10/1 Readings

Reading has not received the emphasis it needs in secondary education. In comparison to other countries, the reading levels of students at the high school age is significantly lower. This is interesting because the literacy levels of younger students is increasing! How can this be? I think Shanahan and Shanahan laid out important points about the need to address literacy in secondary students. A personal story of mine came to mind while reading this. My high school did not offer reading courses to a majority of students. The only one they offered one reading class to Freshman that had lower reading and literacy scores. This class was designed to get them up to the level of their counterparts and once the class ended, they moved on in their education. How can this be productive? Shanahan and Shanahan highlight that literacy skills no longer translate from a young age to the growth hoped for in later educational years. They also highlight that not only are teachers apprehensive to teach reading in their discipline but they are also not as effective as once hoped either. Addressing these problems is difficult but engaging secondary students in literacy courses could help. Today's students are going to enter a world and a job market where higher-level reading skills are very important so building those skills all that we can would help work to solve the problems. I worked as a peer leader in the above mentioned literacy class at my high school. My duties involved  grading papers and helping students with group work and reviews. In this role I saw the growth and change in the students' literacy abilities from the beginning of the course to the end. If this course could work for them to improve their abilities, then why not engage ALL students in that? Stopping with just the students who have lower literacy skills allows the students who already had established reading skills to remain stagnant.

As a Teaching of History major, the parts of the writings that pertained more to history stood out to me. Specifically, the ideas that literacy in history involves the reasonable questioning of sources and

addressing for biases. These practices were realistically not taught to me in my high school history courses either. An example that I have pertains to a class I took here at UIC. I was assigned to write a research paper on the Scottsboro Trial, a trial from the 1930s that involved the false rape accusations of nine young African American men. While researching, I discovered a book from the time written by two lawyers against the defendants Riddled with bias and falsehoods, the book offered little factual information to utilize. If I only had my prior high school history courses I would have instantly dismissed the book all together without using it as an analysis for the sentiments of the times. This type of reading, reading that allows for deep analysis and use of more than just memorizing exactly what the text says, is an important part of literacy. Specifically in this context, it spoke to the contemporary sentiments toward the defendants in Alabama however this idea can extend to a wider variety of disciplines outside of History.

I found the writing about literacy practices in physical education very interesting. I never thought of
physical education as an opportunity to promote literacy and I assume most of us did not. I found this article interesting because it did open my eyes to the concept that literacy exists in ways where you least expect it. An important aspect that this reading brought up was counteracting the idea of making students "disciplinary experts", such as telling students to "think like a Historian" in History or "think like a scientist" in Chemistry or Biology. I can understand why this would be problematic. First, it is difficult to expect this of every student in every class. Am I supposed to be a scientist and think like one in my period one Chemistry class then transition over to a historian for my second period World History class all in the four minute passing period? Then continually do that all day? That is a big burden to place on students. Furthermore, that doesn't take into account students' personal feelings about each subject that could affect their ability to engage in that kind of rhetoric. I believe that this could also be addressed with literacy courses for all secondary education students. Rather than lay the focus on each teacher to teach literacy in their own discipline, the classes could supply students with a higher set of skills that apply to all the disciplines in different ways.

What do you guys think? What do you think could be a solution to addressing literacy issues in high school students? Do you think that adding a literacy class could help or would it place another burden on already resource struggling schools?

10-1 Blog Post

We all know how important it is to teach literacy to the youth of the United States, though it seems that despite our determination and intention, the results are not shown. Reading is a skill that one typically learns in reading class, or whatever it may be called. I think the problem with teaching our youth is to show them that reading is more than just comprehension. Being an engaged reader may seem a bit tedious, and it can be, but there are positive results to come from it. According to the text Foregrounding the Disciplines in Secondary Literacy Teaching and Learning: A Call for Change, "Young people do not need to go to school to learn what they already know; content literacy instruction can help youth gain access to the accepted knowledge of the disciplines, thereby allowing them also to critique and change that knowledge" (Moje). This quote seems to suggest that if a student were able to acquire the necessary reading skills, he or she would be best able to approach any text and make the most of it by critically engaging with it. This connects to a quote mentioned shortly after, which states, "Conducting historical investigation demands knowledge, skill, and 'a modicum of irreverence toward the received wisdom,' because, “if you are willing to accept unquestioningly what ‘everyone’ says, then the story is over before the investigation begins” (p. 2080, citing Ravitch, 2003). Without questioning, students have no real interaction, nor is learning actually taking place because it is as if the brain is solely accepting the information and just accepting for it to be true. There is an increase of knowledge going on, but there is no exchange. I think there is a huge flaw to this because to start off, it is almost unlikely that one will completely "understand" or learn something solely by reading the text. It is good to ask questions because the mind is going on step further or ahead of the reading, and from that, understanding can take place. Students are not merely accepting the information as is, which is vital today with all the politics happening, which connects with being a productive member of society.

Internationally, despite the economic power of the United States, and the claims people make of it being "the best country in the world," despite what people may think, it does not compete with other nations in the areas of science, math, and reading. It is interesting to think about this because more often than not, you hear people say we are in the "Land of Opportunity" and we do indeed, have economic and educational opportunities for everyone, but how is it that students are still unable to make the most of these opportunities? Clearly, something is wrong here. Perhaps there are external factors that play a role in why this is, rather than it just being the need for better literacy instruction. What do you think?

Despite all the good that arrived from the SHAPE and its standards, I believe there is room for criticism. Yes, one does not need to specialize in a sport or anything along those lines to be defined as a "physically literate" individual (Wickens, 2015). However, I think comparing a physical education classroom with the likes of a math, science, language, or history class, is insufficient. Usually, at least from my experience, there are not really any definitive assessments used in physical education classrooms that have a major impact on your grade as opposed to the other subjects. Although you may be able to read body language and physical signs, I think that the physical education classroom may be best to help in social skills, since body language is a major part when socializing. Also, to add on, the unambiguity of not having an expert on physical education may be athletes, but I would imagine that the PE teacher is the expert. Another criticism I have is in regards to the SHAPE national standarsds. It states that a physically literate individual "is a person who 'has learned the skills necessary to participate in a variety of physical activities, 'knows the implications and the benefits of involvement in various types of physical activities,' 'participates regularly in physical activity,' 'is physically active,' and 'values physical activity and its contributions to a healthful lifestyle'" (Wickens, 2015). I would just say that since these standards are for the students, have the standards start off with "Students will..." and list more specific verbs than "know" or "values" because that is not measurable. How will you know these standards are being met if they cannot be measured?

I often find myself going through an entire reading and not completely understanding what I just read (especially if it has to do with math). Back in the day people could get away without being good readers, but nowadays with all these technological advances and changing workplace demands that is not possible anymore. Literacy learning shouldn’t just be teaching students basic reading skills and expecting them to somehow develop and grow. I think this will not be helpful in the long run. Also, teaching literacy should not only be in classes like English or social studies, it should be taught throughout all classes. Reading a normal book is completely different than reading a math or science textbook, I believe it takes a different set of skills. Why are we teaching students such a generalized approach to reading different texts?

 

“Apparently, strong early reading skills do not automatically develop into more complex skills that enable students to deal with the specialized and sophisticated reading of literature, science history, and mathematics” (Shanahan & Shanahan). Like I mentioned before I have this problem myself. I am currently taking an introduction to advanced mathematics course, where all of the problems are proofs, the class is basically all reading and writing. Sometimes it takes me hours to completely read through and comprehend just one chapter of the book. I think if I was exposed to more math literacy when I was in high school, or even middle school, it would have helped with understanding these more abstract concepts. But how can we, as teachers, implement more literacy in classes like science and math?

What I found very interesting from the reading was the fact that students are reading marginally worse than a generation ago. “Despite the growing need for literacy, especially higher-level literacy skills, assessment data suggest that adolescents today read no better, and perhaps marginally worse, than a generation ago” (Shanahan & Shanahan). Just like the quote says even though literacy is in high demand, it seems students are not doing as well in it as students from a generation ago. I really believe a solution to this could be teaching literacy in all classes, not just social studies classes. I also think modeling our literacy teaching to reflect the real world would help as well. “Sixty-five thousand immigrant workers enter the united states each year in order to make up for the shortfall in availability of managers, engineers, analysts, and other high education/high-salary positions…” (Shanahan & Shanahan). Not that there is anything wrong with that, but obviously were doing something wrong if we cannot produce adequate workers for jobs that require higher literacy skills. How can we teach literacy in a way that will help students in the real world?

As students get older they are given more complex readings that have a different structure than the readings they had before. I think the literacy pyramid is a good tool to use when teaching literacy. For example, when students are younger they look at readings that help form the foundation of their literacy skills, which means they are at the bottom of the pyramid. But, as they move up and begin to read more complex readings, maybe from a chemistry class or something, they move up on the pyramid. I think it would be very beneficial to use this, as a teacher.

10/1 Blog Post Shanahan & Shanahan

Currently in some schools, there is a "every teacher a teacher of reading" philosophy in play, but that kind of teaching is harmful in the long run. Experts from different fields read their texts differently, so, the math teachers and history teachers look for different things in their texts. Advanced literacy instructions should be embedded within heavy content-area classes, like math, science, and history. This should be focused on especially in middle school and secondary school, the ages when the child is growing up and needs to focus on gaining literary skills.

Reading is seen as a kind of "basic" skill, which can be adapted to all kinds of texts. Basic skills evolve into more advanced skills, for example, learning to read to analyzing what you read. Basic skills are learned early. But, because of failure to push literacy importance in school, as you move along the continuum of literacy learning, what kids learn becomes less useful. Like, in Kindergarten, kids learn words that are common "of, is, the". These words are used everywhere, from books to newspapers. Later, they learn words that are not of such use to them, words with less general applicability. 

Even though todays job market requires reading for all jobs, but, today kids read worse than a generation ago. Reading test scores are lower today than in 1992. US students read worse than there European counterparts. To fix this, teachers must first build basic literacy skills, basic decoding, understand the text must be meaningful and recognition of words that are used frequently. As student progress pass basic, usually in upper-elementary grades. Here students will learn how to decode multisyllabic words, learn to respond with less common punctuations, and know the meaning of larger vocabulary words. Finally in middle and high school, students begin to master specialized reading routines, and language uses. These skills are less generalizable. A high school student who can read a English book well may struggle in reading a math book. To fix this issue, many school are looking for teachers with expert literacy certifications in liberal arts and sciences. The key to the fix, is a literacy curriculum that guides students to meet the demands of reading and writing in the disciplines that has been provided by concepts of content-area reading.

Chapters 2 & 4: Reading & Metacognition

Who teaches reading? The elementary teacher? The textbook argues that the "credit (or blame) for students' reading ability goes to primary grade teachers, and subsequent teachers or college instructors need teach only new vocabulary and concepts relevant to new content" (17). This is not the attitude to have. Throughout chapters two and four, we see that there are so many different types of reading. A student who can finish a novel in one day may be the student who struggles the most with reading and comprehending primary sources. A student may be a genius at math problems, they can understand complex theories and be the best critical thinker, yet they may struggle to read a chapter book. Throughout chapter 2 and 4, I saw identified with two themes the most. One, the teaching of reading should be taught throughout college, teaching students how to read must never stop. Two, reading must be personal to one's identity. A few weeks ago, we talked about engagement. One of the readings pointed out that the students who most need to be engaged, suffer the most when they are not engaged. It is the same way with reading and literacy. We know that the ability to read and literacy are the two most important skills in our society if you are illiterate, your career options and quality of life drop dramatically. For our students who come from high need schools and impoverished situations, it becomes even more important for them to be literate because in many cases, they are starting from an already disadvantaged point. Yet, our school system consistently fails students of color and high need students. Here, I'd like to share a TED talk by Alvin Irby, an elementary school teacher, who emphasizes the importance of being aware of a students identity when teaching them about reading.

In order to engage students in reading, and promote their literacy, activities, and reading, have to seem worth it and personal to them. This becomes especially important when you are dealing with students who struggle with reading. Throughout chapter two especially, I realized that the best way for students to encounter difficult material is for the teacher to humanize learning and normalize mistakes, it is okay if you don't understand, as long as you are willing to learn! Chapter four dealt heavily with metacognition, which is thinking about thinking. Below, you'll find a useful infographic for helping students understand and develop this.


Lastly, in order to combine metacognition with literacy (while making it relevant and personal), I've compiled a list of activities from other classes, the internet, and the book, that can be useful to help students. Many of these activities can be used across content with a little adaption and allow students to talk about themselves, activating your awareness of identity, plus, everyone loves to talk about themselves!

1. writing word problems for math
2. read a lab/scientific theory and re-write a better lab/design your own lab
3. read a primary source and rewrite it as a narrative
4. perform word problems/theories/historical events
5. class "book clubs"
6. current events
7. socratic seminars
8. write your own primary source/scientific law
9. research something that interests you and write something/create a presentation on how you use your content area for this
10. identify important vocabulary and create your own city that functions based off of that vocabulary
11. student designs a lesson plan
12. take sections from class material, jumble the sentences, the students must unscramble it and identify what it is saying

There are so many ways to incorporate literacy into any classroom. What strategies/activities do you like to use to incorporate literacy and metacognition in your classroom? Why is it important for you to incorporate literacy into your subject area and do you have any unique lesson plans/ideas on how to do this?

9 /24 post

One of the most crucial ideas from the reading is something that is quite prevalent in my life. People read differently. “A person who understands one type of text is not necessarily proficient at all reading types. An experienced reader of mathematical proofs may be perplexed when asked to make sense of a metaphor in a poem” (Reading for Understanding, 20). One of the most evident examples of this in my life is my relationship with some close people in my life. My friend, who is an engineer, often has me proof read her work. Often I am there to examine for grammatical errors, however, I cannot speak to any of the content. I rarely have any idea what is being written about despite everything being written in English. I do not have the educational capital to understand it. However, on the flip side, I have friends involved in education and special education and I am far more adept at understanding their writing and conversation. To expect everyone to be able to perform reading without learning how to in different disciplines is setting up a reader for failure. Reading is not a universal skill.

A comical analogy to this idea is from “The Big Bang Theory” television show. As many of you have seen it, Sheldon, one of the main characters, is a nerdy genius who knows a great deal of just about everything. However, he often misses the nuances of conversation and specifically sarcasm. While adept at any sort of academic language, Sheldon is deficient in social interaction and social verbal literacy. While this is a comical example, it shows that literacy is involved holistically in our lives.

In my high school career, I remember all of my teachers working together to reinforce good writing. All the writing rules and standards that were put forth in our English classes were mandated in our history papers, science write ups, and any other class that had papers due. My high school experience reinforced the characteristics of reading into our writing. Because reading proficiency varies with the situation, reading is problem solving and also a complex, our teachers reinforced this into our writing across all subjects. While this process was not perfect for all of us, we still learned proficiency in reading primary sources, textbooks, novels, plays, newspaper articles, and more. As such, I have a wide discipline understanding. However, even with that understanding, there is so much I do not comprehend because of the specialization of material and content.

As teachers therefore, I find this quote important for the culture that we create in our classroom. “We see the kind of teaching that learning environment that can develop students confidence and competence as readers of various kinds of challenging texts as one that requires the interaction of students and teachers in multiple dimensions of classroom life.” We need to facilitate as educators, or for that matter, facilitate in role of life we fill, a culture of helping students to examine literature critically, and teach how to understand in the variable contexts that we experience.

9/24 Schoenbach (2 and 4): Texts, Thinking, and Modeling Vulnerability

9/24: Chapters 2 and 4

After explaining what a Reading Apprenticeship classroom might look like, Schoenbach, Greenleaf & Murphy (2012) state that “many teachers acknowledge that the shift to a metacognitive classroom requires important reframing of their role and increased trust in students’ potential” (p. 131). As a student, I have been in classes that are the antithesis of RA—no time to share my thoughts with a partner or small group, no collaborative discussions, and no feeling of safety about showing confusion.

And what were my thoughts after every session? Only that the teacher obviously did not care about our opinions. Or worse, that it was assumed we had no original thoughts on the topic. If we instead help students engage in metacognitive conversations about many types of disciplinary texts, then we help them recognize the complex and valuable ways of thinking that each person has to offer.

While working as an assistant in a middle school a couple years ago, I had the opportunity to periodically confer with students in an 7th grade Language Arts classroom about their personal reading and writing strengths, interests, and goals. I saw that trying to articulate what they were thinking seemed to improve their written work. Hence, when I was later working in 8th grade geometry I tried conferring with students about their reasoning in proofs. One student complained, “ugh, this is like LA in math class. Why?!” I can’t remember my specific answer, but I suspect that I missed an opportunity to highlight the importance of math literacy.

This week, I tried while reading the chapters to insert the word “math reading” in place of “reading” to envision how it might apply within my particular discipline. Sometimes this was a challenge because the examples for “texts” in mathematics usually include the textbook for a given course, graphs, the coding of the symbols themselves, and word problems. I am grateful that chapter four in Schoenbach gave a detailed example from Teri Ryan’s geometry class of Thinking Aloud about a passage on inductive reasoning. Still, the usefulness of the textbook as an example of precise mathematical language is a function of the textbook’s quality. One book might have more textual supports but not contain as much rigorous mathematical reasoning. Or you might have come across explanations like this:

Well, probably no high school textbooks would look like that, and your college professor might argue that being an active math reader involves trying problems like that for yourself. However, I like the idea of bringing outside proofs like the one on the Birthday Paradox in Lee & Spratley (2010) as texts for geometry students or above. Also, I think that part of math literacy should be learning how to apply mathematical reasoning to texts that don’t immediately seem to belong in mathematics. For instance, Dan Meyer has various “3 Acts” videos, like this one on elevator v. stairs, to help guide your students in finding problems to solve from an open-ended scenario and then using math from there. Perhaps a brave thing to do would be welcoming outside texts so that your students can “stump” you, as mentioned in Schoenbach.

On bravery, a teacher’s willingness to model his or her own metacognitive processes is incredibly important. I found the example of the literature teacher Doug Green, who often found himself explaining his interpretation of a story instead of his thinking, particularly striking. I imagine his ability to overcome this discomfort helped normalize struggle within his classroom. And as his own self-efficacy improved, I’m sure his students’ did as well.

Have you seen that modeling your thinking when reading a text has helped students make better sense of what they read in the future? Have you had any teachers that did this? If they had difficulty doing this well, did that help/hinder you? In terms of math, I think it is easy have the same dilemma as Doug Green. Sometimes we focus on the decoding aspect by saying what symbols mean or we jump to what technique should be used when instead we could be carefully explaining how our thinking develops with each new expression.

9/24 Chapters 2 & 4 Schoenbach, Greenleaf & Murphy

Imagine that you are caring for a three year old – let’s say a three year old girl who loves puzzles. She wants to do a puzzle with you. OK, she shows you the shelf where the puzzles are, you bring one down, and then the two of you sit down to work on the puzzle. What happens next?

Do you evaluate the pieces, figure out the picture, and then put all the pieces together yourself? No! (or at least I hope not) Most likely, you will pick up a piece, turn it this way and that, place it against other pieces, trying, and failing to put it together. You might even say something, like, “No, this doesn’t fit here. It’s too big. Hmm, this looks like a dog’s nose – can I see any other pieces that look like a dog’s nose?”.

What did you just do? What did you just model for the girl? What were you trying to show her?

Maybe that problem solving doesn’t happen easily and automatically. That you have some tricks up your sleeve for figuring out the puzzle. That you make mistakes, that you ask yourself questions, that you keep trying. Maybe your next step is to ask the girl if she can see anything that might fit with your piece – you invite collaboration.

For me, traditional approaches to reading comprehension, wherein instructors explain difficult texts to students, are akin to doing the whole puzzle on your own. The Reading Apprenticeship Framework gives structure to practices that I believe we instinctively use when interacting with novices. Moreover, it legitimizes those socio-cultural practices that we use to support learning in out of school environments by inviting them into our disciplinary classrooms.

I truly believe that the above scenario – modelling our thinking for a young child that is working on a puzzle – is probably familiar to many of us. But somehow that same instructional strategy oftentimes doesn’t find its way into classrooms. Somehow, our teachers have kept their inner thinking voice, well, inner. Maybe by the time that we are adults, we’ve heard it so much that we don’t even realize we’re hearing it. I know that I sure was tracking my inner voice, my reading guide, while working on these articles, and sometimes it seemed pretty quiet…

So what is metacognitive conversation? Let’s find out:

Ok, maybe not exactly, but I loved Shoenbach, Greenleaf, & Murphy’s suggestion to use an everyday activity (such as the pipe cleaner figure) to help students (and teachers!) notice the existing metacognitive conversations that infiltrate their daily existence. This is an excellent extension of inviting students’ out of school knowledge and abilities into the classroom.

This framework elaborates on activities that I currently utilize in my classroom – though frankly it is a struggle. It is fascinating that my students somehow seem to think that learning strategies that they have developed in other classes must not be appropriate in a foreign language classroom. When I ask them what their English teacher said about how to effectively read – they almost all come up with ANNOTATE… (long pause)…. Oh, we should annotate these readings?!

I am anxious to continue reading on – I am thinking about ways to adapt this framework for use in my classroom. Reminding students to annotate obviously isn’t the end of the conversation. I was inspired by some of the sentence starters in the metacognitive bookmark – I think that I can translate those in Italian to help students keep their bookclub discussions in Italian – I also really appreciated the idea of providing more structure and specific roles to students, particularly while they are still getting adjusted to metacognitive discussions about readings.

Any one else have ideas on how they can envision these activities unfolding in their classrooms? Especially taking into account the needs of our emerging bilingual students who may find think alouds anxiety inducing and beyond their linguistic reach?

Ciao,

Elizabeth

9/24 Blog Schoenbach Chapter 2

Schoenbach answers a very important question in this reading: Why is reading important? In my middle school, reading was just that, reading. The teacher did not really put much emphasizes on it, our English class was spent more on ISAT prep, or writing. Here, Schoenbach argues the importance of reading, that it is more than just a skill. Reading is complex, and uses parts of your memory that you think that you have long forgotten. That is the magic of reading, why those who argue that young children should read usually say that it "transports the child to another world" or something like that. That is because in a way it does. A good book will trigger memories in a child, some long forgotten, some that are new. When reading something more complex, you work to understand. You can try to relate it to your existing knowledge. Good readers may even argue with the author when they are reading. Like when reading a newspaper, you can argue about the "facts" while you read. Reading is problem solving. The reader works to make sense of the text, to analyze what they are reading, to try and make sense of it, not just the knowledge on the page, but from the ideas evoked from words.

As teachers, we have four key dimensions of classroom life that are needed to support reading development.
1-Social dimensions. A safe environment built inside the classroom, where students can be open to what they read, and difficulties about reading. Student can also be thought to acknowledge resources brought by other members. At first I thought, maybe some kind of book club, but that has a problem. That would be removing this environment from the classroom. This needs to exist inside a regular classroom.
2- Personal dimensions. Helping students create identities about themselves as readers, as well as helping them come up with goals for reading improvement.
3- Cognitive dimension. Help your students create a mental process, which includes their own problem solving strategies. This will help them throughout life, as problem solving skills can be used in every subject.
4- Knowledge-building dimension. Grow the kind knowledge that that readers bring to a text, and make sure it grows though further interactions with texts.

What Brings Me to Teaching- Zahra

What Brings me to Teaching
    At a very young age, I wanted to hold every baby and play with every kid there was in the world. My grandma used to babysit and I was so excited to have babies and toddlers to my house. I was the youngest of three, and often very lonely; maybe that is why I loved having other children over. I remember constantly asking my mom if she could get pregnant just so we could have another baby in the family. She usually laughed at my face and told me three was enough. At the age of seven, I knew I wanted to do a profession that had something to do with children (despite me being a child at the age as well). As time went on, I remember playing the “teacher game” and teaching the toddlers my grandma babysat A, B, Cs. It was a passion, that I was aware of a very young age. As time went on, I volunteered to teach religious classes in my masjid. At 16, I had my own classroom and I was teaching second graders about Islam. I was making lesson plans with other teachers. It was a learning process and I loved every second of it. Fast forward to twenty-two, it has been seven years, and I still volunteer to teach religious education class and I still love it. I love the interactions I have with my students, the history I get to teach about Islam, and creating lesson plans. My religion and my grandma were the reason how I found a passion for teaching.


 
 “It’s 3 AM, what are you doing up? You have school tomorrow!” My mom often screamed this line to me MULTIPLES times. I was in seventh grade, and what would a seventh grader do at 3 AM? You might guess I might be texting or watching TV but in reality, I was reading books. Some parents would push their children to go to the library, while my parents would avoid it like the plague. I scared my parents by the amounts of books I would check out, and not being able to put the book down. If I had to shower, I would take my book with me. No one could take my love for reading. Still to this day, once I am hooked on a book I don't stop reading. It has affected my sleep and sometimes would affect my education. But, books are the reason why I chose to be a history major. I always loved history because history felt like a big story, and I loved stories. Stories are what I lived for, and love learning and reading them. Stories are the reason why I chose history as a major to teach.
   
Growing up, I really enjoyed being around being around youth. I started working with ninth graders, and tenth graders in different youth programs and started mentoring them. Soon, I realized that many adolescents need a  emotional support than younger students. Many of these students, have so much potential and are so intelligent but due to different circumstances, they are not able to see that, which is heartbreaking. My goal as an educator is that I want them to see that they are capable of anything if they put their mind to it. Even as a resident assistant, I enjoy working with incoming freshman. I fell in love with working with the older students and realize I wanted to teach secondary because of the connections I made while mentoring and spending time with them. My passion for history,  working with children is the reason why I want to teach.

9/17 History: A way of learning how to learn? - Kyle Trosien

I fell in love with History in my 9th grade World History class. However, instead of merely having us see history as "fact collecting" (Wineburg, as cited in Buehl, 2013) our teacher utilized the principles of history to help us learn better universally across the academic spectrum. There were high expectations for us as young students that, in the beginning, seemed unfair and inappropriately difficult for our age. As young students we were responsible for 12 page plus papers, projects, and intensive, time consuming readings. While I do not recall most of the information taught in the class, what I did learn was the intangible skills of reading critically and being able to talk about those readings in a classroom setting. We were thinking critically about everything that came through the classroom. Our teacher was also a lawyer, and so we looked at everything like we were in a courtroom.

            The readings of literacy all discuss the importance of reading comprehension, and the tendencies to simply skim, or “pseudoread” the text. We as teachers ought to be working to help instill the critical eye of a lawyer into each of our students. Critical reading is examining the text for arguments, meaning, implications, reasonings, evidence, and errors to take hold of and find the truth. History, I find, is one of the most fertile grounds for achieving this end and enabling the idea that "comprehension instruction must be embedded in the teaching of the discourse of an academic discipline" (Buelh, 74). This is due to the factual reliability of information in History being on the same level as Science but with variability in interpretation and significance. There are some manners of debate on how events occurred, discrepancies, and gaps of knowledge. However, there is much of History that is concrete in most Historians minds as factual. And that perspective would hold unless more information and new discoveries were made. Where History gains greater fertility of critical thinking, is the implication of History. Our past shapes the world as it is today. Debate and scrutiny surround the world Historical applications and interpretations. When we look at facts of past events with the eye of a lawyer, we can achieve the education of critical reading that pertains to all other subjects in general education.

            Students should be encouraged to wonder, debate, cross-examine, search for evidence, and be able to present that evidence before others in a coherent way that enables us to be able to make more informed decisions. The following video outlines ideas of thinking critically, which heavily remind me of the way a lawyer would interact with sources.

Just as the video says, we should be able to formulate questions, gather information, apply that information to understand the concepts, assumptions and interpretations, then consider the implications, and finally explore other points of view.

The final and one of the most important pieces of application for us as teachers can be found at nearing the end of Buehl chapter 2. “Teachers can, and indeed need to teach reading compression. Comprehension instruction emphasizes explicit modeling and support of fundamental comprehension processes: making connections to background knowledge, generating questions, creating visual and mental images, making inferences, determining importance, synthesizing, monitoring, and problem solving” (Buehl, 74). The key phrase that I find in this is modeling. As teachers, it is so important for us to not assume that our students will be able to critically analyze a source without first being educated on how to do so. As such, we need to be able to model that to our students and use our experiences in the classroom to help them gain the skill of critical thinking.

9/17 Reading in the Disciplines and Instructional Comprehension Strategies -Patrick Kelly

Literacy is a vital skill to the success of our students in school. In the past literacy instruction fell solely on the shoulders of English Language Arts teachers. It was their responsibility to teach reading strategies, differentiate reading abilities, elements of literature, and more. However, with the introduction of the Common Core State Standards, every teacher has the responsibility of teaching literacy. These standards push for higher levels of comprehension such as analyzing text relationships, identifying structure, explaining points of view, synthesizing arguments and more. In Buehl Chapter 2, he explains the importance of comprehension instructions by stating, “Comprehension instruction leads to learning from current text and builds capacity to learn independently from future texts". Students are able to make inferences, ask questions, and construct arguments. This connects back to meta-cognition and the ability of students to think about the thought process of the author and making connections across the texts.

For example, when reading history students must have the ability to identify vocabulary, historical references, historical perspectives, along with charts, graphs, and maps in connection in the context of CCSS. This is a major change for history instruction. According to Buehl, “Schools typically socialize students into seeing history as a chronology of events and the explanations of social, political, and economic phenomenon offered in texts as a truthful and unexamined master narrative” (P.33). History is more then facts and memorization. It is making connection across disciplines and time periods to other major themes and ideas. The goal of these literacy strategies is not to isolate them from one another in each subject, but build off each others give students the ability to analyze a text with a specific lens.

However, the challenges of reading in history are great. The first challenge that the book, Reading in the Disciplines: The Challenges of Adolescent Literacy mentions is "meeting the needs of students with an array of reading abilities." History teachers must have the ability to differentiate literacy instruction. This can be done by scaffolding texts, preforming close reads, or small group instruction. Teachers are using data from their formative assessment drive these instructional practices. The second challenge is "teach all students to reason in the complex ways that the disciplines require". Students need to be able to explain what they are reading, make real world applications. How do students analyze the text they are reading?

There are many ways for students to grapple with text and find meaning. Two comprehension instructional strategies that this week's reading brought up were "talking to the text" and "Accountable Talk". Each are beneficial to students and allow students to use critical thinking and meta-cognition in coordination with the text. Talking to the text, includes marking up the text and making annotations. Steps include circling words or sentences you don't understand, starring the main ideas underlining supporting evidence, and most importantly writing comments or questions in the margins. Accountable talk uses others students to develop rigorous discourse about the text. Students are encouraged to use starter phrases, question, challenges each other. Both of these strategies are student-centered and focuses on independent thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7Zbie1R_ec (Talking to the Text Demo)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AE8BHzPzna8 (Accountable Talk Demo)

Discussion Question:

What comprehension instructional strategy do students learn best from : Talking to the Text or Accountable Talk? What are possible advantages or disadvantages of each? How can these strategies be used in together?