Chapter 4

“How do I know unless I already know?”

I thought chapter 4 was really interesting because it talked a lot about comprehension and the actual process of teaching comprehension. Beers’ example of Al’s confusion over identifying the main ideas and his lack of comprehension helped me to understand just how difficult teaching comprehension can be. Even though she had tried to explain the assignment to Al, he just didn’t understand what she was telling him. She was telling him what to do; instead, she later said what she needed to do was show him.

In the first transcript, I really liked how Beers made a point to ask Kate what her students learned that would help them with comprehension in other stories. A lot of things build on comprehension and I think it’s really important for students to have a firm grasp on comprehension. I liked how transcript three and four showed examples of teaching comprehension strategies explicitly. I’ve never had a teacher use comprehensive strategies like that and I was a little confused at first as to how that would work. It made much more sense after reading about them used in a classroom.