Ideas for literacy explorations, response to Readicide, enduring questions and concerns about content literacy, inquiry project process, further understanding of reading as a learner in your discipline.
There are several things that I'm interested in incorporating into my literacy explorations and inquiry project. One of the things is this idea of an article of the week, another is a graphic organizer. I think both of these will help my students get a better understanding of vocabulary. I agree with Readicide in that a lot of times teachers are teaching for the test rather than critical thinking. I also agree that in a lot of cases students aren't reading nearly enough and it's affecting their understanding of not only the subject matter but also the world around them. I think that it's important to incorporate reading no matter the subject and this class has definitely given me some ideas to use so that my students can learn for the test and for critical thinking.
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I am also interested in graphic organizers and plan to do my research inquiry project on using graphic organizers before the students start to read an article or text or whatever the reading might be! Students definitely need to be taught critical thinking skills and unfortunately standardized testing is not going to get them to think deeply about concepts...
ReplyDeleteI am also excited about the idea of an Article of the Week. I feel like this is a great way to implement literacy into the classroom despite the content area of that class. Just like Readicide talks about, the fact that teachers are finding themselves simply teaching "to the test", means that our students are losing the reason behind the reading and will eventually simply burn out. In order for our students to become citizens that can contribute to society in a meaningful way, they are going to need the critical thinking skills that are necessary.
ReplyDeleteIt's so good to see that you have some beginning reading strategies to take to your content teaching. I will be very interested in how you include them in teaching the content and the response from your students. Including article of the week and using graphic organizers - especially during and after reading can certainly help to support the critical thinking. Often class discussion helps with encourage students to think critically - beginning to find their views by talking with others and seeing the different perspectives that their peers might have about events and topics from articles and reading.
ReplyDeleteLook forward to hearing more about your experiences at our Monday afternoon seminar!
A big "yeah!" to the article of the week and graphic organizer idea. I've always found graphic organizers to help me as a student, and the article of the week idea would inspire the students to fire up some creative energy and put their critical thinking caps on. These are the type of strategies absolutely necessary to avoid the "teaching to the test" syndrome.
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