We started out by wrapping up our overview of the history of literacy research by doing the museum walk.  Everybody pretty much included the same thing on their posters. Next time I’ll have them hang them on different walls though to encourage more moving around. I did quite a bit of leading conversation around the histories trying to pull out what patterns the students saw in the histories and making the links to the theories. I felt as if I was leading a bit too much. I should have asked the question before the students went to view the posters. But, I think in general the activity served its purpose. Based on the wiki postings, the students do have the gist of how reading research developed over 50 years and how it informs our current understandings of literacy acquisition and learning.

We then moved into a word sort activity. I’ve done the word sort before but differently. In the past, each small group was given a stack of words and asked to categorize. Then we’d compare what the different groups had. I didn’t want to do that since we had already done a similar thing with the museum walk. Last week Kathy had talked about doing a time line silently with cards, so I adapted that idea to the word sort. Each student was given two cards and asked to place them on the wall. They could move other cards if they needed to. They easily placed the cards related to Halliday’s functions of language (which I think we need to talk about more). The systems of language identified by Kucer were also placed easily. A few cards were troublesome though (such as deep structure and surface structure). So I talked about that a bit. Again, I felt a bit leading, but there are things I wanted to bring out. What I liked about the activity though is that it did reveal places where student understanding was still a bit shaky. What I was uncomfortable with is that at times I felt I put students on the spot. But they responded well – and honestly – so I appreciated that.

I think the class is coming together well as a community. I see a growing level of trust and comfort among the students. I’m hoping they’re feeling comfortable taking risks with their thinking.

I then gave the students 20 minutes to start their literacy artifact review project. We arranged the groups (after a few false starts) and I randomly assigned eras based on Alexander & Fox’s article. I just had them brainstorm a list of in school texts that would have been in use during that era and then apply Halliday’s functions of language and Freebody & Luke’s reader roles (just text user & text participant) to those texts. The activity was intended to just get them started. We’ll be spending more time between now and the actual date of the presentations (which Kathy Broikou and I moved back in the syllabus).

I intentionally didn’t spend any time on writing workshop this week. The annotations are developing well. It’ll be interesting to see what the batch with Olson’s article looks like. As one of the authors pointed out, when faced with a cognitively difficult task, the last skill learned is the first one lost. So, I’m wondering if the quality of the annotations will be less strong given the difficulty of the Olson text.

Which brings me to the next thing we did in class. We spent an hour discussing the readings – Olson & Kucer in particular.  I had originally planned a more structured activity for the discussion, but after Kathy and I talked, I decided to back off on that and just give one guiding question along with the suggestion to use the chart handed out at the beginning of the semester to hold their thinking.

The conversation was good. The Olson reading was difficult, so I had I to do a little bit of clarification. But for the most part the students did get the gist of it. In the future, I’m going to remove the Dyson & Bloome articles and just have them read Olson & Gee. At first I wondered if the Olson article was redundant of the Kucer chapter, but after discussing it with several of the groups, I realized it’s not. They are complementary. The Olson article operates at a more abstract level and the Kucer chapter gets into the nitty-gritty. What I think will help in the future though is if I instruct the students to read the Kucer chapter first, then read the Olson article. And maybe even accompany the Olson article with a “comprehension constructor.

We prepared for next week by doing an anticipation guide. Kathy and I removed the Goodman article from next week’s assignment and moved it to October 27th. There was some confusion about when the annotation for Goodman was due. I hope I clarified that the draft annotation should be brought to class on the 27th. Same as always.

Class ended with the students writing a theoretical understanding they were gaining from this class and the connection to practice they were making on sticky notes and posting them as they left. I’m going to type those out and hand them out next week. The connections being made are great.

In overview, I was pleased with last night’s class. It was good to slow down and dig in.