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I definitely
enjoyed Chapter 4 of our book, Reading to Learn in the Content Areas,
about the Assistance Phase of the PAR Lesson Framework. It made me see that
having learned how to activate our students' prior knowledge to prepare them to
learn during any lesson in our classroom and add more complex “files” to their schema,
we must guide them reading in the beginning and assisting them as they move on.
Reading may look easy on the surface to a proficient reader, even second
nature to them, but to a struggling reader it can seem complex and quickly
frustrates them. As mentioned in the text that proficient readers “sample text,
predict, confirm hypotheses, and self-correct quickly” (p. 81). We proficient readers
do this with such ease that it seems second nature for us, but our students are
not yet that point, so we as teachers need to make sure that we model many
different effective reading strategies so they can from their mistakes and
become better readers. It is our job as teachers to give them the tools
they need to succeed in reading and in any other subject or area of school for
them to be successful overall.
One
of the main theories the book talks about constructivism, I have heard about it
in other education classes but am still not quite understanding it. It seems to
me constructivism entails having students derive their own meaning from the
text and therefore there are not any wrong interpretations of the students read
and got out of the text. A teacher is merely a guide and not the giver of knowledge.
I liked how its seven goals were stated but did not feel that enough light was
shed on them in terms of how you go about clearly implementing the goals. They
are give students knowledge of the
learning process, provide students with experience appreciating multiple
perspectives, make learning realistic and relevant encourage ownership and
voice in the learning process, provide a social context for learning, encourage
use of multiple modes of representation, and encourage learners' self-awareness
All
the different strategies in the chapter were ways to make students understand
their learning process, acknowledge many different perspectives, and give them the
tools for learning. Our job as teachers is to assist students in reading
and make them successful, but we may not always be there to make sure they
notice important details in the text or look up new vocabulary that they are
unsure of as they read.
Even
though this chapter was at times challenging for me, I still was exposed to
many different strategies that I would definitely use in my classroom and include
in my PAR lesson plan assignment. My favorite strategy in this chapter was Question
Answer Relationship or QAR because it’s a very straight-forward strategy that
is easily implemented and beneficial to all students at any grade level. I feel like the QAR strategy is very helpful
for the students as they become their own thinkers and it allows them to be in
control of what they learn and able to justify their reasoning in anything that
they learn.
