EDUC 650 will have lasting effects on my current and future students. Prior to this course, my students did not receive very much experience with utilizing reading strategies in my classroom. My students also had all of their literacy instruction done outside of my classroom. The students did not see me as a reading teacher since I do not teach the subject of Reading to them, my teaching partner does. I expected my students to read material during my class, but I expected them to come into my classroom knowing reading strategies to use to help them understand the reading.
During this course, I learned several before, during and after reading strategies that can be used in my classroom and utilized some of the strategies learned about in our text and discussions with my students. The two strategies I have used the most with my students have been the pre-reading assessment and coding text. The coding text strategy can be a very creative strategy for students As a teacher, I can set a basic coding system for the students but can mix up what the codes look like based on the topic of the reading. An example of this is when my students did a reading about Christopher Columbus. During the Christopher Columbus reading, we mixed up what the codes would look like and decided to use anchors, sailboats, and other fun images that related to the content being read. The students could also use the traditional coding signs but could be more expressive and creative through the fun image coding. The students have found that coding their text makes it easier to have discussion with their peers and their discussions have much more substance. Prior to using the coding strategy, students would just say their answer to a question I posed but would not have a discussion around it. It was a struggle to get my students to share things about their reading and have a deeper depth of discussion and what they shared was all on the surface and shallow answers to questions. Through coding I have discovered that I often end up cutting off discussions to keep us moving along. In the past, I also saved the discussion for the end of the reading. Now, students have discussions after each paragraph or section of reading. Students are having so much more discussion and a much deeper discussion through this model. This strategy is so quick and easy to use. It doesn't take a lot of time so it doesn't interfere with the flow of their reading which could negatively impact their comprehension. My students are displaying much deeper understanding, having elaborate discussions, and engaging more about the content they are learning. These are all literacy components that were integrated into our Social Studies class. Our Social Studies class mirrored what the students were doing during their Reading instruction time.
The main focus of this course was how to incorporate content reading components into each subject matter. One of the major components of literacy is vocabulary and vocabulary acquisition. Vocabulary is a very important component of the math curriculum because if students do not understand the math vocabulary, then they cannot answer a question or solve a problem correctly/accurately. The Math Word Wall has become a prominent focus within my classroom. It is an interactive word wall that has math vocabulary words added to it as we encounter them in our lessons. The newest vocabulary words are showcased by being individually hung and able to be seen from all areas of the room. As new vocabulary words are introduced, the individually hung words are replaced with the new ones, while the old words are hung on rings on the word wall that are separated by math strands. Compiling all of the words onto rings allows the students to still look back at past math vocabulary words at their convenience. This also allows students to see how prior knowledge and learning ties into the current learning. The math word wall has been my first attempt at making the vocabulary related to our math content more accessible and easier to understand for my students and cater to students' vocabulary acquisition and retention.
One of the best practices we learned about was offering more student choice. Since this course, I have been looking for ways to incorporate student choice into each subject each day. Some lessons students receive more choice than others, along with some subjects being more structured than others. During math, I try to make the entire lesson based around student choice. The students are able to create the problems we solve as a class and they also create our "Problems of the Day" each day for their classmates to complete for the next day. During Social Studies, students have options between which activities they do or which order they do the activities in. I believe the most successful choice assignment for my students so far has been our United States Important Events unit. During this unit, students were put into pairs to study an important event from United States history. Partners were chosen by students completing a Google Form choosing their top three choices from a list of events. The rest of the project requirements were decided by the class as a whole through a class discussion. Students decided how they would present their learning to their classmates, how long it needed to be, what information they would research about their event, how to assess their learning from their own research and from their classmates' research, and when the whole project needed to be completed by. During this project, I had never seen the students more engaged and determined to finish by a due date. There was not a single class period that I had to remind students of their jobs during the class period or to stay on track. Of course to get to this point, I had to go through a gradual release of responsibility with the students. I did this through gradually giving them less and less structure during prior research projects.