Webcast Thoughts: "Making Decisions for Individual Learners Within a Small-Group Setting"

This webcast was full of important information for all teachers! In particular, what stood out to me was the importance of forming a network of reading strategies. This is something we have talked about in class quite a bit. It keeps showing up over and over. This leads me to believe that it is one of the most important things we as teachers will learn. One interesting fact that I saw in the presentation was that 80% of students will form network of strategies no matter what program/method/philosophy is used, and 20% (the struggling readers) will have trouble constructing a network of strategies.  Yes, forming these strategies comes naturally, but we must teach all of these strategies in order to not leave anyone out! Teaching students a balance of MSV is the most important thing that our students will receive when learning how to read.  That is why we as teachers need to have these strategies and how to identify them down in our repertoire of teaching methods. Being able to identify what strategies our students use well and what strategies our students need to work on is very important in guiding students to the next step in their reading. With a strong understanding of MSV strategies, teachers can come up with a prompting question like, “does that look right?” without even really having to think about it because they have worked on this so much while they were a pre-service teacher.

I really thought the talk about ELLs was very helpful. A lot of ELL students are in my classroom for my field experience (5^th grade), so this was very relatable to my own experiences. Choosing books that are both appropriate to their language level and their reading level might be a little difficult. According to the Level Correlation chart, by grades 4 and 5, the ELLs should be considered “fluent”.  This is often not the case, especially for my classroom.  Some students may have a high level in reading, but not in language, or vice versa. When looking for books for ELLs, we must find a book that is in their reading level, but then make sure it also is parallel to their language level. Often times some of the vocabulary in books are difficult. We need to be constantly asking ourselves, “Is there a book at another reading level that this student might be more successful with?” We shouldn’t just bring students down a level because they do not understand the vocabulary.  I think this is a very important highlight of the webcast. So many times teachers will just say “oh, we should just bring him/her down a reading level” but with ELLs, we need to look deeper into what the student understands, what their language abilities are, and what they are capable of doing. Leveling for ELLs will take a lot more time and a bigger process than English speaking students.