10/28 Literacy

The Optimal Learning Model that Routman is using in Chapter 4 is very compelling. She has the teacher demonstrating the desired skill in front of the whole class and then she has the teacher and students share in the demonstration.

In practice, these two steps are the introduction of the assignment and walking the students through your own example and getting input from the class on what should go where.

I think this type of demonstration is almost used by my Master Teacher in her classroom in many of her writing assignments. I think she does a very good job of hybridizing the first two steps into a single lesson. She does the demonstrating of the journal entry or writing assignment that she wants the kids to do and after she has written a few lines she calls on the kids to share what the next step should be. She may be doing this as a continuation lesson, where the kids have been exposed to the concept at an earlier time in the week and is now attempting to remind their brains how to keep on doing it. The kids also respond well to it.

The second part of the Optimal Learning Model is having the students do the assignment through Guided Practice and then lastly continuing forth in independent practice.

These two parts are used by my master teacher to keep her students going. Sometimes it seems that these two steps are combined in one. And at other times, she has a definitive separation between the two steps. A good example is when she started instructing about editing notes. She had the students copy down her sentences from the overhead and put edit notation on her mistakes. After the students successfully completed that portion, she then had them do it to their own writing. The kids seemed to get the idea, and though they did not catch all of their mistakes they did apply what they learned.

Overall, I have seen some of this done and I have seen it work with the students. The next time I observe my Master Teacher, I now have the tools to actually see if she is really using Routman’s method and I can see how close she comes to doing it. At least, I will be more aware in observing her writing lesson teaching methods.