The past two chapters I have read in Fisher and Frey’s, Better Learning Through Structured Teaching,
were all about the gradual release of responsibility model, and the first step
in this model, the focus lesson.
While observing this last week in my kindergarten placement,
I have tried to pick out the pieces of the lessons that apply to this model,
and see where the GRR comes into play. However, the more I observe, the more I
wonder, can you use the GRR model in a
class as young as kindergarten?
At this age, students are still babies. They need their
shoes tied, buttons buttoned, and they are still learning letters and sounds.
How can we expect to demonstrate new strategies for them, when they need to
learn the basics first? It is hard to give them this control, when there is so
much they need help with still. Chapter 2, which was specifically about the
focus lesson stage, said the assessment could be using an exit ticket to ask
questions and see what they have learned. These students have just begun recognizing
and copying letters, and are far from being able to answer questions on an exit
ticket. Are they too young for this strategy, or does it just need a lot of
modifications?
I continued to observe in my classroom, and saw that my
mentor teacher is very good with her students, keeping the patience, and asking
them questions. I even noticed some think-alouds going on. She was doing a
lesson on parts of a book, and she would ask questions of herself like “what
order do I think the animals will come in, if the book is called ABC animals?”
or “I see that there are quotations, so I must know that someone is speaking in
this book”. These think-alouds are smaller version of what was explained in the
book, and the thinking is not as advanced as they portrayed it to be, but for
kindergarten, it was at a good level, and the students were starting to
understand how you would begin to look at a new book, and strategies for
understanding the parts of the book, even if they are a ways from reading books
like the one they are being demonstrated.
I think that this is in fact a form of the focus lesson, but I never saw
it laid out quite as formally as it was in the book.
In Fisher and Frey, they had a definite structure to the
focus lesson. A beginning, middle and end, and if these steps were followed,
the focus lesson would be complete. I think this is what I don’t see in my
classroom. There are think and read-alouds like mentioned before. And there are
times when we do hand-writing lessons and the students listen and watch,
combining these visual and audio features like the book discussed, and then
they practice on their own, however, they do not always happen in this order.
We do GRR through out a lesson itself. We use the GRR method when we are
writing each letter in each word. The students listen and observe, then they
try it. Then we move onto the next letter, and they are back to observing. It
does not happen in a whole, where they learn an entire new set of skills to
later be practiced, like it did in the book.
Assessment also occurs in our classroom. We do as much
partner-talk as we can, with out letting the conversations drift too much, or
having certain students take over. We have adjusted to doing a lot of class
discussion too. We use assessments like their completed handwriting books, and
worksheets to determine what the understood. I think these are all forms of
what they spoke about in the book, just modified for our grade and age of
students.
I am not sure if I have completely answered my wondering,
because I don’t know if this new, adjusted form of GRR is acceptable, or if it
has to play out by the book. But like any strategy, and anything you want to
use in your classroom, I think that if you can’t adjust it for your students,
and what works in your classroom, to get the same results you aren’t doing your
job as a teacher, and the strategy is pointless anyway.
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