Making Decisions for Individual Learners Within a Small-Group Setting Podcast

The podcast that I listened to was called Making Decisions for Individual Learners Within a Small-Group Setting. Within it, three women by the names of Pat Johnson, Diane Deford, and Mary Cappellini outlined important points on how to make decisions for students within a small group setting.

The first speaker, Pat Johnson, focused her discussion on the three queing systems, which include meaning, visual, and syntactic. More specifically, meaning is if the sentence makes sense, visual is if the word looks right, and syntactic is if the word sounds right. She also discussed how it is important for young readers to develop a balance of all three of these strategies, which I did not realize until she explained it further. By listening to the podcast, I was able to learn that all of these strategies are interconnected. This means that there must be a balance between all three in order to become an efficient reader. For example, if a student is only focusing on visual details, they may only try to sound words out by their letters. This, although it may work for some words, is certainly not always helpful. There are plenty of words that are impossible to sound out, just because of how the English language is.  Similarly, if a student only relies on meaning, they can also face many difficulties. They may change words in the sentence to ones that go along with the picture, but are not correct. In order to solve this, students must learn all three cueing systems and use them at the same time.

The second speaker, Diane Deford, focused her presentation on how important it is to really know the readers in the small groups you are creating. One of the main points that I learned from her is that students bring many differences to the table that teachers should be aware of before they start their small group readings. For one, students all have different interests. This is important to know when picking out what books to read with the group. If the teacher picks out a book on a topic that no one likes, they will be less motivated to try to read it. Diane also said that it is important for teachers to know their students experiential base. This is important to know because it will be easier to form group discussions and questions if they are aware of the student’s histories. Lastly, she stated that it is important to find out what strategies the students within the group can already do. This way they can focus on gaining more strategies and not just review ones they have already mastered.

The last lady to speak was Mary Cappellini, whose major focus is on English Language Learners. The main idea I learned from her is that it is very important to allow time for students to practice their skills. This time should be given for individual practice and for group activities. For ELL students especially, they need time to both read independently and talk as a group. This way, they can work on gaining the strategies needed for reading and then apply their language skills in a group discussion afterwards. Reading and language skills really go hand in hand, and students can develop both their cognition and their language simultaneously.