The Value of Making Mistakes

Your setting up for your students to begin reading, you look around the room and you see wandering eyes, eyes glued to the page, and eyes moving quickly throughout the text.  You think to yourself that you aren't satisfied, how do I know that these students are taking these words seriously and comprehending them in a way that is making them better readers.  Panic sets in, there is no time to find a way to hear all of these readers read all of their books, but how will I know that they are using the correct strategies when they don't understand a word or sentence?  Teachers are not robots, they can't be everywhere at the same time, they can't individually work with each student every single day, but there are ways to keep records and reminders of how students are doing as readers, in a quick and efficient manner.  I was lucky enough to conduct my own "Over The Shoulder Miscue Analysis", or OTSMA, on a student in my first grade practicum class.  I not only was given the opportunity to get to know this reader more, but I was able to see how she interpreted a text, strategies she used when reading and specific miscues that were occurring in her reading.  This miscue analysis provided me with a large amount of data that allowed me to establish strategies and assessments, for the near future, in just only 15 minutes.  We understand that there are only around 7 hours in a school day, not to mention the amount of time that is spent eating, playing, and all the other subjects that we are expected to cover in a school day, every single day.  OTSMA allows us to capture a sense of a student's ability to read in just a few pages.

While conducting my own analysis, it allowed me to research specifics on different types of miscues that may occur with not only this student, but other students in my room.  These different types of miscues include: graphophonic, syntactic and semantic.  The options that I have provided allow me to see what type of reading strategies she is using when dissecting words that she is not familiar with.  During the process of her reading aloud to me, I had an easy time with locating the miscues and writing them down, and once I noticed a pattern in her reading, I stopped and created my own mini lesson with different strategies that would help with the specific miscues that she was making.  Some examples of what I had taught her were breaking down the word to find familiar words within the larger word, using context clues and pictures to establish a word that makes sense in the sentence, or sounding out the entire word syllable by syllable.  These different mini lessons were used based on previous strategies I was provided with during my other work with students.  These mini lessons provided a good fit and good timing for my student, because I noticed that she self corrected more than before and she was making fewer miscues while using the strategies that I provided for her.  The portion of this part of the process was successful for me and I feel as if I got to know her better as a reader and as a student.

Once we had established her reading and focused on some specific miscues, I struggled with the retelling portion of the OTSMA.  I didn't establish enough background knowledge of the book prior to her reading aloud to me.  I was not able to provide her with enough detailed questions or challenge her with the context that she read as a whole.  This is where it is important to prepare when you want to listen to specific students and create a schedule in which you can be prepared for and challenge your students comprehension of the story.  This also created a great opportunity for me to realize if certain miscues helped to change her comprehension of the entire story.  Retelling is one of the most important aspects of the miscue analysis because you get to see if the mistakes that they are making are seriously affecting their interpretation as a whole.  While conducting the unaided and aided retelling I had full understanding that she understood the main points of the passage, and also the details when prompted by me.  I have realized that being prepared will not only help me while she is reading the story, so I don't need to pay attention to specifics in the story and I can focus on their miscues and strategies, but it also allows me to be able to challenge my students and see where their full potential of comprehension and reading can go.

Overall I believe that my OTSMA went well and I was able to learn more about one of my students and interpret her miscues.  I was amazed at how well the mini lessons went and her quick understanding of how to use these strategies while she is reading anything.  This is something that will quickly become apart of my classroom and my goal will be to conduct the miscue analysis 3 times within a semester and chart their growth as readers.