This weeks readings about classroom discussion made me think back to my own classroom discussion experiences and how I felt about them. Firstly, in “A New View of Discussion”, “Response-Centered Talk: Windows on Children’s Thinking” and Chapter 10 of Mignano, they talked about the difference between a recitation and a discussion/response-centered talk. After reading these articles, I see a huge difference between these to terms and I have had experiences with both. As an elementary student, I feel I had more recitations about literature and less discussion but as a college student I feel that I’ve had more discussion than recitation. I think this might be because the idea of younger students being able to carry out a discussion is rather new and recitation is an assessment for comprehension, something elementary teachers really need to focus on. Overall, I do like the idea of having students discuss material rather than teacher focused recitation, but I wonder if recitation is necessary at some times? I can see that response-centered talk is useful and important in many ways, but I feel that these articles say it’s the ONLY way, which I do not agree with. I think that you need to have a bit of both in order for students to be successful in comprehending literature.
In the 1/2 classroom that I am in right now, the teacher does a lot of classroom recitation. She will read books aloud once or twice and then have students repeat happenings in the book. She gives questions and the students give responses. Sometimes she’ll have the students relate the story to their own life but this doesn’t necessarily get them to view the story in a different way or recreate thoughts about the story. I would really like to work on having a class discussion about a book and see how the students respond. They all love to talk, so I’m sure that will not be an issue!
On a different note, I enjoyed the article by Judith A. Langer called “Understanding Literature”. I felt that this article broke down the way students interact with literature very well. She created steps of learning or comprehending, which I found to be intriguing and potentially useful. I highlighted pretty much the entire article for future use! Haha. I’d like to use this article to help me with my classroom discussion in my placement class.
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2 comments:
I agree that in elementary we had more recitation and in college we do more discussion based activities. I think response-centered activities are kind of a new concept in elementary schools and although many teachers believe it is a positive method of discussion it is not always so easy to implement. I think recitation is needed at times, but it also might be nice to switch to response-centered talks sometimes and allow students to construct meaning in a different way. It is probably not possible to have response-centered talks all the time so sometimes it may be necessary to create a balance and try different methods. I also think it would be interesting to see students go through a discussion and listen to them build upon each others ideas and make sense of the text through thoughtful discussion.
I would love to see how this type of discussion would go in a 1/2 split class. It would also be nice to see how the students react to getting to lead a discussion since you said the teacher usually has recitation style instruction.
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