Week Two- Instructional Practices

In this week’s reading of “No More Independent Reading Without Support” I’ve learned many different instructional reading practices that I can use with my students. Some of the instructional practices that I’ve learned to reach struggling readers are differentiating reading instruction, guided reading groups, learning centers, and planning for reading instruction. Some of the other instructional practices that reaffirmed what I currently do in my classroom are whole-class reading discussions, read alouds, independent reading, explicit direct instruction, individualized reading assistance and interventions, and small group work (Jigsaw). I find myself using whole-class reading discussions, individualized interventions, and direct instruction the most in my classroom. I utilize my instructional time efficiently with different activities so that each of my students have an opportunity to engage in different learning scenarios and modalities, as well as for them to demonstrate success each day. In order to gain student feedback in a prompt manner, I use exit slips at the end of each class period as a formative assessment to asses my teaching effectiveness and students’ knowledge and comprehension. I think exit slips are a great tool to assess students’ readiness to move on to more complex and challenging reading tasks or book levels. “For students to do more than race through lots of books, they need a teacher to show them what behaviors they need to practice as they read, and the teacher needs opportunities to monitor and give feedback on how students are using those behaviors” (Miller & Moss, pg. 8, 2013). I agree that teachers should model/demonstrate what effective reading skills look like in front of their students. Each day, I read effectively with my students. I ask comprehension check questions to see if they are understanding what I have read (segments of a book) before I continue on. I then have my students write a summary of the topic(s) that the class had talked about (as a whole-class) or about the book. I always observe how well my students read independently as well as when they read for and in front of the class.