Subjects Matter
(Page 146) “…as we look at our textbook, we need to be asking: what are the really big ideas here, where are the places to slow down, dig in, and “uncover” ideas, not just cover them?”
As I listened to Erin Gruwell (the teacher behind the book and movie Freedom Writers) during the keynote this morning, she reminded us that any teacher that really made a difference with students didn’t just teach the content, she taught the student. One of the keys in teaching the student is relating the material his/her life. If we can take the big ideas from our textbook and relate them to the students’ lives and how they impact them, then the concepts will stick. On the other hand, if we just plow through the book for the sake of getting through it, have we really taught the students anything they’ll remember after leaving our classrooms? Think back to your high school classes…what are the lessons you most remember? Were they the ones where you had to answer the questions at the end of the chapter? Or were they the ones were the teacher made them relevant to you?
NCTE Principles of Adolescent Literacy Reform
(Page 8) “Traditionally teacher preparation programs include little (if any) course work in literacy, so it is possible for teachers to be identified as highly-qualified even though they were not prepared to address the challenges of adolescent literacy.”
I think we all had that one obligatory education course in reading in order to get our teaching certificates. Because I was in a K-12 special ed program, most of the content was geared toward elementary. There wasn’t much of a focus on the high school student, the kids I was planning to teach. I, in all of my ignorance, thought that if the student got to high school, he had to be able to say the words in front of him and if he could say the words, then he could understand what he was reading. After all, if I told him something, he could understand it, so what was the difference??? (Yes, you regular ed folks are reading correctly—most special ed programs only require that one reading course as well—there are no secrets that we were taught and you weren’t.) But the problem isn’t just with special education students. All of us are struggling readers at some point. Think about it: can you pick up ANY text and understand it? I can get through a young adult novel in a breeze, but I’m a struggling reader when it comes to tax documents and technical manuals. That’s because I’ve never had an expert in those fields teach me how to read the material. The skills I use in reading a novel are not the same ones I need when completing my tax return. Because we are the experts in our content areas, we are the experts in reading our particular contents. We just have to build our toolbox of strategies, so we know how to teach our students how to read our content.
(Page 146) “…as we look at our textbook, we need to be asking: what are the really big ideas here, where are the places to slow down, dig in, and “uncover” ideas, not just cover them?”
As I listened to Erin Gruwell (the teacher behind the book and movie Freedom Writers) during the keynote this morning, she reminded us that any teacher that really made a difference with students didn’t just teach the content, she taught the student. One of the keys in teaching the student is relating the material his/her life. If we can take the big ideas from our textbook and relate them to the students’ lives and how they impact them, then the concepts will stick. On the other hand, if we just plow through the book for the sake of getting through it, have we really taught the students anything they’ll remember after leaving our classrooms? Think back to your high school classes…what are the lessons you most remember? Were they the ones where you had to answer the questions at the end of the chapter? Or were they the ones were the teacher made them relevant to you?
NCTE Principles of Adolescent Literacy Reform
(Page 8) “Traditionally teacher preparation programs include little (if any) course work in literacy, so it is possible for teachers to be identified as highly-qualified even though they were not prepared to address the challenges of adolescent literacy.”
I think we all had that one obligatory education course in reading in order to get our teaching certificates. Because I was in a K-12 special ed program, most of the content was geared toward elementary. There wasn’t much of a focus on the high school student, the kids I was planning to teach. I, in all of my ignorance, thought that if the student got to high school, he had to be able to say the words in front of him and if he could say the words, then he could understand what he was reading. After all, if I told him something, he could understand it, so what was the difference??? (Yes, you regular ed folks are reading correctly—most special ed programs only require that one reading course as well—there are no secrets that we were taught and you weren’t.) But the problem isn’t just with special education students. All of us are struggling readers at some point. Think about it: can you pick up ANY text and understand it? I can get through a young adult novel in a breeze, but I’m a struggling reader when it comes to tax documents and technical manuals. That’s because I’ve never had an expert in those fields teach me how to read the material. The skills I use in reading a novel are not the same ones I need when completing my tax return. Because we are the experts in our content areas, we are the experts in reading our particular contents. We just have to build our toolbox of strategies, so we know how to teach our students how to read our content.
12 comments:
Subjects Matter Chapter Six
“No matter what learning theory you subscribe to…all agree on one thing: to remember ideas, learners must act upon them.” I agree wholeheartedly with what Daniels, Zemelman, and Diane have said! When I think back to my high school career, even all the way back to elementary school, not a lick of what I remember is from reading through a textbook and answering guided reading questions. It’s from the hands-on activities and the lively discussions we had. It’s from the cooperative learning and from teaching each other. The lessons I remember are those in which I was engaged. I have to remember how it must be the same for my students. It is not all about “covering the material.” If the students are completing assignments but not understanding them, what good am I doing as their teacher?
What I always enjoy most about Subject Matters is how there are detailed instructions of how to implement Best Practice in my classroom. I used written conversation with my students last year, but I haven’t even taken the time to use it yet this year! I was thinking that this would be a good thing to do on Monday in response to “Act Two” of Romeo and Juliet.
“NCTE Principles of Adolescent Literacy Reform”
What caught my attention the most through this reading was the responsibility we teachers must take for bettering ourselves for the sake of our students. We have to be willing to participate in professional development, and hopefully, just as studies show, our students will benefit in turn. As I was reading through this packet, I thought about how we at Airport are working our hardest to better ourselves. We encourage professional development, we plan and work together, and we even have a literacy coach (wink, wink)! I love many things about the freshman program that we’ve started this year. One of my favorite things about it, though, is working with a team of teachers. This is something NCTE emphasized. It’s vital that teachers work together to make a difference in their students’ lives. This is the first time I’ve felt I have known a group of students so well. I truly believe that together, as a community of professional educators, we can and will make a difference in our students’ lives.
Ruth Anne--have you seen/read Street Love by Walter Dean Myers? It an Urban Romeo and Juliet--and it's written in poetry!
NCTE Principles of Adolescent Literacy Reform:
I was thinking the same things as Ruth Anne while I was reading this article: At Airport, we are participating in professional development, we are collaborating with other freshman program teachers, and we are working with a literacy coach to practice new ideas and strategies with support. This is the way that we will �help our students to use written information to make informed decisions and be prepared to participate effectively in a democratic society.�
I like the use of the word �under-literate�. I can see all too clearly that this is indeed the case. Our students can read and answer questions about the material, but they cannot analyze, synthesize, organize, or evaluate. My daughter is a perfect example. She is an avid reader and did well in high school. She is now a freshman at Carolina and says that she is working harder than she has ever worked in her life! She claims that her teachers in college expect so much more from her than her former high school teachers did. I suspect that that they do not expect more literacy skills; they simply expect more complex literacy skills. We need to teach students how to perform those higher level, complex skills. And we need to teach all students, not only the college-bound, or our nation will suffer.
Subjects Matter � Chapter 6
Again, very practical ideas form this chapter. I especially like the �filter� idea for deciding what is truly important from a textbook (pg 146-147). As I read the jigsawing section, I thought of a lady I worked with last year. She was running out of time for a particular novel (had to be finished by the end of the quarter!) so she decided to jigsaw it. It was a mystery novel. She assigned the culminating chapter to a group made up entirely of students with reading disabilities. It took a bit of convincing on my part to have her include those three students into other groups and have the whole class read the concluding chapter so that everyone could enjoy the ending to the mystery. Reminds me of the saying, �all things in moderation�. I think we need to be cognizant of which strategies to use when.
In reading this week assignment, I have serious concerns about our future leadership and marketplace. The article states, “The Alliance for Excellent Education (AEE) points to 8.7 million secondary school students – that is 1 in 4 - who are unable to read and comprehend the material in their textbooks.” In addition it emphasized that “without a highly literate pool of job applicants, employers are forced to look off- shore for well- trained and highly literate workers from other countries. These statistics are alarming for the future generation of this nation and because of this we can no longer remain complacent about making improvements in our schools and society.
As educators, parents, politicians, and administrators we must work as a team (together everyone achieves more) to develop programs to best benefit each individual student. We must reach children as early as we can, educate ourselves through professional development and apply what we learn to make the improvements needed to have success in our schools and country. I feel we as educators know what must be done at times but we feel boxed in a corner because of the politics, not enough funding, discipline issues, and parents who are not parenting. We get frustrated because of the many obstacles that we have to encounter. Even though, we must say to ourselves that we have to begin now in meeting as many of these challenges and continue to try to make a difference.
The chapter about textbooks really had some good ideas about how to use a textbook. I definitely liked the activity we did in class. I think students are overwhelmed when they open a textbook. There is so much going on. If you have them break down the book and see what the different parts are and what all the colors mean the textbook will not look so overwhelming when they look at it. When you give them something to do in the textbook they will know where to go and will not feel lost.
I also liked the activity where you give the students vocabulary words and have them group the words based on similarities. At first they have to use prior knowledge and cannot use any references. Once they are finished you let each group tell how they grouped the words. This of course leads to reasoning and questioning. Once groups finished then they use their textbook to answer their questions. This gives them a reason to look in their textbook and they aren’t just reading from the beginning of the chapter to the end of the chapter. They have a purpose.
I think adding a literacy coach to schools was a great idea. I know when I went through my Masters in Teaching I had one class that dealt with reading. This of course was not enough to teach reading or improve reading skills in my science classes. Reading has always been left up to the English teacher and they cannot do it alone. Every teacher needs to help their students become more effective readers. Of course how the can do this with only having one class? I think that is why having literacy coaches is a good idea. There is somebody that the teacher can go to for ideas and help. The literacy coach can even come into the classroom to assist the teacher. I think that is great. I wish I had the opportunity of being able to use a literacy coach when I was a teacher.
The classes that are being offered now since literacy coaches have been put in place are wonderful and are very resourceful. I think every teacher should be required to take one of the classes.
Once again, I'm very impressed with the Subjects Matter book. Even on a topic of little excitement, using textbooks, there is a lot of helpful information written in an easy-to-understand format. The different ways to use textbooks are going to be helpful to me, especially since I have a not-so-good textbook for 10th grade English. The only activity they have listed that I've actually used before is the jigsawing. I almost always use that when covering historical information about a literary period. It is very quick and effective. I remember a professor in college introducing the SQ3R to us, but I never used it and forgot about it, honestly. I'm not sure how effective it would be for an English textbook, but it sounds great for history and science, especially.
The most empowering statement I found in this chapter was “to remember ideas, learners must act on them.” Reflecting on how fast teachers must go through material in order to meet today’s standards, it’s easy to see how only a low percentage of students understand a field well enough to do higher level thinking and operating. I’d much rather teach 12 things in depth that I know my students will walk away with a deep understanding of than pass by a thousand things that barely touch the surface. Yes, big ideas can still be vast and hard to narrow, but for the most part, I think teachers have a gist of what are the most important topics. It’s more important as far as the state tests and in life that students be able to reason with what they have learned than just recall what they were taught. I’ve yet to try jigsawing, but I see it as something that can work very well with my small group of students. Math has always been my toughest subject and had it been explained to me as another form of a reading textbook, I might have approached it differently. SQ3R is a great strategy and it really makes the students understand in a more complete manner.
I think one of the reasons it’s easier for elementary school teachers to have that professional community is because it’s a smaller group of people. In an elementary school, you almost have to actively try not to know the other teachers in your school or who you can turn to for advice and supplies in different subjects and areas. At the high school level, there are so many people and different specialties, it’s not the same. NCTE does offer great suggestions to change the approach and things that are not working for adolescent literature right now. Motivation becomes harder and harder as children become teenagers and it’s our job to figure out if students are really not motivated because they aren’t wanting to try or if it’s because they cannot do the task and are just too insecure to ask for help. If reading is the central component to everything, than why is it that we only have to take one “reading” course to be in our profession? Creating a professional community and linking our development and instruction are crucial to making better learning environments and opportunities for our students. The more comfortable we are, the more comfortable they will be.
I’m not sure that I have a whole lot to say about our reading for this week. I thought some of the ideas were really helpful and I plan to use at least one of them next year when we get new textbooks. I do remember learning the SQ3R strategy. – I don’t know I could recite for you now, or anything…
I will answer your question about lessons I remember, because I think they’re very fun. The first came from my calculus class, believe it or not. Basically, the principle was that, in order to find the volume of oddly shaped objects, you would just add together the area of all the cross sections. And to demonstrate this, she drew a shape on the positive side of the x/y axis. Then, she talked about what would happen, if you rotated that shape 360 degrees around the x axis, turning it into a 3d object. Then, she pulls out a food slicer. We were all so confused. My teacher had brought in different items of food – squash, summer sausages, a spool of cheese, etc, and ranch dressing. With each object, she would draw the 2d shape, have us guess the 3d shape, and then cut several “cross-sections” for us to visualize what we were doing and how we were doing it. It was a delicious day.
The other class was from my Teacher Cadet’s class and that was when we had our disabilities. My calculus teacher refused to allow me to do anything that would interfere with my learning, so I couldn’t be blind or deaf. (My TC teacher would otherwise have made me blind.) But I had to chew on three crackers for almost the entire day before I could say anything. I had never spoken so little in my life!! My friends who were blind were disoriented and my friends who were deaf had a really hard time paying attention because they were so confused!
But you’re right. None of the lessons I remember and enjoyed really had anything to do with the textbook.
I especially liked the Guide-o-Rama. I like how it helps students without telling them specifically what to look for and allows you a chance to almost communicate one on one with each student.
I do have one question. What do you do for jigsaw activities when you don’t have an even number of people – let’s say you have 19 students. How do you divide them into groups?
The National Council of Teachers of English booklet took me forever to read. It did open my eyes to see just how important things like our class are. It was also encouraging to see that Airport is taking steps in the right direction.
The article also inspired a question: what do we do if we, as teachers, feel that our reading level is not as high as it should be? I ask this question in all honesty, because I feel like the slowest reader in the world. I know that doesn’t mean everything, but it does mean something. I also know that in college, I hated my literature classes because I had such a hard time recognizing symbolism or digging out the hidden meaning, etc. It’s another reason I hate poetry! Obviously, I should be reading more, but how worried should I be that my own struggles with reading will affect my students?
I think all the activities are grat and in theory they inspire us all to be creative in using them in our classroom; but, then reality sets in and you are told to cover over 400 years of history in 7 days and then what do you do? Out goes the creativity in the classroom and you get down to teaching the content in the textbook because after all isn't that what they are going to test the students on in the End of Course Exam? I do integrate current news into the curriculum and make it relevant to the students lives. I love to read old articles I have saved from newpapers to them and ask them when they think it was written and when they guess yesterday or today I can sy no, we still have the same problems as we did back then. Has anything really changed or do we still rehash the same old age problems? Yes, we all use textbooks as a source BUT we also pepper our content with many outside sources. Newspaper, CNN news, the internet, TV specials, the History channel, books, ETV, the Discovery channel, etc. I have a variety of sources I pull from and I never throw anything away. I really can't remember have a teacher or a class that did anything outside the box. I think that is why I found school to be boring. The only classes I had that I enjoyed were PE and Home Ec. I think because we actually got to do hands on activities instead of being talked to. You know straight lecture, no discussion, no question-answer sessions, no group work, no creative posters, research,etc. Students today do not realize how great they have it in a classroom in which a teacher is crative and teaches with powerpoint, read alouds, primary source documents, films, etc. We have so many things we can use in our classrooms amd boy am I thankful because I even though I'm the teacher, can become just as bored as the students.
Subjects Matter
I never knew some teachers actually divide the page numbers of a textbook by the number of days of school. I don't even remember using a textbook in high school except as a reference guide or as a supplement. I don't even think I carried my books back and forth to class. I'm pretty sure I kept them at home or in the classroom. My teachers always gave us pages and pages of notes (I guess we made our own textbook). But come to think of it, I still have a lot of my notebooks from these classes. I still use my Chemistry 1 and Chemistry AP notebooks for reference when teaching.
I never took a class in literacy in college either. I never gave a thought to the fact that reading a novel is different than reading a textbook. I just thought you could read or you couldn't. Now, I feel like I need to teach my students how to differentiate between the different kinds of text.
This year I have had my students answer guided reading questions that act as their notes for the unit. However, they skim the pages looking for the exact words from the question in a sentence in the book. I try to tell them that they have to read the passages in order to answer the questions. They want the questions and answers to be recall of what is printed on the page. I want my students to take time to read the text and answer the questions critically.
I really liked the other activities mentioned in the chapter. I would like to use the activity for vocabulary words. My students would really benefit from familiarizing themselves with the vocabulary before reading a passage in my class. I also like the guide-o-rama strategy, but I think it would take a lot of time to develop these guides.
Subjects Matter Chapter 6
I find that as I’m teaching and realizing the semester is running low on time, I start thinking about everything I wanted to do this semester and whether or not I’m going to get it covered. How am I going to cover the things towards the end of the semester that I really enjoy when I’m so far from the curriculum for the end of the semester? As I go through the curriculum with each class, I focus more on what they are learning (what the activities/engagements are teaching them) and less on what we are covering. The students I have them semester will benefit more from technique and ways to understand rather than whether or not we make it to the more modern writers and poets. So, when I start to think about what has to be covered and where we are, I don’t panic. I don’t panic because I truly believe what I am covering with the students is far more valuable than how far we get chronologically (that being said, of course that isn’t the same for all subjects or grade/class levels-but it is working for my students this semester). I have a friend whose set English curriculum not only includes the textbook selections but 4 novels. I truly believe it can be done, but with struggling students (because this particular set curriculum does not take into account abilities and levels, only grade levels), how can you ensure they are gaining the skills they need to gain in order for any class to be beneficial to them?
On another note, I LOVED the activities that were recommended to use with textbooks. They are not only ideas that you can use to engage students with their textbooks in a way that is not overwhelming to them, but (as I’m always thinking in terms of teaching English) the activities can be adopted for use with novels and pieces of literature. For example, the Guide-O-Rama is an interesting technique that could be used to help struggling readers focus on certain points in a piece of literature. The Remembering Facts from Long Texts could also work with novels.
NCTE Principles of Adolescent Literacy Reform
I found that I was able to relate to or connect to many of the points in this article. Much of the talk about informing teachers from many disciplines reminds me of SCRI and the work that was done to help all teacher understand how to promote and teach literacy. I also agree with it talking about how students have trouble being motivated because they do not feel that have a reason to be motivated. They do not see how literacy and reading is beneficial to them. Another point the article made was various assessments. Students benefit from many forms of assessments. Personally, I like essay tests (for my own assessments) much better than multiple choice tests. However, I also enjoy creative assessments, such as multigenre papers.
Subjects Matter Ch.6
B. Raines
Class attention please, read chapter 987 and answer the questions at the end of the chapter, I will see you tomorrow----------NOT. Almost everything I do is outside the box. Most of my students would rather take something apart, so lets go do that and then look at the why, what, how. We do not even start with chapter one; we go directly to chapter five then maybe seven, then eleventy two, whatever meets the needs of the class.
Substituting for the textbook is great, I do it regularly. Just make your facts are right, your students will call you on it.
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