Expanding my comprehension of comprehension

I feel so many inadequacies as a new teacher. There are far too many to enumerate. I always leave my readings feeling like I'm now even more aware of what I am NOT doing to help my students, but where is the energy and the time to develop all of these strands of improvement? It often seems like some kind of voodoo is required to harness the powers of all of these strategies of assessment, classroom management, and literacy aligned with the curriculum and still be a living, breathing human being.

How will I get through this? Will I go get through this? Certainly I will but at what cost? My health, my friendships, my family relationships, my sanity, my faith in human kind, my faith in myself?

Ok, I'm kind of in a rut, and I'm at home sick with a throbbing sinus infection, so I'll try to focus on practices for expanding comprehension, as I'm called to do.

Over and over I have been told that we need not only teach our curriculum but also teach strategies for thinking through our curriculum. For example, our students do not know how to go through the internal questioning process required to determine which of the eight parts of speech this word "sleep" actually is.  I need to model for them how they should be approaching this task. "Is this word a person, place, thing, or idea? If yes, then it's a noun. Does this word show action? Is this word a form of "be"? Does this word describe something?..."  I need to give them a framework for thinking through these problems.

I've also found that my students overlook key words that clue in skilled readers to important parts of the text. "Where is our most important reason in this paragraph? .... Do you see any words or phrases that clue us in to one reason being more important than all the others? ... Yes, there it is, the phrase 'most of all.' And which reason follows that?"

At first it was a bit baffling to me that all but a few of my students did not register this type of distinction in text. All of the words seem to look the same to them, and the importance of the words they read seem to lack hierarchy. Unfortunately I feel like I have done little in these thirteen or so weeks to help them see those distinctions on their own. I continue to guide them through these questioning techniques but have done little to give them the tools to do it without my direction. I found the "List of Common Connecting Words and What They Signal" to be helpful in spurring ideas for how I could present these text clues to them.

Other resources that I found helpful were the illustration of text mapping, the opinionnaires, and the class discussion strategies. I feel like partner and group work would greatly benefit my students. My sixth-graders find it very difficult to stay quiet in the classroom, and they all want to make a comment at the same time. However, I'm still in that novice/insecure teacher mode of not feeling confident enough to take the risks that come with group work.

Let's keep this in perspective. Six months ago I knew almost nothing about teaching or managing a classroom. I've had my own classroom for four months. At this point, I may be learning more than they are. I suspect that they are learning something in spite of my learning curve.