Today was the first day that I recorded one of my classes this year. We were reading a story from our textbook and using reciprocal teaching after reading in groups. This filming was extremely beneficial to me. I feel like I always tend to pick myself apart about different mannerism I have while teaching, or over-analyzing the ways I speak or say certain things. I also started to think about how badly I need my hair cut and how sloppy it looked today. I even noticed how my outfit was totally not matching at all with anything else I was wearing. What was I thinking this morning? Anyways...
I noticed many different things about the process of using reciprocal teaching with my students. I think that their cooperative work started to break down and lose its effectiveness because my students do not know what it means to read with a partner or a group. It took quite a while for students to get the hang of how to read the article together, which left a shorter amount of time for the actual reciprocal teaching work. I learned that I need to explicitly teach my students how to read with a partner and different strategies they can use. I will be doing a mini lesson with each class before we begin using reciprocal teaching again in class. It was difficult for students to have meaningful and learning-centered conversations about the text because they did not read it together effectively. I also think that I need to give students one set of things to do at a time. For example, before passing out any worksheets for their collaborative work, my students need to focus only on the partner reading without writing anything yet. It would be good if they could pass an object between each other that shows who is reading at the time, sort of like a talking stick. Once my students get this partner reading process down, they will be able to talk about what they read more effectively and it will prepare them for literature circles and novel studies in class.
I noticed a few other things about my instruction that I need to improve. I need to implement the use of cold calling in each class during questioning. I noticed in my video footage that it takes much to long to move students from low to high levels of questions and my students were showing very low engagement during this time aside from a few students. Cold calling will keep students more engaged and ready to answer. I also need to condense my directions into more brief words and stop repeating myself to improve the lesson flow. At times, the volume was very loud in the footage and there were some very clear off topic conversations that were occurring. I plan to implement a strategy using the word STOP. You write the word stop in the board and every time the volume gets too loud you erase one letter. Then if all the letters are erased, students work independently and silently rather than in their collaborative groups.
My key take-aways from the filming in relation to cooperative work in my classroom are as follows:
1) Students need to be taught how to read with a partner. Give a mini lesson on how this should work, focusing on what it looks like and sounds like and who is responsible for what during the reading. Perhaps give students an object to pass back and forth while reading to keep engagement up.
2) Use the timer while students are partner reading to keep them more on task and break up the portions of the cooperative process. For example, 15 minutes to partner read the story, 5 minutes to complete your role, 10 minutes to talk in your group.
3) Focus students on the reading by itself first. Then pass out collaborative materials.
4) Group management - use student points more during this time (none were awarded during the video footage, oops!). Also implement the STOP strategy during collaborative work.
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