Clinical Reflection on Teaching Practice: #3

Name: Vikas Relan

Date: 6/11/2017

1. Students Success and Struggles, As Based on Evidence and Data from the Week
I feel the boys are understanding that what we are practicing is a tool to help guide their
reading in a direction that helps find and note desired information. 2 of the students (Ivan
and Donte) were able to choose a 2nd person of interest, create 2 -3 questions that helped
guide their reading, and write a summary of the information. They do need a little more
assistance on the trimming down of information to have their writing be classified as a
summary. I plan on discussing that concept in next weeks session.

2. Ways You Actively Engaged Students with Informational Texts, Literacy Tools, and
Literacy as a Tool for Social Justice
A boy came late and had not attended our sessions previously (10 th grader). It was a good
opportunity to engage the students in a few meaningful ways. I asked them if they understood
reading with Guiding Questions well enough to instruct and describe the tool to a new
student. They all eagerly agreed to this task. I asked them to take turns and have each of
them input on the concept and again they listened extremely well. They were able to
describe the process of choosing questions that will give them meaningful and important
information that can be used for a summary.
They all worked together exemplifying the type of teamwork I asked for. They also explained
the info in a manner that helped the new student respectfully learn the tools basic tasks.

3. New Understandings Youre Constructing About Literacy Teaching and Learning

The concept of creating a summary from the guided questions notes taken needs to be
described and modeled for the students. Donte created a great paper, but it was not a
summary, it was full page! Ivan created a good summary, but did not use some important
info from his questions. Damound came very late and was distracted the remainder of the
session. I will need to give him more rigid instruction next session. He could not get logged
in, so I finally asked him to pick a new topic and create some questions that would help write
a summary. I learned that Technology sometimes is an easy excuse for kids to use if they
want to delay working on anything.

4. Connections to Course Readings and Discussions

I like how we can insert the 6 strategies for reading comprehension at various times during
the session.
1- Activating background knowledge asking the students to choose their own person of
interest allowed them to be familiar and use previously known information about
someone they appreciate.
2- Questioning using some background knowledge, they create questions that lead to
more in depth knowledge about this person
3- Making inferences understanding the text has led them to make inferences prior to
completing the reading sometimes, which seems to make them keep reading and
reading.
 4- Determining importance using the guided questions, the text is decided as important
if it falls under the question, or perhaps is still important and placed under the other
column.
5- Summarizing and synthesizing this is the goal in mind and the children are
progressing towards this.
As we understood from chapter 6, we saw firsthand that verbally discussing paragraphs
assists with comprehension when done with other students.

5. Things Youre Still Wondering About or Puzzling Over

I am hoping that further discussion and modeling will lead to the kids understanding that a
summary is important information, some from the guiding questions, creating a concise
collection of the information read. I think using a red pen as a visual indicator of trimming
sentences, we can understand that a summary keeps only the most important information.