Teacher Vignettes & Reflections
Jean Samuel: "Before I became a CORI teacher, I posed a lot of questions myself and had students look for the answers in order to get the information from the text. Now, I try not to do that anymore. I want to allow my students to come up with their own questions and I see that they are much more authentic. Some of the questions are much deeper than I would have expected. I have seen such a shift when they are posing their own questions. For example, one very interesting question that came up when we were observing the peacock feathers was, "How do the peacocks move their tail feathers up and down when they have so many feathers?" I responded that we would have to read and discover the answer to the question. I didn't answer the question like I used to. Rather, I wrote the question on the board. We had so many great questions and I started writing them as a PowerPoint presentation. The students kept coming back to their questions during their research. It was exciting to them because they were their questions, not mine."
Teacher Vignette:
High Scaffolding in Penni Stockman's Lesson
It is the sixth week of school and the fourth week of a CORI unit for third-grade students who have been studying the conceptual theme, "Birds Around the World," in Penni Stockman's classroom. Her students are slightly below-average readers who are only occasionally motivated to read. They need her high scaffold for motivation. During the weeks before this lesson on graphic organizing, students learned a number of other reading strategies, including activating prior knowledge, questioning, searching for information, and summarizing. In addition, students participated in numerous real-world observations and experiences, including bird watching, owl pellet dissecting, examining bird feathers, walking in local habitats to find evidence of bird life, and feeding birds. Read More
