Learning Log Ch. 7

Modifications of hypothesis can occur as the teacher responds to the student's needs during instruction.

When we first started reading this text, I thought how can I change up my entire lesson plan during my lesson? Then I finished a week long substitute job in a second grade class and I realized that this is what good teachers, including myself do everyday. We figure out mid-lesson what is working and what is not and then we adjust. We assess how each student is doing and then we continue on accordingly.

During the diagnostic lesson, records of the instructional modifications are kept so that the amount and kinds of teacher intervention can be identified.

Keeping good records is very important for teachers in general but especially when it comes to lessons that are one-on-one with students. We need to be able to document and record their progress for ourselves as well as for others. We may have a student who's classroom teacher is not able to get through to them so we can look back in our notes and let the teacher know what we found that really works with this particular student. We also need to keep records to show our superiors what we have been working on with specific students. This also helps us to keep our strategies and interventions lined up with the appropriate students.

The teacher told him to read to the end of the sentence.

Sometimes I find myself guilty of just telling students a word that they are stuck while reading. I do not feel that I will do that anymore after taking this class but sometimes I just felt like I did not have adequate information to help them. I would tell to sound it out, or look at the pictures but that was about the extent of what I could think to tell them. Telling them to read to the end of the sentence never crossed my mind but I don't know why. I think sometimes things are so obvious that if you do not look closely enough at it, you miss it. It seemed common sense to me to read until the end of the sentence but I did not send that message through to my students.

If a high degree of task modification is required, a less difficult text or a different technique should be selected.

I thought that this statement was very important because I think sometimes we just feel the text is too difficult for a student. Maybe if we just approached it with a different type of intervention, the student would be able to read and comprehend the more difficult text. If we had just moved them to an easier text, the student would not have made the progress that they had. They may have ended up a level behind where they could have been.

As in this case, the diagnostic teacher may combine reading techniques to evaluate whether the new combination results in greater reading growth. If it does, she uses the combined or piggyback, approach rather than either technique alone.

Sometimes two are better than one. This goes with anything in life,not just reading techniques. Using more than one technique sometimes allows teachers to make more progress with a student than if they just used one method. Sometimes the student may not have made any progress with just one or the other technique but also it may have help to cut down on the time it takes a student to make progress.