Literacy for the iGeneration

It was an interesting week, at least for me on my side of the desk. I’m feeling class is a little fragmented these days, but I’m trying to feel out what student needs are as well as provide the bits and pieces of strategies focused toward supporting writing development and continued explorations of literacy as being more than typographic texts. I’m also working really hard at reaching out to the math preservice teachers. I’m not sure I’m succeeding at anything, but we’re muddling through together.

This week we started out by thinking about visualization, drawing, clustering, and other forms of writing that support student learning. The math preservice teachers also looked at how visual modes of representation and language issues can contribute to student misunderstanding of a problem or process. I’m really liking the Kenney book. The readings are pretty straight forward, so I’m not wanting to spend a lot of time on them. The big thing I really want students to get is that while the strategy books may read a bit like cookbooks, they need to be thought about more deeply. So to get at that I asked the students to examine one strategy closely and think about the cognitive work that occurs when a student are engaged in that strategy.

We then moved on to some writing stuff. I had asked the students to bring in several paragraphs that identified an issue they were seeing in school. We had started that last class. I wanted them to analyze the event. We then used that to learn how to outline from the paragraph as a way to check our writing, and then to summarize from the outline. From there I had students brainstorm what’s on their minds, and then do a Know/What I want to know/How I’m going to figure it out chart. We went over some of the issues, but I’m refusing to supply answers. Part of the reason is, I don’t have all the answers. The other reason is that I want students to learn how to seek answers on their own. So they came up with a list of ideas of where to find out information. I also introduced them to the idea of professional journals and asked them to find a journal article that addresses their concern, read it, summarize it, and bring it in next week. I also asked them to start trying out strategies in their field placement as they can and bring it back to class to report.

Now that I think about it, I realize I’ve got several things going on that need to be brought to closure. 1) we need to bring closure on the writing they’ve been doing. 2) we need to return to their goals set at the beginning of the semester 3) we need to move ahead on the issues they brought up. My task for next week is to address these three pieces coherently while continuing to share literacy strategies. Is it time to go back to theory? Finally, I want them to move more and more to independence and taking over the course. How to do this in a systematic way that won’t cause too much stress. I think I have my work cut out for me. Stay tuned!