Response #9

This weeks readings covered two related topics, "Public Writing" and "Writing for Tests and Assessments".  Strategies for both of these are very similar, since both must conform to standardized conventions and meanings.  Although allowing students to cultivate their own forms of speech and writing is valuable, the ability to communicate in formal modern language is critical for further education or entry into the workforce.  For better or for worse, society makes judgments based on an individual's grammar and vocabulary, and there is no guarantee that students will have picked these up outside of school.  Communicating effectively, particularly in the subject field but also in a more general sense, are important skills for students.

Response #8

Every field of study has its own language and vocabulary, and many terms have different meanings in different education concepts.  This reading stressed the importance of explicitly teaching these concepts to students of the field so that they can comprehend more complex ideas.  This is a form of scaffolding, a strategy where each lesson incrementally increases the students' knowledge and prepares them for a more advanced subject in the next lesson.  Background knowledge in a subject area allows readers to better understand text and allows for easier comprehension of more complex topics, and therefore the ability to understand the meaning of common sources in the subject area is critical to learning.

Response #7

I believe the sheer diversity in public schools is one of their greatest strengths, as students, teachers, and families can be exposed to new ideas and experience new cultures to help them live in this global world.  This chapter, titled "Culturally Responsive Teaching", enumerates the importance of diversity, and includes strategies for engaging minority students in the classroom, particularly how to select texts relevant to the cultural groups in the classroom.  However, I believe that these texts must be, first and foremost, valuable sources for the subject matter.  We have all had experiences in school where the class was assigned such-and-such a book, or watched such-and-such a movie, simply because that day, week, or month had been designated for the cultural group in question, without being relevant to the class topic.  I feel that this blatant lip service is more harmful than omission, although obviously in many cases the source is important and relevant to the subject.

Response #6

In my school experience I had little need or motivation to study.  Learning came easily to me in most subjects, and class lessons were both more involving and more instructive for me than independent study.  Even in college I study irregularly, but these readings have reminded me that most of my future students will not have my same intuitive grasp of the subject matter.  This reading focused on study strategies and procedures, something I admit to have little firsthand knowledge of.  Students in my future classrooms will undoubtedly rely more on studying than I did, and so it behooves me to teach them how to do so in an effective way.

Response #5

Despite what some may think, children do not arrive at school as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge.  By middle school, and especially high school, students have already learned and experienced a great deal.  This prior knowledge can be used to help support your current lessons.  In some of my classes, I have even known more about the topic of the day than the teacher.  In the future, I'm sure some of my students will know more about something I am teaching than I do, or have connections to events or ideas not incorporated into the standard curriculum.  One effective way to engage students is to connect the current subject with something they have experienced, giving the subject meaning.  For complex topics, it is also helpful to refresh background knowledge so that new problems don't seem so overwhelming.

Response #4

Of the two chapters from Content Area Reading we read for this journal, one was primarily a series of examples of "write-to-learn" activities.  The other, however, was a detailed explanation of how to incorporate literacy learning strategies into a daily lesson.  Although a thick chapter and a slow read, it was valuable because it gave direct examples of implementation, and took a metacognitive approach to teaching.  By clarifying specific steps and procedures useful in the classroom.  Of particular note was the emphasis on making sure students knew how to use the textbook to find the information they need.  This is something that I was never explicitly taught in schools, and I would have found it very valuable.

Response #3

This week's readings were about alternate methods of using text to learn.  "Write-to-learn" activities are a good teaching construct to engage students in their own learning.  Consisting of short writing responses, thought maps, or other exercises that use writing to encourage critical thinking, "write-to-learn" can be incorporated into almost any part of a curriculum.  If collected, they can be used to get an idea of students' grasp of the subject matter, or even graded, but the primary value is in encouraging the student to actively think about the topic, which increases retention.  I think this strategy will be valuable in the future, and plan to use it in my classroom when I become a teacher.

Response #2: How can standardized testing be turned to the students' advantage?

There is an important difference between assessment and grading.  One determines the student's knowledge and progress in the given field, while the other assigns a numerical value to that student's work.  Teachers struggle to teach students valuable information and life lessons around cumbersome standardized tests that dominate the end of each semester or year of public schooling.  These tests have a purpose, to hold teachers, schools, and local governments accountable to policymakers and the public on the education of their children.  However, they hold little value as an assessment of student ability, because the sheer volume of tests that must be administered, processed, and recorded necessitates simple questions which have one correct answer.

These questions, commonly multiple-choice, true/false, and matching, are easily processed but provide only a shallow account of the student's abilities.  On the large scale, they can show which districts, schools, and sometimes classrooms are struggling, but they are to general to be good assessors of individual ability.  Teachers need to recognize this and use more detailed (and yes, more time-consuming) methods such as in-class observation, projects, and/or portfolios to provide a clearer picture of a student's ability.  Scantron sheeted-answer keys for multiple-choice tests are a supplement for direct, personal assessment, not a replacement for it.

Response #1

The first chapters of both Content Area Reading and Content Area Writing highlight the changing meaning of literacy in modern classrooms.  I have not classified sources that did not involve reading as text before, and also had not overtly thought about the difference between reading to learn and learning to read for secondary level students.  Although being more aware of these distinctions is a good thing, these readings didn't really introduce new concepts, they just gave a name to ideas I already had but didn't think about metacognitively.  For example, I always knew that interpreting alternate media sources was valuable to students, I just never classified those sources as text and the interpretation as literacy.  These terms might be a handy mind trick to remember the connections between written word, spoken word, and visuals, but they really don't change what should be done.

Introduction

This is a Class Blog for "Reading in the 5-12 Classroom", a class for my Secondary Education Major.  It will consist primarily of reader response journals for class readings.

-Brooks Flugaur-Leavitt