10.24.13 DA - Gee Units 1 and 2

10.24.13 Gee Units 1 and 2


Gee irritates me, though I am not sure why.   I find myself questioning everything he is saying.  Is it because you don't like Gee?  Is it because others go on and on and on about how wonderful Gee is?  I get like this about books and sports teams. I don't want to read you or cheer for you when people tell me I should.  I don't know....

On page 3, I disagreed.  He is talking about incorrect verb usage - when children are using a "rule" and overgeneralizing.  He states - "Whey they say things like "go-ed" instead of "went", they often do not pay attention to correction even if they get it from adults."  In these kinds of situations, what tends to happen is that the adult naturally supplies the correct very form, but doesn't correct. 

Child - "Daddy goed to the store?"
Adult - "Yes, Daddy went to the store"

Over time, the child begins to use the "correct" form of the verb because she WAS paying attention.  Why else would you ever change or grow and how else would change or growth happen? 

We do this all the time in Reading Recovery lessons.  We make the "correction" not seem like a correction, but like a natural language interaction.  There are several instances in my video where the little guy I am working with uses "incorrect" grammar.  After reading a book, he looks at me and asks, "How I did?".  I ask him, "How do you think you did?"  I accept his message. And then answer him in grammatically correct language.  I wasn't aware of it as it was happening.  I wasn't thinking, "I need to correct that"...we were simply two people communicating and using the language reserves we have to send a message.  I got his, and he got mine.  As he then offered the evaluation "Good".  

On page 19, I disagreed.  He says, "Thus we have to reconstruct the context as far as we can".  Not really.  In DP, we didn't attend to the context, and there was plenty to be found in the interactions as they took place.

On page 20.  I agreed.  He is discussing the share time example and talks about how teachers are not always aware of what they are doing.  They have a perception that things are going a certain way, and that perception is not always right.   That has been my experience in working with teachers for the past 15 years.  And, I think that is why RR training has been so important for me and for the teachers I work with.  Really being reflective and examining and analyzing what we are saying and how it impacts students is central to our practice.  Using the one way glass, video taping lessons, having conversations about specific actions between students and teachers bring us closer to an idea of "what happened".  Now, we have talked about how we can watch video tape and have different versions of truth....I agree.  And I also think we can get closer to the essence of an experience with reflection.  We can all take different things away, but reflection matters and can make a difference for teachers.   Gee says, "We can discover new things about ourselves when others study us or we consciously reflect, after action, on what we have said and done." 

I thought a lot of what he said about context is covered in the idea of "next turn proof".   Different labels for the same concept?

This made me think of RR training (p.47) - "When people communicate, they are trying to do things with each utterance and with a whole set of utterances taken together.  They have local goals or purposes for each utterance and larger, more global goals for a whole set of connected utterances."
In training sessions, our immediate (or local) goal is to make sense of what is happening.  We are observing and talking together to try to build some kind of theory about the reader and teacher we are watching.  We don't come in with a particular agenda...we are watching the live interaction and trying to make sense of it.  Our larger goal is to impact the student's process positively.  We come together to problem solve for that particular child and teacher.  To shift things so that they child accelerates more quickly (I guess we do have an agenda...).  The even larger goals is to refine teacher decision making.  By watching so many lessons and talking through so many lessons, we are logging our "expert hours" and becoming better at zeroing in on difficulties students face in reading so that we can do something different.  I am thinking of Gladwells's book Blink - he talks about needing 10,000 hours to become expert at something.  As a community, we come together in this way to improve our practice.

Last comment - the breaking down of language structures made me think about how difficult texts can be for students, not necessarily because of the individual words but because of the text structures..."What shall we do?" is a very tricky phrase for a 6 year old to read, even though the words 'what, we, do" are easy words.  As he discussed each of the different kinds of phrases, I was reminded of the impact of language structure on students who speak a language that is different from "book language" - whether the student actually speaks a different language (Spanish) or speaks with a dialect (southern Appalachian).  The little guy in my video is a prime example.  He is as far away from "book language" as a non-native speaker of English.

Verdict is still out on Gee...