Miscue learning

     My OTSMA went very well overall. I performed the miscue on a girl in my first grade classroom that I visit on a daily basis for practicum. After the miscue I learned that she is also an ELL student, which gave some perspective for the data that I found during the process. My student has a solid understanding of the importance of making meaning out of reading which is a major focus in Miller's text and many of the course readings we have read thus far.

     Through the post-miscue conversation I learned more about my reader's vocabulary. In discussion of "drawer" I learned that the barrier that held my reader back from this word was pronunciation, not the basic knowledge of the word. To address this I would focus more time on the correct pronunciations of words, based on this miscue I could tell my reader has a sufficient vocabulary for the grade she is in, however fine tuning her spoken language will benefit her greatly.

     As for my teacher toolkit I think the main lesson I took away from this experience was to have a back up plan. In the instance where she self corrected a miscue I really wanted to teach her about, I had to quickly implement my plan B by turning her attention to why she thinks readers might make that miscue. This turned out to be a productive conversation, but if I had not been prepared with a back up plan I would have simply breezed over this teachable moment and moved on.

     I also learned not to under estimate your readers. Thinking I knew my readers ability I initially flipped through the book and thought that she would miscue every other word! To my surprise she only miscued 13% of the text (which came out to only 13 words total), and proved me wrong! I embrace a lot of the positive and optimistic outlooks on student reading as seen in Miller and Tovani's books so when she proved me wrong I thought how could I have been so pessimistic about her ability? However during my initial look at the book I took for granted the context clues and illustrations that proved to help out my reader significantly. I also think I was almost hoping for some miscues to work with just because I had heard horror stories about classmates doing miscues and having excellent readers who wouldn't make a single miscue.

     In reflection of me being nervous there wouldn't be any miscues I thought about the readings for this course and Literacy Learning & Teaching I & II. After all of these readings they all still mention that all readers from the best to worst will make miscues eventually, the quality of miscues will vary of course, showing me that I shouldn't be nervous of that for future miscues. If a reader is proficient I could even read certain sentences and have a discussion about how that sentence could use different words and still maintain the same meaning.

     Keeping in mind all I have learned (in this class and previous ones) about miscues I think they are something I would like to have in my classroom. Just as a checkpoint for all the readers in my class to see what meanings they are making, what types of miscues they are making, and to discuss their individual reading process. The beautiful thing is that I think this could be meshed with reading conferences and flow very smoothly, killing two birds with one stone!