer questions that they could possibly get wrong even if they read the text?