Readings for Feb. 7

After reading the Chapter in Weinstein I began thinking about my placement and how this closely relates to what I have recently been doing with my 4th grade students. This chapter goes into great detail about recitation and what positive and negative aspects of it. In my 4th grade classroom but CT has been assigning me to a reading group to work with. The group is assigned a book to read (a very short chapter book) together and the students take turns reading different sections of the book aloud. To ensure that the students are paying attention to their classmates and comprehend what they are hearing, I use some of these recitation techniques. Although a few criticisms of recitation are that the teacher has a dominant role and the student a passive role and that there is a lack of interaction among students, I did not see this as a problem in this case. This may be because I work with the more advanced reading group, but the students were responding to each other and although I had a more dominant role I tried to moderate the discussion by being more of a facilitator rather than a questioner. Although I did not realize at the time that I was using the techniques in this chapter, I now see that I used some of these strategies directly. I tried to get everyone in the group involved in the discussion and encouraged each student to respond. Even if the student could not answer some of the questions I asked, I would encourage them to add anything they found interesting in the book or something they had learned while we were reading. This allowed them to participate but not feel as if they had to give a right or wrong answer. It opened the discussion up, and allowed them to discuss their own interests while I was still able to check for comprehension. The reason I think this recitation was so successful was that it was a smaller group which was more manageable for a discussion and allowed participation from all students. Also, we were out in the hall and were sitting in a circle so that we all had eye contact with one another. I found it very interesting that the students did not want to leave the discussion and asked if we could stay out in the hall longer and talk about the book. Their classroom is very loud and can get out of hand easily and one student commented that it was too loud in the classroom and liked it better in the hall where it was quiet to talk about the book. This is a very shy student, but a student that is very advanced and is one of the brightest in the class. I think he felt more comfortable in the smaller group setting and felt he could be heard in this discussion instead of in the whole class discussion in which the loud energetic students seem to take over. I think small group discussions are very helpful and important in a classroom. However, it can be hard to work with each group when there are so many students, which is why I think some teacher try to stick to whole class discussions.