As I have mentioned in the past, teaching is often a test of trial and error until the student(s) you are working with understand the topic you are teaching. The tough thing is knowing what to try (and sometimes remembering if you already tried it). This week, I found I had made an error in my trial and error process with a student. This student has been coming to us since our first year, and he is now in the second grade. He has been struggling with comprehension, so I along with his teacher, have been working with him in this area. One thing we’ve been working on is keeping him from guessing and reminding him to go back to the passage to search for the answer. My next step was going to be to teach him to look at the questions first, and then read for the answer instead of reading the story first and then looking at the questions.
Anyway, I discovered this week, that I need to adjust my plan. After reading a three paragraph story, I asked him what he had just read, and he could not tell me. I asked him a couple detail questions and he had no idea what the answers were. Long story short, this is my new strategy. After each paragraph, I will be asking him questions about what he read; I will keep doing this until he can ask those same questions of himself as he reads. In the past, reading was a struggle for him, so to compensate, he spent his concentration on sounding out the words and getting them right. This combined with fluency testing that is done in his class to see how fast he can read in a minute, has lead him to not think about what he is reading when he is reading it. I may also have him look at the questions first and then search for the answer while stopping after each paragraph; we’ll see how things go next week. The lesson I learned is don’t’ assume a student is thinking about what he is reading just because he is a good reader!
