Blog #7

All in all, I enjoyed my student teaching placement. It was an educational experience to see the day to day interactions amongst the students themselves and the students and teachers. I have always felt that the best way to learn anything is to just do it. Classes can only teach you so much. You need to be there, in the moment, because experience is priceless.

Discipline issues were not really a problem for me especially since this school was very supportive in this respect. For example: if a student is caught using vulgar language in the classroom, they were automatically suspended for two days. Since I am old enough to parent any one of them, students did not view me as being on their level. They accepted my authority in the classroom.

I am glad that I had the reading class. Although, as an avid reader, I would have noticed certain things about students anyway; this class gave me more tools to assess students reading comprehension abilities. That knowledge is very helpful. I believe that students who learn well and do not have problems with the material, are highly likely to be good readers and students who struggle do not read well either. The only exception to this in my mind, might be the student who is great at math but struggles to read. This would not be an everyday occurence though. Reading well plays a huge part in every aspect of schooling. It makes the difference between being a successful student who goes to college and gets a good job and the student who does not.

I really liked Readicide. I consider this book to be an essential handbook for my teaching career. There are so many suggestions to help students with reading and abstract thinking. I noticed in my student teaching that students rarely read instructions (they would rather ask questions then read what is in front of them). I found this a bit frustrating. In addition, students cannot think outside the box. They have to have every little detail explained to them. I felt like saying "think for a minute, use your head". I say this to my children all the time, but they are 9 and 10. I had hoped that teenagers would have outgrown that by now!!

Blog #6

I recently completed a literacy engagement using the "Article of the Week" strategy from Readicide. Since I am in a Computer Applications class, I found an Article in PC World magazine about the top 25 dates in computer history. I read aloud and some of the students read aloud and we discussed each segment of the article. The students seem to really enjoy it! I did a ticket out the door the next day asking for feedback on whether or not they enjoyed the class and why or why not. Every student said they liked it! One of the things that I liked about it was that I was able to get some great information about the students that read aloud. Some were good readers and did not need any help with the more difficult words and some stumbled about and mispronounced the words they did not know, etc. It is a great way to find out where your students are in their reading capabilities.

I have noticed that several of my students do not know how to skim the text for information. I have been giving some impromptu lessons on picking out key words and how to use the glossary. I have seen quite a bit of frustration in the students relating to this. They get frustrated and just guess when the answers are right in the book if they could figure out how to find them. I really feel I was able to help some of the students and it made me feel good, like I accomplished something that day.

In my own classroom,  I will definitely have a reading corner and I will use the "Article of the Week" strategy. I think it is a great way to connect what is being taught in my business education classroom with the real world. In addition, it will increase the students level of reading comprehension and help them become informed about current events and business world culture.

Blog #5

Student teaching this past week was not a very good experience for me.  The county I am in is facing a $41 million deficit.  So last week they laid off dozens of teachers for the next school year including two of the four business education teachers. One of the teachers has 10 years experience with the county and was laid off in favor of another teacher who has eight years but is also a coach. Teachers were called into the principal's office and then sometimes would come out crying or very angry.  Several teachers said to me "Are you sure you want to do this? All in all, not a very positive environment to be in. In addition, it seems that my chances of getting a job next year are about nil.

On the plus side my host teacher is very nice. The classroom I am in has computers at every desk so one of the big problems is keeping students from surfing the net or playing computer games. The type of classes that are taught in here require the teacher to be more of a facilitator. Direct lessons are short and not every day.  Students are required to use their computers to complete lessons on their computer and using the textbook. The teacher then makes her way around the room answering questions or helping students one-on-one who are having problems. I like the environment and feel very comfortable in the class.

I am still enjoying Readicide.  I intend to keep this book as a reference when I have my own class. The author has some great ideas for strategies that we can use in our classrooms to increase students' reading comprehension. I like the way he presents the book, telling stories about experiments he has tried in his classroom and how they worked out. Whenever he talks about reading, an example "the reading flow", I can completely relate. I am love to read just about anything I can get my hands on and feel a sense of devastation that so many students never get to know how that "reading flow" feels. I sincerely hope that no matter what class I eventually teach, that I can bring more students to enjoy reading and increase their reading comprehension, than if they had never been in my class.

Due 2/4/10

Some of my ideas for literacy engagements includes using Read-Alouds and shared reading. I would like to pick out a content relevant article and get the class reading.  I would also like to use Kelly Gallagher's idea of having the students circle words they are not sure of while reading individually, then move them into groups to discuss it and see if they can figure it out as a team, and then have a class discussion. Additionally, I like Gallagher's 20 questions strategy.  I will have to see how my classes are before I can make a final decision on these choices.  I will not be teaching business essentials like I thought I would be, I will be teaching accounting and computer applications. So I will have to see what will be appropriate for those topics.

I am really enjoying Readicide.  It confirms some ideas that I have had for some time about what is going on in our schools. How sad that students did not know who the vice president is? I am incredulous that students are reading for a grand total of 17 minutes in the course of an entire day of high school! What does the future hold if this failure of our education system continues. To try to address this issue, I would like to incorporate the authors idea of "article of the week" into my future classroom.  What a great way to address vocabulary, reading comprehension skills, current events and an awareness of what is going on in the world around them.

I think that my progress on my inquiry project is coming along very well. I have finished with the literature review and moving on to the next step.  My literacy engagements are going to spawn from this project and I am curious to see what the outcome will be. I am very concerned about reading in my discipline but I will need to get in the classroom and get some real experience with the students before I am really going to be able to grasp the situation. Then I will be able to figure out which learning strategies really work and discard those that do not.

Due 2/1/10

The message that Readicide is trying to convey is that we are losing so many potential readers among our students in favor of teaching them to be great test takers. NCLB has not managed to accomplish anything because it has set unrealistic goals that 100% of students will be reading up to their grade level by 2014.  This is an impossible goal to attain especially given the fact that the way they measure their progress is through their scores on multiple choice exams.  Schools are in such a hurry to wade through the curriculum teaching the students just enough to pass the state mandated exams, that they no longer teach critical thinking skills and they rarely just read.

I liked what the author said about what our goal for our students should be, helping them become "expert citizens".  Emphasizing creativity, common sense, wisdom, ethics, dedication, honesty, teamwork, hard work, knowing how to win and how to lose, a sense a fair play, and lifelong learning.  If those aren't words to live by, I don't what else is. It reminds me of something I always say about raising children.  People need to keep their eye on the ball.  Our ultimate goal is to raise independent, productive members of society.

My connection to school experiences is that many students are unprepared for college due to their severe lacking in critical thinking skills and a low level of reading comprehension abilities. It is very important for me to include content literacy strategies in my classroom.  I am going to need to teach my students the tools they will need to figure out the meaning of vocabulary words and content specific concepts. I will need to incorporate different methods to increase my students reading comprehension because most of them are not going to be reading up to their grade level when they get to my class. I will look at trade magazines and use read alouds and shared reading strategies.  I will put new words into multiple contexts and encourage my students to make examples for themselves.  I will encourage students to make inferences and predictions from the context clues and to ask questions of the text. It is my ultimate goal that they will leave my classroom better readers than when they entered it.

Due 1/27/10

As a continuation of my previous post, I am interested in finding ways to help my students better understand the vocabulary they will be confronted with in the business education curriculum. I was inspired by some of the ideas introduced in Chapter 4 of the book, Improving Adolescent Literacy. I would like to research literature on this idea of using different methods in the classroom to handle the content vocabulary.  If I can help my students with the vocabulary it should improve their overall reading skills which will be very useful for them in all areas of their education.  I would like to see what happened when other educators tried some of these different methods and if they thought the techniques were successful. I am very interested in finding out if the students responded favorably and were fully engaged, for the most part. Technical reading skills are necessary in the business world which differs from the type of reading skills that are impressed upon the students in a typical English class.  Those types of classes typically focus on reading and interpreting literature and poems.  The ability to interpret and understand multiple types of documents including directions, graphs, charts, and manuals are just some examples of what is necessary and required reading skills in the business world.  If we as educators can successfully tackle the content level vocabulary, teaching these other reading skills is going to be easier and more hopefully more interesting to students instead of a being a study in frustration for all of us.

Due 1/20/10

My perceptions of content literacy and the adolescent reader are that the majority of today's students are not reading up to their grade level. In addition, students would rather do anything but read. From my point of view as a voracious reader, I find this incredibly sad. Students who are wasting their days playing mindless video games and watching meaningless television shows have absolutely no idea what they are missing out on. Reading can be such an unbelievable experience. The reader can go any where and be anything. In my opinion, the experience of reading a book can be more invigorating than any video game or television show.

My experience involving content literacy while teaching business education at Georgia College Early College was that the students did not even know basic terms and vocabulary. My teaching partner and I found ourselves giving remedial vocabulary lessons just to be able to teach our lessons. The lessons would then involve content vocabulary. We were experimenting with how best to have the students learn the vocabulary. For example, should we just have a hand-out or should we have the students copy the definitions from the overhead, or should we give them homework to go look up the definitions.... Copying from the overhead seemed to work best, but it was very time consuming.

Effective reading in my discipline involves having a somewhat advanced vocabulary, I have found having a dictionary handy and even the internet available so I can look something up if I need clarification is essential. In the future, I would want to have several dictionarys available to the students so they can look up the words they don't know. I would begin by teaching students how to look up a word in the dictionary and then decipher its meaning. In addition, I would make sure the content vocabulary in that unit is explained. I would also like to have an open-door policy with my students so that they feel comfortable asking me about anything they don't understand.