Prompts, and Cues, and Scaffolds...Oh My!

      I have been wondering about the best way to ask questions without directly giving the answer away to my students. I found the article by Frey and Fisher entitled "Idenfitying Instructional Moves During Guided Learning" very helpful in discussing different types of questions to ask your students. Not only do they provide a list of different types of questions and examples of when they are best used, but they also include a section on cues. There are visual cues, environmental cues, verbal cues, and physical cues. I like the idea of using questions to guide students to the right answer. It is never fun to have the answer told to you when you are trying to figure something out for yourself. I think that as teachers, we many times need to just "cool it" and give our students the opportunity to come up with the correct answer.
      While all of these cues and prompts may be a good idea (a great idea, in fact), it can be a little overwhelming to know how to implement them into the classroom. I appreciated Chapter 12 in the Allington and Cunningham textbook which gave examples of how to structure your day in the classroom. I also appreciated the way that they incorporated some of their own ideas that have been used throughout the textbook and worked them into the schedule.
      Overall, I feel much more confident on different ways to actually "teach" my students so that they will be able to construct the most amount of meaning from my instructions and lessons.

      When do you think you need to use more than simply prompting and cueing? Do you think that the techniques offered in this article would give you a good basis of informal assessment? I sure do!

Real Life Teaching Moment

For my real life observation, I was actually the teacher. I had planned to go to the Child and Hearing Services on campus and observe one of their "literacy immersion" lessons. However, things don't alway go as you want them to go.
I am doing a pre-student teaching practicum over at the school for the deaf, and just so happened to teach a lesson on reading this week (...well, it was planned...). My students are very language delayed, so even though they are in high school, they read at about a third grade reading level. I go to the school on Wednesdays and Thursdays for two different "blocks" (read: class periods). On Wednesday we read a book called "The Breakfast Story" in preparation for a lesson I had prepared to do on Thursday about McDonalds and using money to order for your food. I only worked with one student for my reading lesson, and that really helped boost my confidence. I was able to use several strategies we have discussed in this REED 430 class. One of the strategies that I used was introducing vocabulary before we read the story. My student "Sam" (not his real name) was eager to read the story, without looking at the pictures first. I had him slow down and look at the pictures. We discussed the pictures. We even learned some new signs based off of the pictures alone, that weren't printed on the next page. When "Sam" had finished reading the story, I asked him if he liked art. He said he did. I asked him if he wanted to be an illustrator. He of course said yes, even though he asked "Yeah, but what's an illustrator anyways?" I was then able to describe what's the difference between an author and an illustrator. I gave "Sam" a blank piece of paper and a few markers. I told him that he couldn't look at the pictures in the book, but I wanted him to draw me some pictures of how he thought it might look to him. There was one page that said something like "I am going to breakfast at a restaurant near my new apartment in my new neighbourhood." He drew a picture of houses and then lots of stick people. I asked him who the people were and he said "Neighbours! You can't have a neighbourhood without neighbours!" Oh, that's right; silly me :)

The lesson went really well and I feel like I accomplished a few important things:
1. taught and introduced new vocabulary
2. used visualization and comprehension strategies by having "Sam" draw the pictures
3. used guided principles by looking at the pictures and discussing them before and after reading the story
4. scaffolding by asking him questions about topics he already knew in order to add new/more knowledge

All of these things were successful and I would not have been able to use them if I had not taken this class!