Conversation with a 4th grade teacher regarding her philosophy in teaching literacy

For this particular entry, I decided to interview our new 4th grade teacher. She used to be one of my "parents," when I taught her son in 1st grade. I was curious to find out if there are differences between her philosophy as a parent and as an educator.

She was in our faculty lounge when I approached her for the interview. So I asked her the question, "What's your philosophy in teaching literacy?" She replied that her approach is the constructive approach in which she facilitates the learning and allows her students to construct the meaning. She provided an example for the reading and writing processes.

She said that in reading, she uses many approaches such as shared reading and independent reading. This year and this 2nd quarter, her class started to read The Treasure Island. She said that it is very important for her to read with her class to help them understand the literature better. As she reads with her class, she also makes her own predictions and lists vocabulary words that needed to be studied. She also maintains a literature journal just like everyone else. During discussions, she and her class shares predictions and studies the vocabulary words together. The 4th grade teacher stated that this process enables her to model to her class how to read.

In writing, she said that her students have already done many types of writing such as narratives, persuasive, and how-to-articles. She mentioned an example to her constructive approach to teaching literacy when the class wrote a how-to article. She said that the class wrote simple recipes. Working in pairs, the students were required to sequence the steps in order, and write the steps in order via cursive handwriting. Then, they collated their work together and published a class recipe book.

In Gibbons (2002), it has been written that "research that has come out of second language acquisition studies also suggests that interaction is a significant factor in language development" (p. 15). In the 4th grade class of the teacher that I interviewed, interaction between the teacher and the students and students and students was taking place all the time. The teacher reads with her class, shares her predictions and vocabulary words, and discusses the literature with the students. In writing, the students worked in pairs to organize the steps of a simple recipe and collaborated as a class to publish a handwritten recipe book.

In a study by Swain (1995) as quoted in Gibbons (2002), "when the context requires learners to focus on the ways they are expressing themselves, they are pushed to produce more comprehensible, coherent, and grammatically improved discourse" (p. 15). The teacher that I interviewed shared with me that the published recipe book (in handwriting of the students) was understandable and there were very limited errors  in grammar and mechanics, and the errors did not hinder the reader from understanding the recipe instructions. The reason may be because the learning for the language was in a context that the students were familiar with, and that is cooking/baking/food.

Successful learning through interaction is not a new concept. Vygotsky, the Russian psychologist and educator, maintained that "thought and language in the mind of a child grows out of interactions in others" (Reutzel and Cooter, Jr., 2004). The 4th grade teacher's philosophy in teaching literacy is not far from Vygotsky's theory and the studies mentioned here about second language acquisition. The teacher facilitates the learning of her students, and her students construct their learning by means of relationships between the teacher and their peers.

REFERENCES:
Gibbons, P. (2002). Scaffolding language scaffolding learning: Teaching second language learners in the mainstream classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Reutzel, D. R., and Jr., Cooter, R. B. (2004). Teaching children to read: Putting the pieces together (4th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.