This year is shaping up to be a strange one. While I am still working on maths, my inquiry this year is into reading comprehension and more specifically an initiative called Extended Discussion. Extended Discussion attempts to improve reading comprehension of texts through conversation between group members. This is very different from my initial post about this year's inquiry.
The end goal of Extended Discussion is to have students discussing a text and asking questions of each other. Discussion and questioning pools students' mental resources and gives opportunities to learn from others or teach others. Effective questioning also encourages students to discover where they may not realise they have misunderstood the text.
Obviously, training students to be capable of conversation requires different amounts of work for different students. In general the students of my class tend to be on the polite side, not wanting to disagree or speak out of turn. A handful are able to comprehend texts at their chronological age or higher. Even then, they still do not have the background knowledge (derived from reading mileage) to help them overcome some language hurdles such as idioms or metaphor. A large majority of my students' reading ages are sitting just below their chronological age. On top of that, they have the same background knowledge issues as the handful mentioned above but more pronounced. While I suspect much of my students' reluctance to answer questions, or their seeming inability to answer simple questions is the result of doing nothing at home over our multitude of lockdowns, the reading mileage issue has been present since long before lockdowns started.
A breakdown of my process follows:
The benefit of running this in my Reading programme is that it is going in the direction I wanted my Maths to go, hence the Reciprocal Maths cards I developed. I will be trying to develop this within my Maths programme as well.
No comments:
Post a Comment