Responding to Needs

One thing that can be both refreshening and simultaneously exhausting about teaching is the fact that we as teachers are constantly adjusting what we are doing to meet the needs of students. Effective teaching does this. Though we are teaching the same thing year after year, if we are at the same grade level, each year the students are different and they bring their own set of strengths and needs.  That means we make adjustments to meet the needs of our current students all of the time. It can be tweaks with a lesson or designing whole lessons to address a need.

This year, based on the reading levels of many of my students, I have been using a Close Reading format with several of my reading groups. This has been fun to really dig into texts and hear how students are responding to literature. If you are interested, check out my Close Reading for Younger Students bundle on TPT. With a close read, students go back and look closely at excerpts and then answer text-based questions. While my students have been showing comprehension verbally, when we got into written responses, I noticed they struggled to write complete sentences. I realized I needed to backtrack and explicitly teach them how to answer questions in complete sentences. This was something I did often in 3rd grade, but with 2nd graders I haven't done as much because I have been focusing on decoding and different forms of responding to text.

I put together some passages for my students to read and explicitly taught them how to answer a question using a complete sentence. Then we read a short passage together and responded with complete sentences. Today, the same group will repeat the process with a different text, but with a little more independence. I noticed one student seemed to do better with responding the 2nd day we did this. When I questioned him about what was different, he said that time he paused to think before he responded. That was the first step we talked about. Many of my students were rushing to complete the response, rather than thinking it through first.  

If you want to try this lesson with your students, check it out here. This will take me 3-4 days with my reading groups. We started with just writing complete sentences for one reading group and then the next day responded to a text. I have three different reading passages for the students to use. 

Many times, we as teachers expect students to do something that they may never have been taught how to do. Or they have been taught, but need more practice to make it a habit and really use those skills and strategies. That is the heart of teaching: finding the needs, responding, assessing how the students do with interventions and then repeating. It can be exhausting at times, but can be truly rewarding.