Ensuring our students are literate across disciplines

I particularly enjoyed this reading because it brought up a lot of great ideas to get students thinking, but also hit close to home. Buehl brings up interesting points when approaching reading. “Doing reading” versus “using reading.” It’s ironic because so often in classes I dreadfully think to myself, “Ugh I have to do the reading this week and I completely forgot,” or “I don’t feel like doing the reading.” Not once have I thought, “I’m excited to be using this reading in class.” Of course, texts have made me think and I enjoy engaging with them and use them often, but I think words and how we formulate our thoughts have big power. I know I should work to change my thinking, but we too must change our students thinking. More than what Buehl suggests. We can teach students to engage and question texts, but how do we ensure this is happening outside the classroom? I understand changing their thought processes is a lot of work, but I think we need to go above and beyond and ensure students use this thinking outside of class. Some may say it will come naturally over time, as it did for many of us. But I believe we must tell our students they are “using the reading” as opposed to “tonight’s assignment we will be doing a reading.” How we word things with students is extremely important.

Our wording in our questions also makes a huge impact as Buehl argues we must teach our students to use essential questions, and not rely so much on our leading questions to get us through a discussion. Obviously, you want students to come to certain conclusions and may need to lead our students along the way, but you want your students to be doing the heavy lifting. That being said, I also found it interesting that in Chapter 5 Buehl claims that there are certain reading styles in every discipline. Essentially stating you should know what to look for and that you don’t have to close read everything. He even goes further in the reading and claims it would have been more helpful in mathematics to close read as opposed to the reading style he chose to approach in his philosophy and history classes. Obviously disciplinary experts approach reading in certain ways but isn’t it even more interesting to think about reading in this way. It appears Buehl is saying, “you don’t need all the information, just the information that is most helpful to you.” While this is a valid argument, what are we teaching our students when we approach texts in these lenses?

“The central premise of disciplinary literacy is the mentoring of students to examine, question, organize and interact with the world through a variety of different disciplinary lenses. The goals assume that teachers of a disciplines are at least to a moderate extent, insiders.” As a future teacher, I’m scared to teach my content, and I haven’t realized this fear until my methods of teaching math classes. There is a difference in passing a class and fully comprehending all the ins-and-outs. Why are things the way they are? Can I truly model what is happening in this equation? Being fully literate is an extremely important part of teaching now, especially, if we want to teach literacy ourselves. This is why we are math majors with education minors (or whatever the case may be). Either way we need to be literate in both our area of expertise and education. This legitimizes the profession, but puts a lot of pressure on new incoming teachers. Which goes back to my other questions. Do I actually know why things work the way they work? What if I don’t know how to ask the right questions? How can I ensue my students will become critical thinkers?

At the end of the day all of these questions will be answered, and eventually, after years of teaching, we will all find our confidence in ourselves not only in our discipline, but as teachers in general.

It truly is the small things that make an impact.