Throughout my work with my tutee, I learned a lot about teaching in general. I was grateful for the fact that I got to work individually with her so that she had the individual attention that she needed as well as the fact that I could tailor instruction to her. This meant that I was able to experiment with different comprehension strategies and backtrack or move forward as I needed to based on her level. With my tutee’s biggest gap being comprehension, my research question drove my instruction because I wanted to ensure that she had the skill set to be able to read and comprehend on her own.
When I look back on my research memos and the data between her pre-assessments and post-assessments, I am blown away by her growth. I have never noticed her struggle with surface level comprehension, but as we progressed, she was making predictions and inferences and supplementing so much background knowledge whenever and wherever she could. As I mentioned in my research memos, she was familiar with concepts like predictions and inferencing, but did not know the difference between the two, how they could help her understand the text, or their significance in general. However, we focused on a specific concept/skill each week and she was implementing them and was a chatter box about what was happening in the text. Her growth was simply phenomenal.
After reading several articles, I have learned that there are SO many ways to increase comprehension. One of the variety of ways is simply to talk about literature. This can be so easy because in my future classroom, I plan on doing a “Mystery Monday,” where I will introduce a new book to my students where I would talk about it and then they would get interested and check it out for themselves and we could conference together about it. Also, by reading the article by Duke and Pearson, I was on the right track by teaching individual skills, modeling, conferencing, and giving individual practice. I need to work on the collaboration piece, but I was pretty close to meeting the steps that it takes in order to effectively increase individual comprehension.
I have learned a lot throughout this experience and I know that it will impact my future teaching because I have had this practice and I have seen that it works. I also am aware of how I can make it better, but working on more collaboration and even better modeling. I am grateful for this experience because independent comprehension is essential as they go through school and even in life and I want to ensure they have the tools that they need to succeed. I can’t wait to use these practices in my own classroom!