Week Four

For the articles and NIL - How does literacy "work" in your content area?  What connections are you making? What new strategies are you taking away (specific to your content area)?

The article by Nancy Frey took me back to my history teacher my final two years of high school. He was by far my favorite teacher and is probably the reason why I'm on track now to be just like him - a high school history teacher and soccer coach. As I began reading the article, shortly thereafter I came across the four instructional strategies for gaining student attention - demonstrations, discrepant events, visual displays and thought provoking questions - and I immediately thought of my junior year history class and senior year world history class. He would often have us recreate in small plays significant political events in US History. I remember we brought electric candles to class to act out Paul Revere's famous ride, one of by land two if by sea. Over the course of one week, in particular, I remember we spent a lot of time outdoors in the parking lot collecting gravel rock and stones. We did this to try and gain an understanding for the scale of work that went into the Great Wall of China. It's important to visualize things in order to truly appreciate them. As far as what I want in my classroom, I want to offer visual aids to help my students connect the material. We've all had teachers that show an endless number of movies and videos, I don't want to be like that at all. Having children put thought into what they are doing will also help them absorb it, understand it and later recall it.

The three types of assessment are very important in the classroom. As it relates to my content area, I'm not exactly sure as I'm not yet In the classroom. Summative assessments are the simplest and quickest way to test for understanding, comprehension and regurgitation of information there is. This would be a simple quiz about The Treaty of Versailles, a test about the Spanish Inquisition or an end of year exam encompassing the entire US History curriculum for tenth graders. Formative assessments take place when teachers take information from student work, classroom observation and group discussion and adapt teaching to the needs of that student. I could simply give students comprehension checks following a reading about Benjamin Franklin. This allows me to gauge comprehension levels, but it also gives students time to reflect on what they've read and an opportunity to digest the material. Observing reading strategies and comprehension is also a form of formative assessment, as it gives the teacher an opportunity to understand how the student reads, learns and thinks about course material. The last part of formative assessment is performance. This gives students an idea of what teachers expect from them when reading content. The use of a rubric is common here as it allows students to see if they are below, right at or above standard. This is the most reflective piece of formative assessment and in one example, a student would gather information from two separate sources recalling the same event and allow them the opportunity to understand and comprehend why they may be so different from the other (i.e. recollection of the Million Man March from an African-American and also from a white man). Diagnostic assessments are the last type of assessment in the classroom. These usually are not conducted by the teacher, instead by a reading specialist, special education teacher or school psychologist. In working with the teacher, school administrators hope to determine the students' overall reading level and what strategies must be delivered to help the student progress in reading and comprehension levels. It is here that a student may be found to have a learning disability, or maybe even that he/she works and learns better in groups. These findings would be very interesting to see how they would be applied from subject to subject, some students are simply better at Math that they are in English, or some simply memorize dates and names as it relates to History  better than they can understand formulas and theorems. I really enjoyed reading about assessments, it certainly has the best interest of the student at heart, and more times than none I know it will get to the bottom of what may be hindering a student while also giving the teacher a plan of action.

Daniels 3 and 4 - Choose one writing strategy in each chapter to give a brief explanation of the strategy and then give an example from your content area about how you might use the strategy in your course.  So, this could look like a list of definitions and examples.

Chapter 3 - Writing Break. This allows students to stop and think about the material that's just been presented to them. Children rarely get to actually sit and think about what they've been engaging in, whether it be a lecture, group work or even a film. Allowing students time to take a small break to write what they think about what they've just heard will give them the ability to better critically think about the material. Then having them talk about what they've written will improve retention and understanding. This would be a great way to help students learn about a topic like The Revolutionary War. Showing them maps, informational videos, pictures, providing dates and locations can be very overwhelming for a topic that is so broad and detailed. Having the class quietly write about what they've just read after watching a slide show about Bunker Hill would certainly help them take in and also think about the critical moments to that specific event.

Chapter 4 - KWL. These charts ask students three questions; What do you KNOW about the topic? What do you WANT to know about the topic? What did you LEARN about the topic? I really like this form of teaching and learning, it certainly makes students responsible for their own learning. Asking the students beforehand what they already know and also what they hope to learn about a topic makes them go into the content very aware. And then asking them when the material has been covered what they've learned a) tells them if they've learned what they wanted to learn, b) if what they knew beforehand was accurate and c) if they've truly learned something new. I really like this because it's applicable to just about anything history related. If you're covering The Cold War a student may already know it was a time of tension between the Soviet Union and the United States and several NATO members but may want to know why exactly relations between the two had deteriorated the way they did. At the end of instruction they may then state they learned the The Cold War started at the end of World War II and that the Cuban Missile Crisis could've ended with a nuclear attack on American soil. This is a fantastic learning strategy and hope to utilize it in the future.