Miss Brown's Dilemma

[Angelina Polius]

Miss Brown is a Grade 6 Teacher who insists that most of the students in her class lack interest in Science. She believes their lack of motivation to learn is partly due to the fact that some of students are repeating grade 6. A few students are able to read independently while the majority have some decoding skills but experience difficulty understanding what they have read from their text. Miss Brown has been teaching Science using the 'telling pedagogy' or by asking students to read specific chapters from their text and answering the questions. Obviously this approach has proven to be ineffective.

What advice would you give to Miss Brown to help students become actively engaged in reading the text and helping them understand and retain the content that she is teaching?


You may not offer all your advice in just one post. Feel free to make reference to relevant literature to support your claims.

[cyan]

My advice to Miss Brown is that she should provide many opportunities for students to construct their own meaning or knowledge. According to the constructivist approach, authentic materials include; concrete materials, pictures, movies, games.

Moreover, I will also suggest that Miss Brown use multimodal texts to motivate students to create their knowledge. So apart from the prescribed textbook, miss brown should use out of school methods, such as, documentaries, news items, internet, magazines and encyclopaedia to interest students to learn content.

Furthermore, as she help students develop the skills and strategies to use these various informational texts, students will be trained to be life long learners and independent learners.

[sben]

Well my advice to Miss Brown is that, firstly, she have to understand that every student cognitive development differs. As a result, she should make her class become a constructivist classroom.

Secondly. she should provide with her students especially the struggle one's with concrete materials so that they can contruct meaning and knowledge for themselves.

Thirdly, she should try and stimulate students interest and curiosity with some motivated activities which students and make it students centered.

Finally, she should try to provide a very conducive environments so that the students will be comfortable to learn. Also, as it was mentioned that some of the students cannot read independently, I am suggesting that she should include in the activities , such as, Echo reading, for the struggling learners

[sben]

Another advice to Miss Brown, she should use another methods of assessing her students at the end of the term such as making uses of rubric, Portfolio, checklist, etc since some of the students experience difficulty understanding what they have read from their text.

[kami]

firstly Ms.Brown needs to understand that her students have different learning styles. She needs to identify the various learning styles of her students then she would be able to come up with more effective activities to grasp the students attention. Since its a science class she should have more practical classes so that students can be more involved in their learning

[Angelina Polius]

Thank you all for getting the discussion going. I agree that Ms Brown needs to make her lessons more interesting and student centered, but how can she achieve this goal? She needs practical suggestions and ideas. In your advice to Ms Brown you need to suggest different activities/strategies that she can use. Cyan and Sben suggested a few.

Provide examples to illustrate, that would be of greater help Ms Brown

[bien]

i agree with my fellow colleagues. miss brown needs to make the science lesson more interactive for the students. they hould be given the oppurtunity 2 construct their own meaning, formulate their own conclusions and generally become more invloved and responsible for their own learning. she should also focus on teaching the students how to read and get information from the textbook, as many of the students may be unfamiliar with the text structure and jargons of the textbook. if she doesnt do this, the students will become frustrated and will not grasp the content, resulting in their failure.

[joejoe]

miss brown should realize that most of her students are still learning to read and it might be very frustrating to them when it comes to reading a passage and answering the questions.
I personally do not think that the students lack of interest in science comes about because of them repeating; i think that it has a lot to do with miss Browns method of teaching science.
my advice to Miss Brown is to use an array of vocabulary strategies will teaching science, because she has to remember that a majority of her class cannot read independently and are still learning to decode words. so while teaching science she has to always remember to bring in the language arts which are vital in helping the students understand the concepts better.

she can use for example: concept maps to help students graphically organize their thoughts on a concept as well a to organize whatever they have learned from the teaching and readings. this will allow the students to also become familiar with the wording and structure of their textbooks

[jean]

well firstly, Miss Brown needs to remember that it is a science classroom. Science is a hands on, practical subject and therefore Miss Brown needs to get the students involved in more "doing" than just listening or reading. This will help the students better remember what was done in class.

As mentioned before by some of my colleagues, she should also find out the learning styles of her students, so that she would be able to cater to their styles. Also, since so many of her students have difficuty with reading and comprehension, she should utilize reading and comprehension strategies whilst teaching, to help the students develop those skills.

For example, she could use peer or guided reading so the weaker students could receive assistance. Also, comprehension strategies such as the anticipation guide, QAR and learning logs can be used to aid in and evaluate students comprehension of what was done in class.

[adessa]

Science is subject where alot of 'doing ' takes place. Miss brown has to get the students motivated by involving them in their learning.for example encourage the students to brainstorm on a topic so the can bring in their own experiences.She should also have student do the practicals in the classroom and not read about what they should do. Finally since some of the students are unable to read independently she should allow the students to work in groups and also encourage them to read aloud.

[phia]

I have to agree with adessa, science involves alot of doing or practical work. I believe that she needs to involve the students in practical work because learning is more effective when students are actively engage in the learning process. Also, i think Miss Brown needs to avoid direct instruction but instead lead the students through questions, and activities to discover, and discuss new knowledge. She should let students develop their won conclusion on the subject.

[cyan]

I also want to advise miss brown that she can use the following reading strategies to actively

engage students in using their prior knowledge. These strategies include: KWL chart,

anticipation guide, brainstorming, clustering, word map, semantic feature map and frayer

model. Miss Brown can also use some of these reading strategies during and after reading.

[millie]

I really believe that miss brown must keep in mind that she has to be the one to motivate the students. Additionally, miss Brown must stop assuming that the students are equip with the necessary reading and writing skills for reading the assign chapters, they are not. Therefore miss brown needs to begin teaching reading and writing in content areas. This could be done by introducing a variety of pre reading, during reading and after reading strategies. These strategies will help students learn key vocabulary which is necessary for understanding text.

[del]

Good Evening my fellow participants;
I must say that I agree with the advice that you all have given to Ms Brown.
My advice to Ms Brown is the students of grade 6 are tired of her lectures and her teacher centred classes. She should move away from the traditional approach and move towards the constructivist approach of teaching, simply because reading and writing has evolved.

In 1981-1989 readers were viewed as passive recipents of information that they read, however, Vacca and Vacca (1993) has modified that to reading as being a two way thing where readers are active, engaged and strategic constructors of the meaning from the text. It is a two way process.

As a result of that research Ms Brown should teach the students a repertoir of strategies, model them and give them an opportunity to practice the strategies for them to become comfortable with them.

[del]

Ms Brown should also try to make the text available to the students in many different ways; for example electronic print, newpapers and text massages. Because text is multimodal and the students need to understand that text comes in many forms. This will also motivate the students as well.

Furthermore, Ms brown needs to provide direct instrutions to the students on the different texts structures together with the graphic organizers to help the students understand the expository text better.
Another thing that she can do as well is to is to ensure that she teaches the students the vocabulary that they need in order to understand the content better. Because there is direct link between vocabulary and comprehension.

If she tries these things that I mentioned above the students are going to be independent lifelong learners