SMART Environments that Support Monitoring, Reflection, and Revision

Recently, we had the opportunity to participate in a focus group with fifth-and sixth-grade teachers from a school in our local area. One of the goals of the meeting was to discuss their perceptions concerning the learning needs of their students. The teachers were confident that their students had the potential to become excellent learners, but they were dismayed that so many of them entered the fifth and sixth grades unprepared to learn effectively. Following are excerpts of the comments made by teachers: My students can memorize facts, but they can't tell you why these facts are significant ... they haven't had to take in facts and try to assimilate or synthesize and spit it back out into some form that has meaning. They are not used to having to attach meaning to what they are doing. (Tracie Pennington, fifth-grade teacher) It seems if I have students in a whole group and I say, "Oh gosh, what do we need to know about to find the answer to this question?" And they can say, "We would need to know X, Y, or Z." And then I'll say, "Let's look right in this section here. Does anybody spot something that might be related?" If I am prompting, they'll do a better job. But if they are working independently, they won't pull it out. You have to prompt so much to get them to do it. (Suzanne Cassel, fifth-grade teacher) After my students print out their first drafts, they are supposed to go proofread. They'll go read, read, read, "Sounds good to me." Or if I get peers to read each other's, it's like they say to each other, "Okay, I'll say yours is okay if you'll say mine's okay." (Babs Bertotti, fifth-grade teacher)