Webcast Reflection

Making Decisions for Individual Learners Within a Small Group 
Throughout the podcast, the speakers really stressed the importance of small group work and having the students work together. Literacy is a very important component of the learning process and it is important that students learn all the different strategies that go into reading and writing so they can work and learn efficiently and effectively.
The first speaker discussed the sources of information that students use to draw meaning and understand the text that they are reading. The three different sources are meaning, syntactic, and visual information; students use these three sources of information to understand words. However, I learned that is it important to teach the students to balance these sources so they understand the text to their full potential. The speaker gave an example that if the student is mostly using their visual source of information and hardly touching on their syntactic and visual sources, then you, as the teacher, need to encourage them to use all three together. Students need to get in the habit of using all sources together and balancing all three so it is easier for them to read more complex text when the time comes. Additionally, the speaker stressed the importance of using a network of strategies while reading instead of focusing on one specific one; this is something we learned in our cluster as well. The speaker said that the network of strategies should be "interconnected, flexible, overlapping, fluent, and self-initiated." This is something I will remember for my future classroom because I think it is really important for students to use different types of strategies instead of just a few because it will get them to understand the text better and become better readers. A quote by Frank Smith that they mentioned was ,"Reading depends more on what is behind the eyes-- on the non-visual information than the visual information in front of them." This really stood out to me because I never thought of reading in that sense. Elementary students who are first starting to read need to dig deeper than the text on the page in order to understand the true meaning on the book. This will help them develop good comprehension strategies as well, and it will help build a good foundation of literacy skills. Every word in a book has a meaning behind it, so as teachers I think it is really important to teach the students that.
The second speaker talked about making instructional decisions and knowing the strength of the readers in the classroom. I didn't really understand the importance of this until after listening to this podcast. I learned that it is important to know the strengths of each student because you don't want to give students books that are too complex for their literacy level because they won't learn anything; they will be more focused on how to say the words they don't know. In order for teachers to know the strengths of each student they can look at the student's interests, experiential base, language, and the strategies they use. It is also very important to assess student processing by keeping a record of some sort to assess the needs for strategy instruction; it is the teacher's job to help the struggling students and point them in the right direction if need be. A good strategy that the speaker discussed that I will be sure to use in my classroom to assess independent reading is sitting next to individual students while they are in a small group and listen to them read. This is a good strategy because the teacher isn't necessarily singling any student out; they are just discreetly listening to different students read aloud. As the students read the teacher jots down notes and then discusses with the student things that they need to work on and what they are doing a good job at.
Lastly, the third speaker talked about ELL and closing the gap between ELL and their English-speaking peers. This section of the podcast freaked me out a little bit because I have not learned a lot about working with ELL and teaching them English as their second language. I am not fluent in any other language besides English, so I will need to learn how to communicate with and teach ELL in an effective and efficient way without embarrassing them in front of their peers. However, I did learn some strategies in this podcast that I can use in my classroom. The speaker talked about the importance of small group instruction and guided reading lessons and how they are great ways to improve ELL; this is a good way for the students to learn from one another and help each other learn English. In order for this to be effective though, the students need to be placed in groups with students that are have similar literacy levels. There were many other strategies mentioned in the podcast and I can't wait to use them to become a better teacher for the future ELL in my classroom.
This podcast was very useful and I learned a lot of useful strategies and tips to create a classroom full of fluent readers. I can't wait to have my own classroom and help my students grow every day in the literacy department and in other parts of their lives as well. I get more and more excited to teach every day!