Seminar

Phonemic Awareness and RTI: Change HOW You Teach as much as WHAT You Teach

On October 7th, 2010 I went to a seminar in Bloomington, MN. The presenter was Colleen E. Hill, CCC-SLP. The seminar was six hours long and information about specific phonemic awareness therapy materials and strategies were discussed, as well as research based comprehension strategies.

Six Evidence-based Comprehension Strategies that Work with RTI are...

1. COMPARE & CONTRAST

~How is a bunch of bananas like a group of students?

2. INFERENCES

~Background knowledge, discussion

3. PREDICTING

~Student invests, activates interest & memory

4. SYNTHESIS/CREATING

~How is Rush Limbaugh similar to Barack Obama?

5. DISCUSSION of TEXT MEANING and INTERPRETATION

6. ANSWERING DEEP EXPLANATORY QUESTIONS

~At all grade levels---80% of teachers' 400 daily questions are knowledge level (Bloom's Pyramid). Students not using higher order/critical thinking skills.

 

I feel as thought I already knew the "strategies" the presenter discussed towards the end of the seminar. I also felt the six she discussed were not exactly strategies of teaching, but that they were the topic areas of what to teach about under the umbrella of comprehension.

The presenter did give numerous therapy activities (mostly worksheets or handouts) on the topics of; Proverbs, Same or Different Sentence Meaning?, Compare and Contrast, Word Chains, Word Finders, Expressive Language, Verb Forms, Sentence or Fragment?, Noun or Verb?, and Word Scramblers. Personally, I enjoyed receiving activity ideas for therapy, but felt that work sheets were not the only way to go about teaching comprehension strategies and phonemic awareness. There are some great computer programs out there, which can be very fun and beneficial in keep a student motivated. I feel as though it is good to break up phonemic awareness practice with another therapy activity--besides always hearing the SLP's voice when listening to phoneme sounds produced by only the SLP. Computer games or programs often offer different voice choices and allow the students to manipulate the pictures or objects on the screen which really changes how the student is learning about phonemic awareness. When a child can manipulate pictures or objects they are using their whole body to learn, not just their mouth.

Overall, I would not recommend this seminar to Speech-Language Pathologists. I would recommend it to classroom teachers because there was a lot of great information on the importance of phonemic awareness and how it relates to phonics and RTI. I also felt the comprehension portion of the seminar could benefit classroom teachers, as well as special education teachers.