My OTSMA Experience

I did it! I was able to complete my first over the shoulder miscue analysis (OTSMA). Even though I found it to be somewhat challenging, it was not nearly as difficult, or as time consuming, as the formal miscue analysis that I had to conduct last year. I think that teachers could always use more hours in the day for numerous tasks (teaching lessons, correcting papers, conferencing with individual students, etc.). According to the article, Inviting Reflection on Reading through Over the Shoulder Miscue Analysis by Ruth Davenport and Carol Lauritzen, “Over the Shoulder has slowed us down and encouraged us to pause within the busy life of the classroom to carefully consider what has been revealed about a child’s reading and what has occurred during the reading conference.” I believe that the OTSMA is something that I definitely see myself doing more often than a formal miscue based on the class readings and my own personal experience with it.

I decided to do my OTSMA with a third grade student in my practicum classroom. Due to the bad weather, which caused late starts and school cancellations, I was not able to meet with this student beforehand as much as I would have wanted to. As pre-service elementary teachers, however, we are taught to be flexible and to work with what you have. That is what I had to do in this situation. The reader that I met with is a female and slightly struggles with reading. She still loves to read on a daily basis for fun, however, which is something that we want to see! My student and I decided to use the chapter book that she was already reading, What a Year by Tomie dePaola, for the OTSMA. From this miscue activity alone, I was able to observe the individual student read a large chunk of her book in just one sitting.

 This experience alone has taught me a lot about the individual reader. Since the Over the Shoulder has less observational writing/data, I was able to focus my attention to where it was truly needed, the student!  During and after the reading, I effectively communicated with my participant and pinpointed what strategies she was using and things that we could work on. For instance, from this miscue analysis I learned that my student uses all three cueing systems as she reads (syntax, graphophonics and semantic) but could definitely work on her use of semantics to construct better meaning from the text. Even the student’s retelling was very important, because I was able to note what she was focusing her attention on, I noted in my recordings (template D) that I would create mini-lessons that focused on semantic cues (such as having the student fill in the appropriate words that have been omitted from a sentence).

The next time that I do a OTSMA I will make sure to gather more background information on the student that I am working with. I felt that I had to go into this meeting with little knowledge on the student that I was working with, which made the entire process that much harder. In my prior blog posts, I have said a couple of times the importance of getting to know your students as learners and individuals, so that you as a teacher can design lessons and activities that will help all of your students grow appropriately. I would also select a book that had more pictures in it. The book that my student read did not have as many illustrations that I wanted, so I wonder how much of an impact it had on my student and their reading process.