Field Experience Reflection

For my field experience, I chose to teach the CATCH reading/annotating demo that was listed from day 2 of my five day unit plan. As the lesson is flexible and can be used with any reading material, this was the best fit at this point in the school year. The lesson was viewed as something of a refresher or a different take on a way to annotate reading as many of the students had been through similar lessons at various stages through the school year.

I began my lesson by opening a discussion with the class on what would be good ways of breaking down a difficult text. As a history class, this class was very familiar with the concept of approaching a historical document, a newspaper article or a particularly wordy textbook that could give anyone problems so I asked what would be some good things to do to start off your reading. I was standing at the board ready to write out the techniques or strategies that were given. One of the students raised their hand and suggested that I should “do soapstone like (teacher) has us do.” Although I had observed this classroom previously and interacted with these students, I asked them to explain it to me like I had never heard of it before. The student recited the meaning of the saying, Subject, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Subject and Tone. As he went through each, I wrote it on the board next to my section. I thanked the student for his input but suggested that we were going to discuss a different method that the class could use in conjunction with the method he had described.

I wrote out the word CATCH on the board and offered up the option for anyone to guess at what I might mean by this. No one had any correct guesses so I continued on and wrote out what each part of catch stood for and gave a brief description of what that section meant. I explained that this method is a great way of tackling any sort of text and is actually a good way to approach filing out their soapstone prompts. In order to identify the different parts of soapstone, students need to be able to work through the parts of the text that were unfamiliar and bring out the important parts. I gestured over to the wall where last month’s projects were hung detailing issues related to the Iroquois Confederacy. I reminded students that if you were unsure on who the Iroquois were or what a confederacy was, that could be a big stumbling point that they would have before they were able to pull the main idea out of the text. Sure, they could hazard a guess that the confederacy was the subject for their soapstone, but if you didn’t know what that was, could you possibly misinterpret the purpose? This question did raise some eyebrows and prompted some nods from around the class.

Now that students had an idea of what CATCH reading was and how to use it, I had students pass around a short article that the teacher had in mind for their lesson for the next day. The article itself was not connected to my initial five day unit plan but as I said, this one section is flexible and accommodates moving around the curriculum well. I asked the class to begin reading through the article using CATCH reading. While the students were working on that, I moved between different desk clusters, asking students what they thought of the method and to explain to me what they were marking up. Many of the students had taken out additional sheets of paper that they had written out blanks to fill for a soapstone but they were using the CATCH methods to mark up the article itself. When questioned, these students remarked that they have been using the soapstone for every reading in the class so this was a way of getting ahead of the classwork by doing it early. 

After about fifteen minutes of moving through the class and getting feedback from the different desk clusters it was time to begin winding down the class as the bell was going to ring soon. The teacher had given the go-ahead for me to assign the exit slip of the day so I asked students to complete my post-assessment from the lesson plan which was to write out why is CATCH reading helpful and do they expect to use the skill outside of this class. In reviewing the slips that I collected, I found many of the responses were comically short. Several of the slips had a single sentence saying something along the lines of “CATCH is helpful because it helps me read and I can use it in any class.” 

Although I enjoyed the lesson as a whole, I think there were several aspects that I would tweak if I were to use it again in the future. Approaching the lesson from the aspect of finding evidence while teaching CATCH reading feels like pulling students in different directions at the same time. CATCH reading seems more of a mini-lesson to address general reading skills while something like soapstone is more suited to the type of skill my lesson plan is looking to build or reinforce. My post-assessment was lacking in defined expectations and the answers that I received showcased that. The students were in good spirits with me and I think they were excited to take a break from their routine but as a part of my future toolbox, this lesson needs some fine-tuning.