For this reflection, I will talk about Tovani's "Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?" and the article for this week about text structures.
Tovani: Chapter 3: Parallel Experiences:
This
chapter consisted of strategies and experiences of looking at how students are
struggling with reading different context, and how as teachers, we are expert
readers in our content. Thus, we have the responsibility to teach our students
in our content area how to read the material we present to them. From this
chapter, Tovani tells the reader/teacher that if we all can do our part and
teach different content reading strategies, then our children will be better
off when presented with any text. They will be able to pick out how to answer
the question, how to ask questions, and how to use graphs to interpret the
passages. She puts a lot of emphasis on modeling, and this is probably one of
the best strategies when teaching students how to approach problems/passages.
At the end of the chapter, she shares with us what works. We need to identify
what students are struggling with, select a challenging piece of text to model
reading and how we struggle with it, and share with the students how we
overcame this said struggle. I think this can be and is very powerful, and
these three pieces play a vital role in the teaching process. This chapter
pertains to every single teacher that reads it. This is a great universal
chapter that all teachers can relate to at some point. In my domain,
mathematics, I instinctively teach students how to decipher word problems and
pick out what is important to solving the word problem. It is important that
each teacher knows how their content area relates to teaching a portion of
reading skills. If they do not realize this, then they are doing a disservice
to their students.
Tovani: Chapter 4: Connecting Students with
Accessible Text
In
this section, rigor and accessible text are the two main topics that are
addressed. Students are given a text book at the beginning of the year, and
they are expected to read it every night. However, if they are not capable of
reading this intense text, how are they going to ever be excited about learning
the material for the course? This is the issue that Tovani talks to the reader
about in the beginning of the section. She informs the audience that rigor is
still upheld in a classroom even if the text is not on the reading level for
that particular grade. Accessible text is a great solution to bringing in
engaging text that is readable for all students that can relate to them or
outside the classroom on a bigger scale. With the accessible text, it is
sometimes a quick fix. However, there is still another alternative. Text sets
are a tool that teachers can use that helps support the material that is in the
textbook. They still have rigor that teachers look for in text, but text sets
bring in many different types of text that relate to one subtopic in the
course. With this, students can choose which text is most interesting to them
to keep their engagement alive. Tovani encourages the reader to provide
students with this choice of different reading materials/altered assignments.
She also tells us to demonstrate how the content we teach relates to the
outside world. It is important for students to make these connections and
perform applications of reading to the real world. Another great point she
makes is that as teachers, we should not expect the text to do our job. This
seems obvious, but teachers tend to rely very heavily on texts. They forget
that it is not the textbook’s job to teach our students. I think this is
something I definitely need to keep in mind and use in my classroom next year.
I would love to show students how they use mathematics in real world
applications, how mathematicians are making great strides in the world, and how
new theorems and proofs are being formulated. I think it would get them
thinking, and it would encourage them to keep an open mind about learning and
practicing mathematics.
Teaching Text Structure:
In this article, the
authors open up with a great connection. How children learn to speak is the
same process for how they will learn to read. However, children at a young age
are reading the types of stories that are narrative prose. These are the fairy
tales that follows the set up of having a beginning, middle, and end. When
these children grow, they will be presented with harder material which is
presented to them in expository prose. This is the type of reading where they
are reading to learn. They are deciphering information to learn from it while
reading. This is why students are having a hard time reading, and the authors
make this very clear. This is why the text structure strategies are incredibly
helpful for students if teachers take the time to cover these. Expository prose
is presented in five main ways: main idea, list, order, compare/contrast, and
classification. The students are required to put the reading into their own
terms for studying purposes, but these strategies are helping them have a game
plan when reading a passage. If they know which structure it is, then they can
know what to pick out from the text. I think it is beneficial for students to
see all of these strategies, but the teachers need to present them in a way for
the students not to be confused. The authors offer great teaching steps for
teachers, and I think these can really help in any level reading or content
class.
No comments:
Post a Comment