As a new teacher, it is always helpful to talk with other teachers to see what their classrooms look like, this way I can get an idea of the rights and wrongs for classroom instruction, behavior management, etc. The teacher I interviewed has been teaching for 5 years so she is a fairly new teacher, but everything that she said I could connect with. Her ideas and values in teaching seemed almost similar to my own. This interview let me see the teacher’s philosophy of teaching and break it down into individual parts. After reviewing her answers, it is easy to see that this teacher uses a constructivist approach when teaching literacy.
The constructivist theory was defined by Piaget. When writing about Piaget, Bodner explained, “Piaget’s view …show more content…
Just like the constructivist theory stated above Pardede (2013) describes the top-down approach to reading as, “a process which the reader’s background knowledge plays a key role in the creation of meaning… it is not merely a matter of decoding print to sound but also a matter of making sense of written language”. The teacher I interviewed showed that she believes in and uses this approach in her instruction almost daily by implementing all the strategies listed above. She described her strong opinions of building background knowledge several times throughout the interview, and she does so because she feels it is the key to reading comprehension and she knows that is the main goal of …show more content…
By looking at Chall’s reading stages of development her students fall between the 2nd stage and the 3rd stage of reading (Chall, 1983, p. 13-17). Some of her students are at stage two because they are still struggling with simple comprehension skills and their fluency is way below the words per minute for their suggested reading level. The students at stage 3 are reading fluently with very little decoding struggle. Also, these students are mastering the simple comprehension skills (prediction, main idea, etc.) but these students are not at stage 4 yet because their vocabulary is not as developed and their higher order comprehension skills are not as strong as needed to be at stage 4 of literacy development.
In all, I feel that this teacher has a strong constructivist approach to her literacy instruction and she has the best intentions for all of her students while teaching. I learned a lot about literacy instruction through this interview and by comparing her ideas and strategies to theories of learning. Although there is no exact theory that all teachers follow I do believe that this teacher follows a constructivist approach in her classroom and she is meeting the needs of her students by doing
The constructivist theory was defined by Piaget. When writing about Piaget, Bodner explained, “Piaget’s view …show more content…
Just like the constructivist theory stated above Pardede (2013) describes the top-down approach to reading as, “a process which the reader’s background knowledge plays a key role in the creation of meaning… it is not merely a matter of decoding print to sound but also a matter of making sense of written language”. The teacher I interviewed showed that she believes in and uses this approach in her instruction almost daily by implementing all the strategies listed above. She described her strong opinions of building background knowledge several times throughout the interview, and she does so because she feels it is the key to reading comprehension and she knows that is the main goal of …show more content…
By looking at Chall’s reading stages of development her students fall between the 2nd stage and the 3rd stage of reading (Chall, 1983, p. 13-17). Some of her students are at stage two because they are still struggling with simple comprehension skills and their fluency is way below the words per minute for their suggested reading level. The students at stage 3 are reading fluently with very little decoding struggle. Also, these students are mastering the simple comprehension skills (prediction, main idea, etc.) but these students are not at stage 4 yet because their vocabulary is not as developed and their higher order comprehension skills are not as strong as needed to be at stage 4 of literacy development.
In all, I feel that this teacher has a strong constructivist approach to her literacy instruction and she has the best intentions for all of her students while teaching. I learned a lot about literacy instruction through this interview and by comparing her ideas and strategies to theories of learning. Although there is no exact theory that all teachers follow I do believe that this teacher follows a constructivist approach in her classroom and she is meeting the needs of her students by doing