After doing my observations, I saw a lot of very interesting practices and ideas. My one big take away from these observations is the in class; group read alouds that classes do when reading the core texts of the class. I struggle and applaud this approach to teaching the required texts and overall I can see a few pros and cons to the in class reading. From talking with the teacher who I observed, I learned that most of the students in her class struggle with reading and that most read at a kindergarten to a second grade level. More than half of her freshman class has IEP’s for reading. So a way to make sure all students are understanding the book and reading is for the entire class to read the book together during class time. Each period, students choose a character to read as, and there is a narrator. The class is usually structured with a work sheet being passed out with the key exercise for the chapter. On the sheet is the Do Now, space for notes, questions to help guide reading, important quotes, and the exit slip. Because class time is around an hour, the classes I observed managed to read anywhere between ten and twenty pages. The book the classes were reading was Lord of the Flies by William Golding. The book is around two hundred pages so on average; classes will spend between two and three weeks reading the book. That’s a lot of time just for reading. There are some advantages to this method, besides that students are practicing reading and public speaking. The teacher will stop the reading and do quick check ins when it is appropriate. Usually she will ask, so what just happened? Or, what does this word mean? Or how do you think this character feels? These low level, probing questions help everyone get on the same page and understand the story better. I personally remember reading Lord of the Flies in high school and I remember having some trouble picturing certain scenes because of the language. If I had trouble and I had at least the grade level appropriate reading level, I can only imagine the difficulty someone would have reading with a very low reading level. In fact, why would a student even bother if they aren’t engaged in the text to begin with? Reading can be very hard, but it’s even harder when you are stuck reading a text that doesn’t feel relevant to you. This book is relevant in a sense that it’s about a bunch of kids who get stranded on an island and have to fend for themselves. But the language in which it is written, and the fact that all the characters are British boys from a boarding school, makes it hard for most people to relate to now a days. Reading in class with assigned parts is a way to make sure students understand what they are reading. What really sells me on this practice is the check ins. Without them, I think this would be a giant time waster because yes students are getting the story, but they aren’t getting clarity on the story. The teacher, by asking questions during reading, is also modeling great reading strategies for her students. For example, when there’s a word that isn’t very familiar, she asks them what it might mean. She has them look at the context clues, and recall prior knowledge based on what they know about the story, setting, and characters. One aspect that I struggle with is that students are getting enough chances to discuss the novel. They do check-ins, and they do stop after chapters and fill out their work sheets, but I was hoping to see more detailed discussions about deeper meanings of the story. At the end of the book, the students were guided to start thinking about these bigger “So what’s” of the book, so there is a chance that I just didn’t get to see these desired discussions. There could also be other foundational reasons why the students read in class. There could not be enough books for each student to take one home. Is this exercise differentiated? Though many of the students have IEP’s in reading, not all of them do. From my observations, I did not see a lot of differentiation for students who may be meeting or excelling in reading. I feel as though this slow paced reading could get boring for them. In order to meet all the needs of each student, I feel as though she should have some sort of differentiated work to keep her higher performing students engaged. Overall, reading in class has many pros when done correctly. It becomes a hybrid of discussion as you go reading in such a way that is slightly more geared to the actual act of reading rather than longer, more in-depth discussions. I feel as though if there were more discussions, especially after the book, then the experience is worth it. If the book isn’t unpacked than I don’t see why it’s even being read besides for practice. But out of the snapshots I have from my observations, it does seem like a tool that assists students in reading and understanding the required text.