Blog 5

Wow, I have to say that I was a skeptical of the usefulness of this course when I started.  The experience I have had with my other secondary education courses has been less than stellar.  However, this class certainly sets the standard for how useful, positive and productive a teacher education course can be.  I am very happy to have taken this course because it was a similar subject to another secondary education course I took but I feel like this one has given me concrete ideas and methods that I can use while student teaching and in my career. 

To begin with, I have learned that I can and should incorporate some form of reading into every unit I teach.  I can remember reading out of the book as sort of a punishment in high school and I think that has to change with my classes because reading is an important skill for students to develop and use.  In order to help students do this, there are a few things I need to do with every reading lesson.  First, never turn the students loose on the text and just expect them to understand.  I need to do pre-reading activities such as previewing the text and making inferences about what it could mean to get the students thinking then have them actively read with during reading activities.  Lastly, the after reading is most critical to understanding and comprehending a text so I must have the students ask questions, annotate the text or do a graphic organizer, some activity that applies the text to a deeper level.  I want to have a wide variety of texts for students to read because when the text is interesting, students are likely to be more engaged in the reading.

Next, writing is a very important job skill and most students have had bad experiences with writing.  I will do my best to incorporate some form of level one writing into my classes every day.  This is very informal writing and could be anything from filling in guided notes to working on a bell or exit quiz.  The purpose of this writing is just to get students writing down thoughts and ideas and not to be judgmental.  In terms of level two and three writing, these are going to be done less often in my classroom, probably a couple of times a semester.  I really like the level two writing because it allows me to just focus on one or two characteristics and not have to give a lesson on all the characteristics I want to look for in the writing.  In addition, this is going to be the majority of writing students do in a job.  A writing prompt is key to helping students feel like the writing is important and not too restrictive.  Things like making the audience real, giving students a rubric, and keeping the topic broad enough that there can be multiple answers is critical when it comes to writing prompts. 

Third, I have a good understanding of what critical literacy is and what I can do to incorporate it into my classroom without being overly aggressive about it.  In another course I took, we discussed mainly just the philosophy of critical literacy and I never had a good idea of how to incorporate it.  Working with digital text is a great time to work critical literacy into the picture because you can have students question the text, question any biases or sources/lack of, and many digital texts are up to date on social issues that can be talked about.  Critical literacy needs to happen mainly on the part of the students though.  I liked learning about how to make a good discussion, which I think, can happen in many parts of agriculture such as conventional vs. organic, cloning, genetically modified organisms, climate change, and immigrant workers.  Each of these does not have a definite answer, which is important when having a true, honest discussion where students can come up with their own questions on the subject.  Critical literacy fits into many segments of other forms of instruction and I think it is my job as a teacher to teach students to question and not just pass things off as true because someone else said it.

Overall, this course has given me some very good ideas of how to improve the learning of my students.  Reading, writing, using digital texts, helping ELLs, asking students to critically analyze, all these skills will improve my teaching as well as my students experience and learning.  I liked the fact that Amy modeled the lessons for us because it is easy for me to recall those lessons and then adapt it to my content area.  I also know how certain types of activities or lessons should be run and how to get students to the ultimate goal of the activity.  The ball is now in my court.  I know that some of my lesson plans I have created need some work to do all these things I have said I need.  Additionally, I need to constantly remind myself not to use writing or reading something as a punishment because it is very easy to fall into the trap.  Literacy is my job just as much as it is the English teacher’s job.  I have to do my part to be sure students are learning as much as they can and are prepared for a job or continued education when they leave my classroom.