7. How does the teacher gradually release responsibility? How did today’s lesson promote student independence?
The teacher uses P. David Pearson’s strategy of gradually releasing responsibility by modeling, guiding their practice, independent practice with feedback from the teacher, and application of the strategy completely independent of the teacher.
Today they were working on their Thanksgiving reader’s theater that they are going to do as a play. This class has done reader’s theater before so they were familiar with the concept. They were paired up with a partner and given a part in the play such as: Massassoit, John Carver, Squanto, pilgrims, etc. The teacher told each group who they were and told them to highlight their part. She demonstrated what it meant to highlight and asked the children how will highlighting help us. The children all gave good reasons why highlighting was a good idea and how it would be helpful for them when practicing for and performing their play. She then modeled how to appropriately highlight their script and talked about how to do it neatly. The children were then to find a place in the room with their partner to highlight and go over their parts together.
Even in this simple task of highlighting and practicing their parts the teacher gradually released the responsibility upon the children. She talked about what they were going to do, she modeled the steps that needed to be taken, she let them go with their partner and begin the task while she watched to make sure they were doing it correctly, then she let the students do it by themselves and practice their parts completely independent from her. In her everyday tasks Mrs. Afeld encourages students to think independently and learn ways to help themselves.
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