Kayla Burdette

CIRG 653

Spring 2019

Module 4 Discussion Board

In chapter 3 of By Different Paths to Common Outcomes, Clay goes into great detail

about awareness. Awareness is the ability “to attend to something, act upon it, and work with

it,” (Clay, 38). Awareness allows teachers to interact with their students to foster literacy

learning. Through the course of the chapter, Clay discusses many different types of awareness

that students develop. In this discussion, I am going to talk about two situations in which I have

observed students becoming aware.

In the first situation I will describe, the preschool-aged children I worked with at a

daycare while I was in college. Each morning, I would read a story to the students who were 4

and 5 years old. I always made sure to select books that they would be interested in and were

developmentally appropriate. I enjoyed doing this because I knew some children may not have

ever been read to or had the opportunity to look at a book. I always started the red aloud by

explaining that books are for reading and are not a toy. I would talk about the front cover and

ask the children what they thought the story was going to be about. I asked a simple question

and let the children talk about what they were thinking. As I read, I always paused to let the

children look at the pictures and talk about what they were seeing. I would also ask students if

they thought the book was real or make believe. Before long, the children were guiding the

read aloud more than I was. They caught on to the process of how a story goes. Often times, I

would read a story again a couple week after the first read. I did this so students would
understand more about how a story goes. I observed that after I started reading to the children

more, they wanted to tell stories to each other. Students had gained a better awareness of how

a story goes and were able to add more detail to their stories.

Just like the interaction in chapter 3 between Mark and his father, I asked the questions

to guide the children, but let the children think about what they were hearing and seeing in the

story. In chapter 3, Clay adds the findings of Yopp and Singer. They stated that teachers working

with young students should ”phase out” and students should “phase in” as they begin to

become more aware and ready to develop tasks on their own (Clay, 68). In the situation that I

described, it started out with the teacher leading the conversation and read aloud to the

students having more of voice in the conversation. In the observation, the students were

attending to the story and taking in information by listening to the story, seeing the words and

pictures. While attending to the story, students were required to act up on it by answering

questions I posed, and worked with it by retelling the story. They also acted upon the

awareness after the story because they were retelling me the story and coming up with their

own stories.

In the second situation I will describe, the students in my first grade class developed a

sense of awareness when it came to writing and how it relate to reading. The students came

into the school year being able to write their names and simple cvc words, as well as some sight

words such as I, am, at, and see. Very early on in the school year, students would practice

writing their spelling words and words that contained a certain skill, such as short a or short e

words. However, they wouldn’t always recognize the word when they read a story. A couple of

the students would recognize that a word was a sight word or a spelling word, but most of
them did not have this awareness. As time went on, the students would quickly point out that a

word they read was a sight word or spelling word. Once I included guided writing in our guided

reading groups, I saw a huge change. I spent two days on a story and on the second day of the

same book, I would have students write about what they read. I started out with a dictated

sentence and then demanded more as time went on. Students were quickly able to write their

own sentences, based on a prompt. Students realized that I was asking them to write about

what they were reading. I required students to think about what they just read and write a

sentence about something they learned from the story or something they remembered about

the story.

This situation required a lot of teaher-student interaction. Because I incorporated

writing into guided reading, I was able to work with small groups of students. I was also able to

make sure students were listening and attending to what we were doing in the group more

adequately. I was guiding students through the process, but still allowing them to do some

thinking, which led to the action of students actually writing about what they read more

independently. By doing this in different small groups, I was able to tailor the interaction and

instruction to the different reading abilities of my students. Each group was at a different level

and some required more guidance than others. Although all of the students in my class were

around the same age, they had very different ability levels. In this observation, students

attended to the story that they were reading, acting upon it by thinking upon the story, and

acting by writing about what they had just read.

 Clay also discussed the Vygotskyan approach through scaffolding. In both of the

observations I included, I used the scaffolding approach. I scaffolded by asking the students

questions, but shifted the responsibility onto the students.

References

Clay, M. M. (2014). By different paths to common outcomes: Literacy teaching and

learning. Aukland, New Zealand: Global Education Systems (GES).