The final Post

Buehl, D. (n.d.). Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines (p. 263-279) Question: How can generic literacy practices be modified to meet the demands of readers and writers in disciplinary contexts? We have discussed the importance of self-learning through reading complex texts. Now we must learn how to modify generic literacy practices to help our students find success in our classrooms. How can we extend our students knowledge beyond the classroom environment? We need to be able to show them that the skills they learn in the classroom are a stepping stone for self-development. Instructional practices are ever changing we need to change along with them to become quality educators. It’s my opinion that generic strategies are a blue print not a recipe to be followed blindly by the instructor. We should take an idea and then change it to fit our individual classroom situations. I try to look at them as a prototype and thus they are only a starting point to jump off from. If I have learned anything throughout this class it’s that one shoe size doesn’t fit everyone, so one generic literacy practice shouldn’t be used by all teachers universally. Use the support staff that is provided to you at the school you work at. A master teacher once told me that no one should feel that sharing lesson plans is a bad thing because no one should own a quality lesson plan. Education is something to be shared and grown upon. I like to think of this as insider information. I have stated how advantageous modeling “what and how” regarding classroom instruction is. The “why” is also vital to achieving reading and writing literacy in our classrooms. We need to embed eminence literacy practices into our yearly plans to ensure we address reading and writing skills in our nontraditional classroom fields of study. This will give our students the best chance to live a knowledge base life full of self-discovery and curiosity that could lead to the next evolution of their being. Remember that the more self-knowledge we seek out as teachers the more knowledge we pass down to our students. This is the privilege and the responsibility we all sign up for when we decide to become an educator. This will be my last blog post, I want to wish everyone well and I will pray that we impact numerous students in a positive way during our teaching careers. Thank you, and good bye!!!!!!

Post #9

Buehl, D. (n.d.). Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines (p. 216-263) Question: How Can instruction scaffold the reading of complex disciplinary texts? What will our students do when they have to read a complex text and can’t avoid reading very word to try and find the deeper understanding on their own? Take a moment to ponder this question and how you attacked a similar task. Did you apply any of the information we talked about in earlier posts regarding the book suggestions? Your answer might be yes, and you could have done these helpful suggestions without even knowing it. This is because we learn to read in a formal setting in school, then we take it home and we naturally read more exploratory. We call this studying. A reformulation of study skills is basically any strategies used under the umbrella of self-learning including reading and writing. What makes ones persons study habits different from and others? Well part of it has to do with how we identify the habits of our mind. Are you the type of person who wants to learn new information when you find something to be interesting to you? Or are you the type of person who is good with only the information that is presented to you? How you answer these question might give you some insight to how, or to what level your study skill might be at. As a teacher we hope to motivate our students to hunger for more information beyond the information we present to them in the classroom. Here are some personality variables that affect performance, including the following: (p.220) • Resisting impulsivity • Managing stress and frustration • Handling failure • Showing persistence • Maintaining a positive outlook • Collaborating effectively • Delaying gratification These listed traits are linked to internal drive. Unfortunately too many students today show little in the area of internal drive. How can we as teachers show our students the importance of good study-skills and how they are associated to our individual success in the real world? We can start by teaching our students to make the connections from their previous knowledge to the new material they are receiving. Also we can teach our students to look for implications of things that are not directly stated to them. There are more suggestions out there it’s up to the instructor to find them and match them to the students’ personalities. On my next post we will look at customizing literacy practices.

Post #8

Buehl, D. (n.d.). Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines (p. 163-216)

The question: How can teachers mentor students as disciplinary reader, writers and thinkers?

In this part of the book it talks about how we can be a better mentor to our student regarding reading and writing. It gives a great example involving a sports star and a classical musician. The sport star was Albert Pujols, and the musician was Joshua Bell. I’m a coach of baseball team, so of course I knew immediately who Albert was and what he did for a living. On the other hand I had no idea who Mr. Bell was. It turns out they are both the leaders in their field both in terms of popularity and accomplishments. So why am I telling you all of this? Well it has to do with an insider’s view of them. Because if you are instead in either baseball or music you might have already thought of deeper knowledge about them and the industry they belong to. This is a nice example of how two different people with two different interests would probably have to different insider view points and have two different types of selective hearing/understanding, or questioning about them. The two super stars basically act as mentors to the people who look up to them. They give us something to think about and something to strive for in the field we are fascinated about or are involved with. They make us want to learn new information about them and their trade. Now how can we do the same thing with our students in terms of them becoming voracious for self-knowledge in the subject areas we teach? Well, we can start with making disciplinary reading less like doing, work and more self-engaging. Thus far in this book we have learned about a variety of ways to approach this. In this chapter it says that the critical facet of mentoring readers in reading of complex texts is to nurture the realization that reading is inquiry, and thus read to find out rather than reading to get it done. The hard part is fostering this type of culture in our classrooms. How we question our students also is vital to their learning experience. Here are a few examples of good questions that are open-ended:

·         What does it mean to be fit?

·         Are there rules for art?

·         What is the impact of altering a recipe?

·         What makes a mathematical argument valid?

·         What makes business practices ethical?

These are good questions because they should incite complex answers which in turn can lead to more insight in the subject area. Modeling self-questioning should also be a high priority when teaching our students. This is the key for mentoring disciplinary readers no matter what subject we teach. We need to teach our students that it’s also acceptable to question the author. These where some of the more thought provoking takeaways I wanted to share with you in this post. Till next time, thanks.

Post #7

Buehl, D. (n.d.). Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines (p. 120-162)

Frontloading Instruction That Activates and Builds Academic Knowledge

The question: “What instructional practices should precede the reading of complex disciplinary texts?”(p.120)

As teachers we should know by now how important it is to lecture and assign reading assignments to our students no matter the subject area we teach in. It should also be noted that it is important to teach our student the background (lecture) of our subject matter i.e., when and how it started, where it’s has been, and where it’s going in the future etc. If students lack a solid background of knowledge in the subject matter they will be less likely to build that knowledge through reading assignments. What is the balance of lecture and self-reading 50-50, 40-60? I don’t have the answer I think there is no one right answer. However we do need to strike a balance between the two. Frontloading works like this: Assumed knowledge, Frontloading, to New Knowledge (Disciplinary Reading). When we teach we should not assume that our students already have a solid background in our subject matter. Take the time to review the basic concepts of what you are going to cover over the course. Frontloading is also the responsibility of the students as well. “The good reader knows to relate what is being read to prior knowledge, and he or she is aware that good readers predict what might be in upcoming text and relate ideas encountered in the text to their prior knowledge.”(p.123)  This quote embodies what we should strive for when regarding our students. We can lead our students to share their previous background knowledge with a simple question like this, PE: Something I know about physical fitness is? This gives the educator a starting point. There are many different ways to find out where our students are in terms of their background knowledge in our subject matter. Brainstorming, confirming, in inquiring, revising, resolving, extending, and thought-provoking statements are but a few of the things that are under the umbrella of frontloading instruction. Putting all this together will come over time as we spend more time in the classroom with our students. Frontloading is worth the time and effort and is overlooked too often in my opinion. “Reading often and reading well are prerequisites for achievements in areas far beyond literature and literacy alone” – National Endowment for the Arts, 2007, p.91    

Post # 6

Buehl, D. (n.d.). Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines (p. 72-121)

Teaching to the match: bridging academic knowledge gaps. “Question: How do academic knowledge gaps affect the reading of disciplinary texts? “ (p.72)

What is the necessary reader background knowledge; for the reader to find success in what they are trying to comprehend? I guess that is considered by many to be the hardest question to answer because we all come from different cultural backgrounds. When an author writes his texts he can’t possibly make it universally understandable to all readers. I mean if we weren’t raised in this country and had to read text and answer questions about the USA in a history class, without the popper background knowledge we could be lost. The language variables alone could be hard to overcome, and vocabulary is a whole other issue someone from another country would have to figure out. To facilitate an understanding when we read text is complicated to say the least. Who are the right authors for our students? Well if I was teaching a classroom full of females’ students I wouldn’t just choose male authors with male messages, I would have to consider bringing in other influences to inspire my students learning outcomes. I would have to play the matching game. When the instructor does a good job at this game the reader’s comprehension will come naturally. If I personally read a book about coaching strategies I get it right off the bat. If I read a different book about war strategies my background knowledge plays in and I understand that the also because they’re so closely related in nature. On the other hand if I read a book on nuclear physics I would be hopeless lost and more than likely give up reading that book. Knowing the schema, which we rely on when reading for comprehension is necessary to working fluently and efficiently. Gee says something to this effect in our previous discussions. I will end this post with something to contemplate over; why is important to consider how our students came to know what they know?            

Post #5

                     Buehl, D. (n.d.). Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines (p. 31-46)

To continue from my last post, I wanted to start off with discussing these subject matters; text relationships, richness of detail, text structure, vocabulary density, and author purpose when considering teaching comprehension with complex texts. Let’s start with text relationships this is when we determine the relationships between ideas in informational texts or between characters in literary fiction that become less basic for us to understand. If a student can’t make the necessary links between what they are reading they will get blogged down in the process. The richness of detail is when the texts become more complex and or in depth in terms of background and its structure it will automatically become richer with detail. If the student is doesn’t have the strong foundation of reading they will more than likely get blogged down here as well. Text structure is the way the ideas/information is presented to the reader and how it is organized.  Students need to be able to develop a sense of how to make their way through the text by themselves to continue reading without being given the directions by the author. Vocabulary Density simply means the increased text complexity due to the challenging vocabulary that is presented to the reader by the author. This can actually help draw the reader into a more engaged state when reading text in my opinion. “Finally, complex texts may mandate that readers infer the author’s purpose and intentions for writing the text.”(pg.41) This will be more clear to the reader when the texts is less complex and will be become harder for the reader to decode when the text gets more complex. By utilizing the steps that were listed in my last post it will help in this facet of reading. Being able to read complex text proficiently will determine how far the student will be able to continue their education beyond grade school. In my next post we will look at teaching to the match: bridging academic knowledge gaps.   

Post #4

Buehl, D. (n.d.). Developing Readers in the Academic Disciplines (p. 31-46)

The question “What does it mean to read, write, and think through a disciplinary lens?”

This chapter covers teaching comprehension with complex texts, but if we think about it we arguably, have to comprehend something almost every minute of our lives. What will I wear today if it’s cold outside, when the light turns green that means? When we read it’s no different we constantly need to assess the text in order to make sense of what we are reading and thus be able to move forward in our journey of discovery. We don’t merely want to be able to read the words off the pages flawlessly, but to make a judgement of what we are digesting. We look at such a problem earlier in this class with the Critique of Mosaic of Thought Excerpt, if you can recall the boy who read the words off the pages with little effort but had problems with his comprehensions. Deciding on our understanding of what we have just read is a vital part of being able to grow as a person. We want our students to engage in what we assign them to read not to just read to get the work done.  I think comprehension determines this outcome for many students. Pseudoreading this is when a student reads, but not for the sake of comprehension.  Skimming for answer is another technique that is sometimes used by students. There are seven fundamental comprehension processes that can help us become better with comprehension.

1.      Make connections to prior knowledge

2.      Generate questions when you read

3.      Visualize and create sensory mental images

4.      Make inferences

5.      Determine importance

6.      Synthesize

7.      Monitor reading and apply fix-up strategies

We need to remember not to just assign reading and to assess performance, but rather to teach comprehension skills. I will continue on this subject matter in my next post.