Journal Question #5

This entry answers # 5 of the Reading Methods Journal

What types of instructional methods are being used?

Instructional Methods
For the most part, Mrs. Overstreet used direct and explicit instruction during the math and social studies portions of the day. She often would teach the lesson in its entirety and then begin to include the class as they worked through the worksheet/lesson on the smartboard together. Mrs. Overstreet’s language arts lessons were much more inclusive, for she encouraged her students to read with a purpose in mind, think about what they were reading, converse, brainstorm, and write with an audience in mind. The children did not compose texts as a group, but rather wrote in their journals (which were never reviewed by Mrs. Overstreet) by themselves. I wouldn’t say that Mrs. Overstreet had fully embraced balanced literacy, but she made an obvious attempt to incorporate elements from that approach.

The class was very print rich (most of it produced by the teacher), but it was not literacy rich. The classroom had absolutely no student-produced work on the walls. I recognized the balanced literacy terms that Mrs. Overstreet used with her students such as “metacognition”, “schema”, “mental movies”, and “shared reading”, however, their experience with my interactive writing lesson was the first that they had ever had of that kind. They were unfamiliar with going through the writing process as a group. It seemed that the ideas and the concepts were there, they just weren’t being utilized to get the maximum participation and purposeful thinking out of the students. There was evidence of a gradual release of responsibility (P. David Pearson), but the process didn’t seem to make it past the second and third stage (I do, you help and You do, I help) to the fourth stage of You do, I watch.

The science lesson that I observed was hands on, but not very purposeful and seemed like a huge waste of time. The children used flutes to learn about air pressure and sound. There was no discussion or reflection of the experimentation and what the children learned after it was over. It was a poor lesson and Mrs. Overstreet admitted that the teacher in charge of the lesson had not planned it ahead of time.