Questioning Questions

Questions. Why do we have them? What is its purpose?

You know I never thought about questioning questions that my teacher ask until I read this chapter. I can sadly say that I have always been that student that does not question the teacher but just remembers what they said for the test and goes on. Most of my educational career has been a teacher questioning students (Me) to promote thinking process. But I love the idea of student’s questioning the questions being asked. This promotes higher order thinking and also allows students to reflect on their thought process. I feel like when a student can generate questions about a topic then he or she has to have knowledge on the topic. Do you see where I am going here….

I want my students to question my questions so that they can think more for themselves. This is going to be a tough challenge because I believe that most children do not know how to think for themselves but instead they are trained on how to think.  Teachers must facilitate learning by building HOT questions off of previous background knowledge. This can be done through a ton of instructional strategies and the students will then start to realize that the questions they are asking are more important than the answers they are giving. Fry said, “When teachers use these strategies to ask probing questions, students grow in their thinking process.” My only question is how do we get students to start questioning and thinking about what they think instead of worrying about just finding out the answers to the question?

Questioning the Author strategy was my favorite one from the book because it does make the students think deeper into what he or she is trying to say.  Through students questioning the author they have to analyze the author’s logos, ethos, and pathos. I had really never done this until we did this in class on Tuesday. I really enjoyed and learned a lot from the video by analyzing the speaker’s pathos, ethos, and logos.

In conclusion, I will use student centered questioning in my classroom to facilitate higher order thinking. 

Getting It Down: Making and Taking Notes Across the Curriculum

Before I started this reading I thought it was going to be like every other passage we have had to read about taking notes. First you start with headings, then make clear bulleted pointes, highlight the important information, etc., you get the picture? But thankfully the authors gave some very good examples of good note taking techniques. I really really liked the idea of having special ways to organize notes based on the subject.  I hope to incorporate that into my future classroom. The Research Grid was one of my favorite examples in the book. I know that in the past I would have loved to have a layout of how to organize my information and notes for research papers. Because lets be honest, research papers stink if it is on a boring topic that no one wants to know anything about.

             Personally for me note taking has always been a crucial asset to my achievements in school. For one, I learn things more efficiently if I write it down, and I also find myself paying closer attention to what is going on if I take notes about a topic or lesson. This is something Fisher and Frey discussed during the chapter. They stated, “Taking good notes trains students not only to pay attention but what to pay attention to.” This statement is so true! I have had to suffer some bad experiences when I was in high school because I studied my notes that were filled with pointless information. I think that if my teachers would have taught me in early grades on how to take notes based on the important information I would have done much better on my test and papers. So because of my bad experience I do plan to teach and assess my students on note taking and note making. If I teach this skill earlier in the year then I think I can set up my students for future success.            

            Note taking being taught will increase all students’ comprehension and retention of the material covered in class. Although, how a student sets up his or her notes can help or hinder them as a learner. Since I am an advocate for note taking, should I allow my students to take notes the way they would like to or should I have them all do it a specific way based on the lesson? In other words, I just want the student to do what is best for his or her learning, so should I require a specific way for the students to take notes or allow them to create there own? Any suggestions from past learning experiences with taking notes?

Picture this Reflection

I have always wanted to know more about what other educational professionals thought about graphic organizers. I personally have mixed feelings about using graphic organizers because for myself I learn things better in a linear fashion, so graphic organizers like concept maps has always thrown me off. When I was in school I always felt like teachers would have us feel out graphic organizers as busy work and not really explain the importance of each section on the organizers. After making my graphic organizer I never used / studied it because I always felt like it was hard to follow or not enough room to right down important information. Like Fisher and Fry stated in the chapter "If the purpose of a graphic organizer becomes filling it out correctly, it is nothing more than a worksheet." That is simply how it was for me in my early education, nothing but busy work. Now that I am a teacher I have had several teachers have different influences on me about using graphic organizers. Some experiences were beneficial but some were not. In my future teaching opportunities I want to use graphic organizers but I want them to be beneficial to my students. How can I ensure that each of my students benefits from using these and not have a bad experience like I did during my grade schooling years? Maybe my teachers did not use the right kind of concept map based on the subject and topic being taught. How do I know which graphic organizers is appropriate for which subject, grade level, and lesson? 


Last week as I was in my 2nd grade clinical class and we made a graphic organizer based off a story we had just read. At least 5 of my students did not understand how to organize their data onto the graph because it was so busy and unclear of directions. It seemed to me that the students did not understand how to use different types of graphic organizers, so maybe an assortment of styles should be taught at an early age to prevent this problem in the future. Or maybe the teacher did not select the best graphic organizer for this assignment because it is important that teachers select an appropriate graphic organizer based on the lesson or assignment. 

Text Talk

This article and book reading were very beneficial to some underlying information about using read aloud's in the classroom. When I was reading this article I tried to think back to personal experiences that I have had with people reading book to me. I do remember always looking at the pictures an making assumptions about the plot due to the title or pictures. Now that I am older it is easy to forget that when I'm teaching a child I must really hone in onto the ideas in the text because the children are mostly examining the pictures and getting a false understanding of what the book is about. The authors made some really good clear precise points. If your are using read aloud you must use pictures, open ended questions, discussions, back ground knowledge, and vocabulary in the "most beneficial educational" way. This is not by letting students flip through a book, telling them what words mean, and asking one-word answer questions. Instead, allow children to engage in the text by how inflect the tone and pitch of your voice when your reading, show pictures that go along with the plot during the book reading, help them make connections with their background knowledge through questions and discussions to the ideas in the book, and allow time for students to learn a new word from the book by looking and reading the context in which the word is being used. This process sounds so easy but is yet so complex. A read aloud can be a very rich learning experience for all age groups if it is done with the procedures. Having the student comprehend the text is the ultimate goal. We want them to know the main ideas and how it pertains the content of the story, but we as teachers must prepare time and activities that can assist this style of learning.

Writing to Learn across the curriculum: Tools for Comprehension in Content Area Classes

Knipper and Duggan's article about writing for comprehension in content area classes was very helpful. It proved to me that writing is a vital skill that must be used throughout my future classes and started at an early age. Whether it be in a science log, biopoem, or a simple self-learning reflection, writing must be incorporated into all subjects. These two authors phrased it well, "children need to be writing to learn rather than learning to write." If a student can express their knowledge through writing their thoughts and understandings on paper, then it proves that the student has gained a deeper level of comprehension. 

Children can to use writing for many things in the classroom. Knipper and Duggan gave some great suggestions on how to incorporate "writing to learn" into the classroom. Organized note taking, biopeoms, reflections, and blogging are just a few strategies that I hope to use in my future classroom.

As a child I can not remember practicing writing in fun exciting ways. My teachers always gave us a topic and we had to write a story or opinion from that topic. Since there was no teaching strategy variety used for writing I grew up disliking writing. I never felt like I enjoyed what I got to write about so I developed a dislike for all different types of writing. It was not until my freshman year of college that I had a professor that opened up the beautiful world of writing. I can honestly say since that year my confidence and capability to write has grown. So in conclusion, I clearly see the importance of teaching my future students writing as a learning strategy at a young age. This will benefit their whole education in the years to come. 

Making a case and a place for effective content are literacy instruction in the elementary grades

I really enjoyed reading this educational article. I felt like it had a lot of good ideas and reasoning about what and why I should teach my future students informational text. In the very beginning it mentioned how we are trying to teach our students comprehension in the classroom through our basal readers, but most of the time it ends up with the teacher reading the text aloud or listening to a tape of the text. This is such a disservice to our students because they will not get to experience and learn whole literacy comprehension through listening to a read aloud. Listening to a tape or a teacher read aloud is just allowing students to learn and practice listening comprehension. Preparing our students for success in future grades includes teaching students to read for themselves and through other instructional strategies to gain whole comprehension of each text. I believe this is especially important for the early grades such as Kindergarten through 2nd because that is when the foundation literacy skills are laid.

Moss made some very important points about incorporating informational text in early grades. One of those being, build a scema for what is to come in their future educational practices. I am a firm believer in practice makes perfect. If we expect students to read and gain knowledge from informational type text then we must offer opportunities for them to practice with it. I think presenting informational text in early grades can be challenging because you always want to keep the students engaged and interested. And lets be honest, informational text is not the most exciting thing to read most of the time. However, Moss made some good suggestions for incorporating this text into their daily learning. Discovery Kid magazine is a good resource to use to bring informational text to young students in a fun interesting way. There are many other magazines like Discovery Kids that offers fun learning opportunities while incorporating informational text. Also allowing kids to explore different types of books, magazines, or journals make learning opportunities available to the students. Letting children choose a book can also help students make connections throughout other types of text. When students get to see the different types of literacy content that is available to them they can build experiences with different text that might not have been available to them in the classroom. For my future classroom, I hope I take the knowledge gained from Moss's article an apply it to my students. In conclusion agreeing with Moss, it is crucial to start as early as possible when preparing children for future academic.