I had the chance to teach the first ELA mini-lesson this morning in my placement classroom to Louis* and Trevor*. I worked with the students for about fifty minutes, and it was a great experience for me to be able to see how these two individual students reacted in response to the lesson that I prepared for them. As a quick summary, we read a book about the different kinds of jobs adults have and we practiced the comprehension strategy of connecting by filling out a double-entry journal.
Both Louis* and Trevor* were not excited to be pulled out of the classroom to work on reading. This is not something that I think either of them enjoy doing, and they are pulled out multiple times during the week to work on reading with both TE301 students and a resource room teacher. In addition, the students were practicing a play that they have been working on in the classroom, and the boys really wanted to be doing that instead of working on comprehension. Nonetheless, I tried to be as motivating as possible, and I think the boys liked having pieces of construction paper to be able to write their thoughts on.
I worked really hard to model for them what the double entry journal was and what was supposed to go in each column. The boys really struggled with the first column, where they had to put an idea from the book into it, and then move to the second column where they were supposed to connect a thought. They really wanted to skip right to the personal connection part, which is good and bad. Good, because they were already thinking ahead and making connections, but not so good because when I asked them to point to the spot on the page where they were connecting their idea to, they had a difficult time.
The strength of my lesson was that the boys knew that they had to pay attention to the content because they would be asked to write down a connection to it each page. I think this kept them a little bit more focused, even though I definitely observed how easily it was for either of them to get distracted and how many times I had to urge them to re-focus. The biggest limitation of my lesson was that I don't think I fully got them to comprehend the main ideas of the text. With this double-entry journal, they were focusing in on certain details that they could connect to, but when I asked them about the main idea of the text at the end, the boys were still missing a good chunk of the main idea. I think a lot of this had to do with their desire to go back in the classroom, however.
In regards to myself as a teacher, I liked having the construction paper so that I could quickly scan the connections that the boys were making in the journal. I noticed that I had to explain the purpose of the journal in a couple of different ways, and I was proud that I was able to do this in Spanish. I know that I had to use a lot of patience in this lesson, as it was a little discouraging that the boys really didn't want to participate. I am still wondering if this was a good strategy in helping the boys develop comprehension skills. Comprehension is such a big idea, and breaking it down into teaching different strategies was the way that seemed the most logical to me. I am wondering how I could use the strategy of connection to help the boys focus more on the main ideas rather than the minute details.
Overall, this lesson was insightful and helpful in my teaching development. I am excited to see how the questioning technique works with the boys next week on an expository text, and I hope that I won't have to pull them from something that they want to be part of in the classroom again!
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