What are the three most important learnings you are taking away from this course? Think about the new understandings you have, the new ways of thinking about the course topics, ideas you wouldn't have had unless you had been in this course, make a connection to your tech interview - get at the big shifts and/or the more subtle shifts. Refer to the readings, conversations, and activities that help lead you to your learnings. Why do these new learnings matter and how have they impacted your identity as a content area literacy teacher? Post you blog as a comment below.
Before this course, I usually connected literacy with ELA but after disscussing the assigned readings and participating in class discussions it’s much more. As Zwiers says “We are all language teachers”. Each content teacher has their own definition of literacy. I believe as this point in my teaching world, creativity and comprehension has a big role in literacy in math and science. Literacy is being able to share and communicate, being able to visualize images/graphs/data/informational text, interpret them, create off them but also give meaning verbally. So often we see the math being done, we do the math but I need my students to show understanding math and in science be able to use learn information make discoveries and ask new questions. I’m quoting our classmate Meagan , “taking what you've learned in class and using it to help you better understand the world around you.”
ReplyDeleteFrom Kathleen Cullen’s article “Culturally Responsive Disciplinary Literacy Strategies Instruction she quotes “Despite evidence that teaching students to use these more generalizable comprehension strategies is beneficial, many content area teachers have been reluctant to teach the strategies or even cue students to use them (O’Brien, Stewart, & Moje, 1995)”. I’ve learn to not be afraid to try reading or writing strategies because we all learning a language weather it's the language of math and the language of a scientist. The miscue allowed me to take a look into my students perception on reading aloud and comprehension in math. What is going through their minds and what leads them to certain conclusions.
I really enjoy taking the time to try out some literacy strategy activities such as, Word splash, using persuasive writing through RAFT, saving the last word in class before testing them out in our classrooms. If I didn’t take this class I probably would not really think too much about what type of literacy I do in my class. There are aspects I already do like going over content vocabulary but not how I am using them after the lesson. The lesson plan was a way for me to think about what happens next after learning new vocabulary. The photovoice was great too since we were able to use a different form a media to share our views on literacy and what we can do to enhance our teaching.
The digital manifesto was an example that literacy is moving in the 21st century. With my tech interview with my librarian I asked her how her role changed as a librarian of the 21st century. She tells me is not just “stamping books out” but teaching and showing different forms of literacy, introducing students to graphic novels and audio. She’s working on a possible playlist of audiobooks and podcast to her students. A lot of time and planning goes into finding digital items that work best in her classroom. She also mentioned that she wants to encourage new ways to share and create, so last year she started makerspace as a part of her rotating schedule. Marker space is an outlet to let students explore their creativity (not to just make slime).
I want to continue to use what I’ve this semester to grow upon my definition of literacy and encourage my student to use language better through images, text, and other forms a media.
This course has taught me so much about literacy across content areas. There was so much valuable information, it's hard to decide what's been most important! I would say that understanding literacy across content areas is definitely new and useful information for me. I had never given any thought to the idea that literacy - besides just knowing how to read informational texts - could be carried into the science classroom. After reading and discussing Zwiers, I know that literacy is multifaceted and complex. Literacy has to do with speaking, listening, reading, and writing, but there are also processes that help to make people literate in a subject. For example, math literacy includes the ability to understand graphs and models, as well as using them to demonstrate an idea. In science, literacy means understanding graphics, math, and complex language that happens in a variety of tenses and voices. It's a lot of work for students to build literacy in so many ways throughout their day!
ReplyDeleteA big thing that stuck out to me through our discussions and readings was the importance of questioning. Questioning is crucial to gaining literacy in any content area. Zwiers, as well as Fisher & Frey, both discuss questioning at length. Fisher & Frey say that high quality questions are a great way to check for student understanding and an excellent way to push their thinking forward. I look forward to using different questioning techniques discussed in Fisher & Frey with my students.
The presentation we participated in was really helpful in molding the way I teach vocabulary - I'm trying a few new approaches this year thanks to our discussion! Vocabulary is so tricky, especially when working with ELLs, because not only are they trying to learn the Tier 3 subject-specific words, but they are also trying to analyze many Tier 2 words that we use as if they are common knowledge. Tools like graphic organizers and activities like word sorts are really helpful in helping students grasp new terms, but they also have to apply the words in different contexts and revisit the term often in order to truly master it.
Some readings and processes that I learned from this course are: 1)Zwiers academic Variation, across the content specifically Sentence Starters 2) Miscue Analysis and 3) Fisher & Frey’s Questioning strategies. I was aware of making connections across the contents and I am familiar with the older term---interdisciplinary. However, Zwiers did an outstanding job providing examples of what making content connections looks like as well as creating a resource to reference when creating and planning lessons. Another aspect that I view differently is questioning. I have been taught to create questions that will help students dig deeper by using the DOK wheel but I never thought about it in the context for reading comprehension. For example, in SQ3R, part of the technique is to take the titles and subtitles and make them into questions, this guides one’s reading, ensures comprehension and helps the reader to stay focused. Miscue analysis is something I generally associate with the reading specialist. Although I have had plenty of practice with miscues, it did not dawn on me that I could use them to inform my own instruction. I would say there is going to be a big shift in my facilitation because I have been practicing these things but only on a superficial level, now things will be planned systemically.
ReplyDeleteSome new ways of thinking as a result of this course came from some activities that we did in class. The Tea Party activity requires the students to really investigate terms or ideas in an interactive way. Save the last word was also another activity that is good because it forces everyone to listen and provides an opportunity for everyone to get an equal say. Both of these activities we practiced in class allowing us to see the real life application.
I loved creating the digital manifesto because it made me think about what my expectations for digital literacy, learning, exposure and how they all relate to education. As I look back on the meeting and conversations I had with the media arts person, I think about how my ideas in the manifesto I created connect to hers. She has a passion to make media arts relatable and easily accessible to everyone but also spends time on the safeguards of the web. She also believes that it is a powerful tool but not the only way to do things.
These new learnings matter because they will directly and positively impact my teaching style. These new ideas are just more ways to help me perfect my craft and help me think like a literacy teacher; figuring out strategies to help struggling readers and challenge strong readers as I plan and teach my lessons.
To me literacy means using what you know to build new understanding and connections within and across content areas. That definition would have been very different prior to this course. Literacy is complex and does not only include reading and comprehension, but also speaking, writing, listening, and connecting ideas. Not only did we define literacy but we also applied that definition and expanded our understanding with several different activities. Some activities and strategies that really stuck out to me as ones I could use in my own classroom were the Word Splash and Tea Party.
ReplyDeleteI especially enjoyed our work with tier 2 vocabulary words. Since we learned about the benefits for our students and strategies to include them in instruction, I have began introducing them into my classroom during lessons. I have tried to make sure if I use a tier 2 word that I think my students may be unfamiliar with I will define and explain the meaning to them before moving along through the material. These words are so important in developing our students’ literacy across content areas. I would not have been as aware of this significance if it hadn’t been for our study of these words and how we can implement them in our instruction.
Another big take away for me was the use of questioning in my instruction. “Classrooms should include ample experiences in responding to questions that require students to analyze information, identify problems, develop original solutions and formulate opinions. These are also the more difficult questions for teachers to develop.” (Fisher and Frey, chapter 5) In my video analysis I observed my own teaching and found that I commonly ask questions that are more knowledge and comprehension questions. This made me more aware of the need to plan my questioning to give my students the opportunity to think deeper and develop their mathematical thinking and problem-solving skills.
This course was not easy for me. I had trouble defining literacy and applying it to me and my own math classroom. Having been a middle school teacher for a short time, I did not find it easy writing a digital literacy manifesto. I found that the tech interview with my Special Ed resource teacher was very helpful for me to understand how we can guide our students toward becoming responsible and productive digital citizens. Over the course of MLED 530 I was able to expand my knowledge and thinking about literacy across content areas. I appreciate all of my new learnings and I know they will help me continue to grow as an educator.