As I observed my
classroom this week, I noticed many students failing to participate in whole
class activities. As a part of our
reading curriculum, we implement a program called Reading In Motion. RIM gives a set of sight words that students
should say and sound out to a particular beat on a CD. Most students enjoy saying and sounding out
the words, but some students do not participate. My mentor typically says the word and the
beginning sound of the word first so that students can hear how to correctly
pronounce the words and sounds. Students
can simply repeat my mentor if they cannot yet make the connection between the
word she points to and the word she is saying.
The students who do not participate seem to be the ones who need the
most practice with decoding words and recognizing sounds of letters. I try to get the students to participate and
they usually will repeat my mentor for a few words until I stop looking at
them. The students will then stop saying
the words because nobody is looking at them.
It's important
that these students practice the words so that they can become better readers
and develop a sense of fluency. The
students that don't participate are the low level readers. I understand that the students may not say
the words because they don't recognize them, but they can simply listen to my
mentor and repeat what she says. I'm not
sure if they're embarrassed that they don't recognize the words or if they just
don't want to participate to the song in a whole group setting. I'm concerned about these students because of
the low levels of reading that they are at.
I want them to succeed in reading, so I want them to practice the sight
words. I'm going to try to focus on one
student per day that does not participate and find out why they don't say the
words. It seems that this is a case of students
not wanting to participate in the whole group.
At times it comes off as not wanting to learn, since their eyes just
wander around the room, but I'm sure that these first graders want to learn so
I want to figure out their reasoning.
I am impressed by your "action research" approach to the phenomenon you have noticed. Indeed, much of (if not 100%) of becoming a better teacher involves noticing things and then trying to get to root of the problem.
ReplyDeleteIt might be hard to have these students actually articulate why they are reluctant to participate (even if they know, they may not feel comfortable telling you; or, they may not have enough self-awareness to know why they are so reluctant). You might try experimenting with different types of instruction; perhaps they do feel uncomfortable because of their lack of familiarity with the material; thus, as with math, when the class is focused on having "knowledge" of "the right answer", some students may shut down. You might experiment with other activities where students can talk to each other in ways that they feel comfortable. From there, you can try to incorporate the vocabulary you are trying to teach (e.g., by having a fluent student paired up with non-fluent partner; or by having two non-native speakers define the term on their own, and then to have them compare their description with other students who are comfortable with the "new" term).