Prior to this course, I thought I was not a very good Reading teacher and my students were benefitting from not having me as their "Reading" teacher. I thought everything related to reading and learning reading strategies was for the designated Reading time in our schedule. Since my teaching partner and I have departmentalized, I thought I had "gotten out of" having to do any of the teaching of reading strategies. However, during this course I learned that I am still a reading teacher even though I do not teach the designated Reading time.
Prior to this course, I knew vocabulary knowledge was an area where students differ the most. The amount of vocabulary knowledge students have depends on their amount of exposure to reading and experiences. I knew students with a low-economic status are exposed to far less words than their peers from another social class. Students are not able to construct meaning from the words read if they have not had prior exposure or existing schema of ways to connect the vocabulary. During this class, we learned about the tiers of vocabulary: Tier 1 words are words that have essentially one meaning (i.e. lunch), Tier 2 words have multiple meaning and are used across content areas (i.e. draw), and Tier 3 words are specific to a certain content (i.e. circumference). Knowing this, I started a Math Word Wall in my classroom a year ago to focus on the tiers of vocabulary words that are used during math. The Math Word Wall has become one of my favorite components of 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. My 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.
"Two-fer" is a term I have heard before but not in the education world prior to this course. During this course, I learned a "two-fer" in education is being able to teach a subject (besides Reading) and reading strategies at the same time. This made me begin to wonder, why do we have a designated Reading time? Why are Reading standards separate from all other subjects? If all subjects should be integrating reading within it then why do we give students a stigma that reading is just a subject and not something that is interwoven throughout all subjects? In every class, students are reading something, but only during the allotted reading subject time do students recognize the reading they are doing as reading. All teachers should be using the "two-fer" strategy in their classrooms. We all need to work together as a team to develop our students as readers. The more reading strategies students know, along with their expertise with using each strategy, the better they will be able to understand what they are learning in any subject area.
I also discovered how essential it is to integrate literacy into all the other content areas. During this course, I learned several new reading strategies to use before, during, or after any reading or learning that can be used in any subject area. I was able to show how different reading strategies can be used in other subject areas through my included artifact, my Constructivist Unit. The focus of the Constructivist Unit is allowing the students to drive their learning and discover information on their own. The teacher is not their source for information, but is a guide when assistance is needed. While listening and participating in coursework online and face-to-face discussions, it was evident how much impact student talk can have in partner, small group, or large group activities. While examining textbooks and reading our class text, "Subjects Matter", it became very apparent that textbooks are often not at the proper reading level for the grade level they are made for and they do not go in-depth enough to allow students to create a deep understanding of the topics within. Textbooks cannot be used as the sole instruction to teach a subject, but rather they should be used as a resource to gain information for students. Since this course, my classroom rarely uses the textbooks provided for the subject areas I teach. Instead of relying on the textbooks I have been given, I look for additional resources, utilize technology and incorporate authentic activities to relate the content to the students to make it engaging and interesting. I am also able to give students more responsibility for their learning when they cannot just rely on a textbook for all the answers.
After taking this course, I have begun integrating more reading strategies into my daily lesson plans. The area where I have been able to integrate these strategies the best has been in Social Studies. The majority of our Social Studies classes we spend time reading to learn. Social Studies also heavily relies on being able to pull from prior knowledge to see how events and history relate and build off of one another. Since this course, I have integrated literacy and reading strategies during our Social Studies time. A specific example of this is when we learned about the First Thanksgiving. I decided to integrate a book study into my Social Studies class. I am not the "reading teacher" so my students rarely see me reading books or hear me reading a book to them. While working through our book study, several students made comments about how they felt like they had two "reading teachers" since I was working through a book with them and reading to them. The students loved having me read to them and asked if we could do more book studies during Social Studies. What more could a teacher want? My students are wanting their teacher to incorporate more reading into the other subject areas. This experience was eye-opening to me and made me realize that I need to integrate more books into my Social Studies curriculum. I need my students to see that even though I do not solely teach the Reading curriculum, I am still a reader and have the ability to teach them through the use of books. We also used anticipation guides and coding when reading and learning about Christopher Columbus during Social Studies. We have also used RAFTs (Role/Audience/Format/Topic) in Math class for the students to showcase their learning and understanding. It has become so apparent to me how easy it is to integrate different reading strategies into the curriculum I am already teaching.
One of the best practices we learned about was offering more student choice through the Constructivist approach. Since this course, I have been looking for ways to incorporate student choice into each subject each day. Some lessons I give 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. I allow the students 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, I have been giving students options between which activities they do or which order they do the activities in. I believe my most successful choice assignment 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.