GLT Reflection

After completing my guided lead teaching I felt that the unit went extremely well overall. I felt that for the most part my students did learn a great deal about what it means to visualize and how it can help them as readers. When I think specifically about the three consecutive lessons that I did, I feel that even in that short period of time my students were grasping what visualizing was. The first three lessons of my unit focused on the introduction of visualization and how to use this strategy. Further into the unit is when I got into teaching how and why visualization an help us as readers, but the first two lessons focused on what it was and how I used it as an example. Students would try to do what I did when I modeled visualizing for them during think aloud, however for the most part it was trial and error. The students were just getting a feel for what it was on a basic level. Because I began this unit on a Wednesday, I had them do this trial and error for about two days- just feeling visualization out. And that Friday I had my students illustrate their visualization from our poem of the week. Students are used to doing an activity like this illustration activity. Students usually illustrate the poem of the week on Fridays, so it worked perfect to incorporate something they do regularly into the visualization unit- however usually it is just okay think about the poem and draw a picture. This time it was more of an assessment for me to see if they understood the concept of reading the words, imagining what that would look like for them, specifically and then illustrating it on paper. Having them illustrate gave me a hardcopy of an example of them visualizing based on the introduction of this unit.

Overall I felt that the majority of my students did learn visualization as a comprehension skill. I felt that I had a couple students who struggled with the difference between making text to self-connections and visualizing. I had numerous students give examples of their visualizations as related them to something they see themselves doing like the person in the book was doing. This is more of a text to self-connection than visualization. I tried to reiterate and re teach that a visualization is illustrating the book in your mind, so instead of seeing yourself doing what the character is doing—you should actually create a picture in your mind of the actual character doing what you are reading about, and visualizing what that character looks like in your mind.

Based on my students’ interpretations of the poetry from their visualization illustrations I found that many students actually really tried to illustrate based on the exact text. For example, the poem read “Come said the wind to the leaves one day,” I had students who drew actual wind and dialogue saying, “wind” including quotation marks. I felt that for the students who did that it was so easy to interpret that they understood what visualization was. I also had quite a range between students who illustrated that way and students who kind of drew leaves of all different shapes, colors and sizes—in non-traditional leaf or outdoor colors, and initially I felt these students maybe did not understand visualization. But I think I changed my interpretation because I feel that I taught visualization in a very subjective way that because we all have our own knowledge and experiences our visualization are based on OUR minds, and OUR schema. I made a point to teach visualization in this way so that students would get a chance to express their imagination, and see that because we are all different we all have a different schema, therefore we all have different visualizations. So initially I found that I was only thinking some of my students properly visualized the poem, but then I realized that between first and second graders visualization illustrations can embody a wide range of drawings. So instead of looking for specific things from the text, I just looked to see that the drawings were obviously coming from the poem. Meaning- I looked for leaves, and some sort of sky or wind in the pictures. This was only the first hardcopy type of assessment I had collected, so I was solely looking to see how students had begun to interpret visualizing and the idea behind it.

I do not think I am going to re teach a lot of this information, because by the end of the unit I felt that the students really had a good grasp of the material. I know that visualization comes up again each year in the making meaning curriculum—but I felt that we spent enough time on it where my students were benefiting from it. If I were to teach these lessons again- instead of having the poem illustration on the first Friday I would have done something a little more specific. I would have had the words from the poem, or another poem separated onto a blank piece of paper. I would have sentence by sentence and then a space to illustrate their visualization for that specific sentence, I did this later in my unit for a book we read that I only showed some of the pictures and we illustrated our visualizations of the pages I did not show- this was a really great lesson that helped me to really assess how they were understanding visualization. If I were to do these lessons again, after the initial introduction lessons on days 1 and 2, I would do the poem on day 3 but just having it separated so that I could really have students focus on reading a certain line and then visualizing that certain line. I think this change would help the students to better understand why visualizing helps us to understand our reading. This would allow students to practice reading a sentence and then visualizing that sentence, this practice would show them how they are really paying attention to one specific part of the text to better understand.