Blog # 8 Sheltered Instruction

 

I noted the following strategies used to shelter instruction in the videos:

v  Explicit instructions, including content and language objectives

¨      Objectives posted and discussed with students

v  Explicit teaching of reading strategies to support comprehension

¨      Visualizing

¨      Questioning

¨      Inferring

¨      Summarizing

¨      Teacher modeling of strategy use

v  Vocabulary instruction to support comprehension

¨      Vocabulary presented in context, with picture

¨      Use of synonyms

¨      Meaningful stories to connect to students’ backgrounds

v  Building background knowledge before beginning instruction

¨      Introduction and practice inferring before applying in the new text

¨      Guided questions used to focus students’ thinking

v  Hands-on activities

¨      Sticky notes used for students to apply reading strategies in text

v  Review strategies

¨      Review of past and currently taught reading strategies

¨      Opportunity to clarify misunderstandings

 

Reflection:

The teacher prepares lessons so students are able to access learning.  The teacher builds upon students’ background knowledge and previous lessons to make new learning comprehensible.  She has a method for allowing students to clarify what they do not understand.    Students seemed engaged, although one student seemed to be responding orally much more than others.  Although the importance of group work was mentioned, I did not observe it.  The During Reading video and the Post Reading video were the same, so perhaps I missed some group work occurring during reading.

Cheryl Schall