Before I begin, I need to note that I just read an article about teacher use of blogging in US News & World Report. This article points out the difficulties that are inherent in blogging about one’s job. The writer, the article suggests, always needs to be cognizant of where the line is and to not cross it. So true. As such, I use this blog to reflect on my teaching and the events of the class. We bloggers need to be constantly aware of what the purpose of our blog is and who our potential readers are.
Now onward.
The first part of class was designed to revisit last week’s readings on the readin processes, but do so in a way that connected to this week’s readings on historical perspectives on reading. We focused on four areas of reading research in particular – phonics, fluency, comprehension, word study. I selected those as the focus because those are the areas getting most attention in education (particularly childhood) because of the National Reading Panel. I struggle in part because I feel these articles are more or less “informational” and don’t require a lot of discussion to get through. I am seeking ways to engage students in the information and to apply the information to what they are doing in their other classes and in their teaching. I don’t think we got there yet. That’s something we need to return to next week.
After moving through a series of questions I set up to move through the readings, we spent some time workshopping the annotations. I showed two annotations that I thought were particularly well done. There are several approaches to teaching writing. One is showing examples that are imperfect and then doing the revising. Another is showing exemplary work and talking about what makes them exemplary. I chose the latter. What was nice is that I was able to use student work. I have some strong writers in this class.
That took pretty much half the class. I let time get away from me a little bit because I allowed myself to become engaged in conversation with a few students. I need to keep a better watch on time and to move the groups along in a timely fashion. I like talking with my students, hearing their concerns, questions, and just learning who they are as people. It helps me as a teacher. But at the same time, whilst I’m conversing with one or two students, I don’t want the other’s languishing. I’m very aware of that.
During the second half of class, I had the students spend time in their expert groups discussing their chapters, and then we moved into jigsaw groups to teach one another about the chapters and to put together a timeline. We weren’t able to finish that activity, so that’s going to be the first thing we do next week. We also need to spend time discussing how the research we read relates to the other classes and to our teaching. I also plan to do an activity to reinforce the learning about the specific reading processes that are discussed in the readings.
For me, the class flew by. I hope it did for the students as well. I just have to keep reminding myself that this is a survey class and the best we can do is introduce the students to these concepts and hope that they’ll be able to dig into them more deeply in their methods classes as a way to make sense of why it is that they do what they do.
October 6, 2008 at 9:43 am
Last week’s class was again very informative. However, I feel as though we never get through all of the scheduled events and particularly to the reading that was assigned for tonight’s class. I find this sometimes frustrating because by the time we do go over the material the following week, I have forgotten much of its content or concepts. However, I did enjoy the jigsaw because it allowed all of us to comprehend the other various components of literacy. Unfortunately, again we did not have enough time to finish the time line project. Despite learning all of this new information, I sometimes feel as though I am frantically trying to just get through the sequential steps/events of the class rather than really getting more information out of the reading material.