Finding the Right Balance

Say:
What Matters: Meeting Content Goals through Teaching Cognitive Reading Strategies with Canonical Texts by Styslinger, Ware, Bell, and Barrett
Bridging English by Milner and Milner
Readicide by Gallagher
When Kids Can't Read by Beers
Reading Better, Reading Smarter by Appleman

This has been one of the more helpful sets of readings that we have done.  I find myself thinking fairly often, "This is great, but how are we supposed to balance these practices while teaching the books that we are required to teach?"  I think that ideally, we would be able to teach whatever we thought our students would react to best, but here we are.

I think that What Matters was a helpful article in this regard because it talks about specific ways that teachers encouraged literacy by using these different required texts.  I personally responded well to the use of visualization during The Crucible and The Great Gatsby because one of my internship classes is during a reading seminar, where we are teaching struggling readers different strategies.  We taught them visualization last week by having them draw out scenes from The Things They Carried. Gatsby is also a good text to teach with visualization because it is easy for students to imagine huge parties and old cars.  I also liked the idea of teaching how to make predictions.  These things may seem like obvious ways to read for us, but they are not always apparent to struggling readers.  Having them make predictions as they read forces them to think while they are reading.

One of the most important things that Readicide said in this chapter is about supporting student reading throughout all of their school careers.  We used to believe that once we taught them how to read, we could just give them anything and they would be able to handle it, but now we know that they need to be supported over time.  We need to work them up to different texts, and read some texts with them to talk them through it and help them to understand.  One of the things that I struggle with is taking notes in the margins of books.  Gallagher suggest that we tell students to underline things and to write things in the margins, but when I was in school, and often still today, I never knew what I was supposed to underline, or what people were writing in their novels.  One of my English professors presented her copy of Emma to us one day and it was covered in markings.  All I could think was, "How did she know what was important enough to mark in that book?"  I thin that people often struggle with this and that there needs to be a way that we guide our students into making notes in books.

Milner and Milner, Appleman, and Beers are our methods texts for this week.  Milner and Milner does a great job of showing us how we need to move from reader response to interpretive community, and into formal analysis.  Beers and Appleman give us great methods for prereading, during reading, and post-reading strategies.  Between our class at DJJ and our internship this semester, I have found these texts helpful.  During my internship, I have used tea party from Beers and found that on its own it was alright, but it works well as a way to enter into a discussion about a text, or about a specific topic about a text.  I have also found that reading to students is helpful as well.  It relieves the pressure off of them from worrying about if they are going to have to read so that they can focus on the text.


Do:
For my do section this week I am presenting some student artifacts representing some things that I have done in my internship.  The first is a list of discussion questions.  These were answered by students in pairs after they participated in Beers’ tea party activity with a poem by Shel Silverstein.  The students did tea party then answered these questions in pairs and finally we discussed them as a class.  The tea party went over well, but I could have modelled it better.  The students were having trouble understanding what they should talk about with the people that had other lines.  They were more focused on putting a poem together than talking about the meaning of the lines they had.  The other artifacts in this Do are from a lesson I did on The Things They Carried.  Students were told to highlight what they thought was the most important passage and were then required to draw a picture of it and talk about it with a partner.  This also led into a class discussion that turned out pretty well.  Students were adamant about the discussion because they had put so much effort into these drawings that they believed that the passage they drew was indeed the most important.