each in their own way

From: Mike Cole (mcole@weber.ucsd.edu)
Date: Sat Oct 28 2000 - 10:38:48 PDT


Phillip-- I have still not progress enough through the thicket of email
to get to the our web page and read sequentially through the discussion,
but (a recurring habit), a passage in your note caught my eye:

 i am always astonished to thus far no one has
demonstrated the same way of learning as another - in fact, especially
with children for whom learning to read is a supremely difficult task, if
i don't attend to what they are teaching me about how they are learning to
read, then i find myself at a loss as to what to teach them.

this mirrors my experience with teaching reading to kids who don't come
by it in the course of prior instruction. It is this problem which was
a major motive behind the development of Question-asking-reading, the
peg griffing-inspired generalization of brown and palincsar reciprocal
reading. The idea was to create a medium which was simultaneously effective
in providing indvidual diagnoses of kids (mis/understandings) of what
reading was and to pinpoint the problem AND AT THE SAME TIME an activity
that allowed those kids to re-mediate their understandings. There is
an externalization/internalization (is is it the other way around? :-))
dynamic at work, but getting the kids coordinated with the activity
of interpreting the world through print requires more than that idea
to become an instrument of teaching.
mike



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