Module 7: Slideshow Presentation Reflections

Perspectives of the Learning Process

This brief slideshow states the importance of talking to the student to get a clear view of what skills they believe they need to learn as a reader and writer. This can be done informally through conversation; a quick conversation will help you get an idea of how the student thinks they are doing and where they think they need help. This will help the student to set individual goals and take ownership of their learning. It is also extremely important for you to talk to the parent and teacher (if that is not you). Knowing how the child reacts to work at home and school and their learning behavior will help to paint the full picture of the student’s motivation and ability level. It also helps to notice any discrepancies between different environments.

Comprehension Evidence and Strategies

This presentation illustrates reading comprehension and explains what the difficulties students have and the related problems with comprehension of different types of texts look like. This text details every aspect reading comprehension and the possible problems with that area may look like, offering strategies for each possible issue. This presentation gives a lot of information but the most interesting to me is the bullet point that mentioned that reading comprehension involves more than 30 cognitive processes. I find this fascinating because of the unique needs of my students and their highly varied cognitive abilities and how it affects their comprehension (which is what I am completing my action research on).  For each of the slides presented, I just kept thinking of a particular student with that specific difficulty.

Classroom Instruction that Works: Nine Best Practices to Improve Student Achievement

This slideshow presentation details Marzano’s nine best practices that affect student achievement and strategies that can be applied to support each. Because I enjoy learning about how the brain processes information, my favorite of the practices mentioned is finding similarities and differences; showing students the connections between new concepts and ideas and what they already know will greatly increase the likelihood of new information being moved to long term memory. The strategy recommended is the Most Important Point strategy, this asks the students to identify what is most important and make a connection to prior knowledge. Finding similarities and differences in new concepts or information can increase student achievement by 45%. This point really stood out for me because we work on a lot of concept building in my classroom. The presentation goes on to introduce 8 best practices and outline their impact on student learning and recommend strategies for each.