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.