Ch. 7, Reading Comprehension

I cover the 7th grade Reading standards when I teach novels. When we are reading one, I really hit on the one standard that says "Respond to literary texts in a variety of methods." I think it is wise when looking at reading comprehension. I think I am good at motivating my students to want to read our material and learn from it. I establish the "rule" at the beginning of the year that when anyone is reading, no one is to giggle or ridicule if a classmate makes an error or doesn't know a word. This helps with self-efficacy, as the book mentioned. Establishing that respectful reading culture plays a key part in reading comprehension right there. As we read, I'm good at stopping at points of importance to ask questions. This way I can gauge their comprehension as we go. We also, of course, discuss and answer questions when finished too. Throughout the 7 years I've taught, I've gotten a lot better at my questioning strategies. I try to write the questions in a way that will be familiar to PASS and that makes them dig deep to find the answer. My questions vary in that they may ask about main idea, direct questions about certain chapters/sections, and literary elements.

Although my questioning strategy/approach has improved, the one area that still needs improvement is how I approach summarization. I'm not really good at helping students to understand which details are important and which ones are irrelevant. I need to find ways to cover this more. Another area I need to improve upon is self-regulation. A lot of times I feel like I have to keep such a fast pace, I don't take the time to remind students to monitor themselves as we read. This is something I could model and be more consistent on. I think this is a good idea that would definitely be worth the time and effort. Another thing I need to do more of is peer tutoring and cooperative learning. The reason I don't do this very often is it takes time away from me actually teaching and the fact that they can easily get side-tracked. It drives me crazy to think we are wasting valuable time when I could just be teaching myself.

I really enjoy teaching reading, so I definitely want to keep learning more about how to be a better reading teacher. I plan to take more time to analyze and assess myself. I need to ask myself am I implementing these strategies when we're reading? I need to assess what I'm doing to help them and tweak my approaches as needed.