Andrea Delise Week 8

Lately, I have noticed how important gradual release of responsibility is for instruction. For example, during read aloud time, I teach comprehension. This week, the students are focusing on author's purpose, and determining important information. On Monday, I read a Bernstein Bears book to the students and we talked about the author's purpose of writing the book. We talked about this as a class after having a discussion about what author's purpose is. To relate this to the students, I said that they, as authors, also have a purpose in mind when they are writing. I asked the students to think about a story they have written. I asked them to think about what their purpose was. I asked for examples. I then said, "Just like that, these authors have a reason that they want their readers to come away with after reading the story." After introducing author's purpose and showing them what the author's purpose was, I felt like they had a general idea of what it meant.

On Tuesday, I took it a step further to explain to the students the three different kinds of author's purpose: to inform, persuade, entertain. First, I gave them a quick example of each. I would then give them an example like "Ok, so if I'm reading a book with facts about whales, what is the author's purpose? Why?" I repeated this with several examples until I felt the students really understood. Then, while reading our read aloud book, I stopped to ask the students the author's purpose. I would have other students repeat and re-voice what other students said, to clarify meaning. Monday, I modeled author's purpose and students had an idea of what it was. Tuesday, students and myself found the author's purpose together and among each other.

Today, we reviewed examples of informing, entertaining, and persuading. I had students guess what the author's purpose was in examples I gave them. I also had them state how they knew. Next, I  had students give me examples of each author's purpose. Since it was the third day of doing author's purpose, today the students worked individually. They read an excerpt, decided what the author's purpose was, wrote how they knew and wrote examples to prove their thinking. I feel that this was the best way to teach it, since they had the chance to experience learning about author's purpose on Monday by watching me think out loud during the story, on Tuesday by finding and talking about author's purpose among each other, and finally today, doing the assignment on their own. Each student had the correct answer about the excerpt being to entertain and was able to give a reason why. I feel as though if I would have explained the types of author's purpose on Monday, read a story and found the author's purpose, and then sent them back to their seats to work on an assignment where they had to find the author's purpose of a text, would have been overwhelming and the meaning of the author's purpose might have been lost.

I now know that giving students a gradual release of responsibility can happen over a lesson, a day, or even a week, depending on the class and how the students are responding to the information. It may not need to take a week of lessons, however the repetition of author's purpose and the gradual release of responsibility for this lesson was really beneficial for my students. :)