Readicide, Chapter 3

As a product of Accelerated Reader, I can definitely see what the author was talking about. After I stopped having AR, the thought of not having points did diminish my motivation to read new books. I was always told what to read and how fast I needed to read it and then took a pointless test to get points. Half of the time I would not read the whole book, I'd only read until I thought I had all the information I needed to take the test. Accelerated reader is a good tool to get students to read. However, the transition from AR to not having AR hurts students because they no longer have incentive to read. We as teachers must learn how to give students options on what to read and to integrate reading into our curriculum.

The problem with integrating books into our curriculum is that the book becomes the curriculum for our subject. You should definitely use books, but it's the delivery of the book that matters most. It is emphasized in our program to steer away from the textbook as the curriculum, but use it as a resource only. When reading a book in the classroom, we must be careful to make it a resource or as a connection to the topics or themes we're teaching and not to make it the curriculum itself. The flow of reading is also another important aspect of reading in the classroom. While we must be careful not to sacrifice the flow of reading a novel in a class, we must be sure to not leave the slower readers behind. While you might not break the book up into single chapters, there must be some sort of benchmarks that students must either meet or succeed in order to scaffold the book for slower readers. This way, students who read faster can go ahead and progress and not have their flow interrupted by having to wait on other students. The use of a novel in a classroom, especially a social studies classroom can be really beneficial when used the right way. It takes careful planning while taking all of your students strengths and weaknesses into consideration. While all students won't read at the same place, when things are spaced out in ways that don't affect flow, it can still be beneficial to your students to read novels that are course related in order to spark students' reading.

Readicide, Chapter 2

In this chapter, I could definitely relate to the teacher's story about Al-Queda. I just taught a lesson last week over the Iraqi War and my students couldn't tell the difference between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. This blew my mind. The lack of background knowledge is crippling to Social Studies. It's kind of like in math. If you can't add single digit numbers, how can you be expected to multiply anything? This goes along with the author's Phelps story. We expect students to be able to swim the English Channel when they've never even been in a bathtub. If they happen to make it across great, but when they don't, we try to point to everything but the elephant in the room: the lack of reading in schools.

Educators have no reason to not integrate literacy into their curriculum with the access to resources we have today in the internet. We focus more on test taking skills and neglect the simple fact of knowing how to read and comprehend a paragraph. Too much emphasis is taught on how to eliminate wrong answers and not enough attention is paid to keeping kids reading at their grade level. The best example I can think of is one student in my student-teaching placement. She's an outgoing, intelligent girl, but she reads on a third grade level... she's in the seventh grade. Her writing samples are atrocious. She can hardly write a sentence, but she's been passed on all the way until now and she's finally biting off more than she can chew. I was trying to think of who should be to blame; should it be the parents, educators, administrators, or the system itself? I think it is a combination of all of the above. For this much neglect to a child's literacy to occur, it bothers me. She's finally getting help, but I wonder if it's too late. She's going to fail seventh grade and if her reading level doesn't improve quickly, she could fail again. She could potentially be driving to middle school in a couple of years. We as educators must pick up the slack of our predecessors. It starts by integrating literacy into our classrooms. I can deal with students not knowing who Mao Zedong is or what were some of the acts brought about from the New Deal, but I will not tolerate my students not being able to read and write basic sentences. (By the way, I felt like there were a lot of metaphors and anecdotes in this chapter)

Readicide, Chapter 1

After reading chapter 1 of Readicide, it has made a great argument about the harmful effects of high-stakes testing in schools across America. I can look back at my educational experience and see how I was taught to read the tests more than I ever was taught how to read books and determine what to look for while I read. While I was able to achieve, many low-income and minority students have either failed, given up, or dropped out completely. This should be unacceptable to educators. While there will always be people who drop out or potentially fail, we must do everything we can to lower that number as much as possible and reading plays a huge factor in that battle. When students read, they have to do their own thinking. Reading requires more effort than just listening in my opinion. In my placement experiences, the students I saw that had to read in their classes had significantly higher order thinking than those who were subject to worksheets, lectures, and test-prep. While my effort as a Social Studies teacher is to create better citizens through many different educational experiences, these experiences can't happen without reading. I try to make my students responsible for their own learning and then I assess how they are progressing in their own learning and then I try to scaffold those who are not achieving as much as others. But without reading, this becomes very difficult. When reading is implemented throughout the curriculum, the students become better readers, writers, and eventually better thinkers. When you're able to get students thinking about the content on their own, it allows you to do more with that thinking and begin the process of higher-order thinking. The only problem with the higher-order thinking is being mindful that you do have a certain number of things you must cover in a year. I feel that the hardest part of teaching will be to find the balance of depth and width. How deep can you get without sacrificing coverage of something the students will be tested on? Hopefully through reading the following chapters, I will come to an understanding of this and find ways to implement reading deeper while getting the coverage I feel comfortable with.

Visual Literacy

In my Visual Literacy module, I watched a video on how the ACME program allowed for students in an animation class to get feedback from real-life animators on their projects. I would've loved to receive feedback from someone within the profession in which I was studying would critique something I've done. It really creates an authentic learning experience for the students by making it applicable to our real-world experiences. I hope to be able to integrate some sort of real-world application into my curriculum whether it be through having actual historians come in to talk with the students and tell them how they go about their work and how my students can think and learn like historians. The other thing that I loved about the visual literacy video was the technology. The way the teacher had videoconferencing set up for the animators to talk with all the students was very innovative. I hope to also use technology in my classroom to integrate literacy into my curriculum. The teacher said the students perform better whenever they know that the real-life animators will be reviewing their work. It would serve as a great performance assessment in the balanced assessment format of gauging a student's success within a unit.

My First Disciplinary Literacy Blog

After reading, listening, and studying about Disciplinary Literacy, I believe it is a great way to authentically enhance our students' Social Studies content. Since literature is an integral part of how history is recorded, we must be able to integrate historical literature into our lesson plans and get it to our students in a way that is easy enough for the students to comprehend, but does not interfere with the historical validity of the document. I vaguely remember any time throughout my pre-college experience ever seeing historical literature used in my history classes outside of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. In addition to the integration of literature into the content, the theory of schema is an interesting concept to education. While the organized chunks of knowledge and experiences can lead to feeling and emotions that can be used to be active learners, we as educators must learn how to activate this schema and get our students to understand and attain a higher level of thinking. It is my goal upon completion of this course, I am able to successfully integrate historical literature into my curriculum and activate the schema that will allow for a greater increase in the active learning and achievement of my students.

1. What does it mean to read like a historian?
   
   Reading like a historian means to take any document and examine it for its historical context, validity, and meaning. One example of how to read like an historian is when I had to read first-hand accounts of the Crusades (which was a painful experience) I had to take into account the context of the document, who wrote it and how does that affect the meaning, and how does it connect to what I am trying to understand. I try to never take first-hand accounts as absolute truth because of bias that may be used in the document. Addressing the need to read like a historian to your students and successfully showing them how to do so will allow them to have authentic learning experiences and hopefully make any history class more interesting that it was before.
   
   
2. Why do readers struggle with history text and how can teachers help?
   
   In the article my group had in class, "Tampering with History: Adapting Primary Sources for Struggling Readers", the authors addressed three key factors that causes readers to struggle with history text. The first was the excessive length in which historical accounts can be. When give the task of reading a massive selection, many students will not focus on what they need to get out of the article and simply scan over it without gaining any knowledge from it. The author suggests limiting the text to 200-300 words to not overwhelm students. The second is the complex sentences and syntax which is used in many forms of historical literature. The simple act of copying and pasting the document into a computer text editor (i.e. Microsoft Word) and simplifying the words to allow for better understanding will suffice for this problem. One must be careful not to sacrifice the validity of the document in order to simplify it for their students. Finally, the authors say when the document is densely packed into a page, students will 'shut down'. I can remember being one of those students. Leave ample space to give the illusion that there is less to read that the student perceives.
   
   
3. How can teachers engage students in significant ideas in their subject?
   
   I have learned throughout my M.A.T. experience to teach authentically to keep students engaged in the content I want them to understand. To do this, I always try to relate any content I teach to real-life situations through different strategies. My favorite way to keep students engaged is to use analogies. I am always quick to use analogies in daily life. Sometimes when studying history I always have the thought, "that's kind of like...", and it allows me to understand it better. While I know this is not how every student will stay engaged, it is on that is easiest for me to use. In order to reach all of my students, I must vary the techniques I use to engage students to try and reach as many different learners as possible. We learned ways in our Learning and the Learner class in the fall to differentiate how we teach through different learning strategies to reach many different kinds of learners, not just the way you learn.