#7 Final Reflection

Although this semester has seemed to have flown by, the lessons I've learned in "The Teaching of Reading" will surely stick between my ears. Through the literacy engagements I've practiced on my students I have gained a deeper understanding of how to metacognitively assess literacy content in the classroom. How my students read, how they disassemble complex political information, and how they reconstruct that information into their own prose are essential understandings gained from this course that I'll carry with me to my own teaching experiences in the future.

I have learned various strategies through examples set forth in Gallagher's Readicide, as well as the different strategies shared in class and through my own personal research with the inquiry paper. This class has helped me formulate my own philosophy of teaching even further by allowing me to generate specific examples of literacy development across my teaching internship. It has helped me see what strategies work and don't work with today's hyperextended learner. The technology literacy engagements seem to be the way of future education strategies to engage learners in a more comprehensive understanding of being technologically literate. However, that is not meant to leave traditional literacy methods in the dust, but will challenge us as educators to create new ways to stimulate our ADD students into taking the time to use their own literacy skills.

#6 literacy engagement

For one of my literacy engagements, I decided to take a cue from Dr. Webb's syllabus and incorporate the use of technology to support my students' literacy learning. In my AP Government class, the unit we are covering dealt with political parties, and the platforms of the main two political parties. Instead of giving my students lecture notes that would dictate the platforms of the main political parties, I decided to embed YouTube clips from five of the US's main political parties (Republican, Democrat, Green, Constitution, Libertarian) and have the students seek out their own understanding of what each party's platform was.

After each video clip (and during) I would pose questions relating to the specific terminology used by each party's pundits and ask which specific examples of issues found in each platform the pundits pointed out. As well as the potential cleavages that each party might address. By reminding the students of each clip's connection to the themes discussed in the unit, I believe this allowed for each student to gain a better concept of what they were looking for in each clip and allow the students to develop their own analysis in a way that could connect back to the material in the lesson. I showed a clip from Barack Obama's 2000 convention speech. The next clip was from McCain's convention speech, then Lieberman's speech, as well as an interview with the Green Party presidential candidate, one from the Constitution party, and a political rally speech from a member of the Libertarian party. For each clip I required the students to draw four boxes on their paper and write in their own words the platform of the party in one box, the key words used by the pundits in the second box, the potential cleavages addressed by the pundit in the third box, and, in the fourth box, their own personal response/reflection to the clip. My students really took the clips very seriously and asked tough questions after each clip. I think the actual visual element of seeing a party member speak the platform of the party was a lot more effective and made a bigger impact on connecting the unit's content in the mind of my students than if I had just read out the platforms in lecture not format. Some of the speeches were easier to interpret than others, but overall the students really got into it. They asked if we could watch more examples of party platforms from parties outside of the US. Overall, I think the clips really helped put in perspective the varying opinions of political issues in the US and gave a broader overview of real world examples than those just covered in the textbook.

#5 literacy engagement reflection

For one of my literacy engagements, I employed the technique of a visual graphic organizer as a summation of the week’s notes by allowing the students to actively participate in the formulation of the graphic organizer that I displayed on the smart board. It allowed the students to be actively engaged in the discussion and gave them an opportunity to help out their team members who were filing in the blanks in the graphic organizer.

Since my class is split up into 4 different groups I had four different media graphic organizers on the smart board. Each graphic organizer increased in difficulty and content. I did this on purpose, to show how the graphic organizer may not only be used for simple vocab retention but also as a way for students to organize their own ideas and more complex thought processes related to the content at hand.

The first web was related to public opinions, where the student would fill in key vocabulary. Second web was types of influence on political socialization, which dealt with a more in depth understanding of a complex concept in the unit. Third was types of cleavages in public opinion, which connected the first graphic organizer to the second. Last, the types of media and their cleavages of options. On this, I challenged students to not only take from the previous three but also to pull from their own prior experience what kinds of media would relate to the three distinct concepts dealt with in the unit, covered by the last three graphic organizers. This last graphic organizer proved to be the most valuable, considering it was primarily a student formulated note taking strategy with all content written on the board from student discussions, not from notes, as from the prior three graphic organizers.

In this literacy engagement I learned that graphic organizers can not only help the students reorganize the content given through notes and vocab but also can help organize group discussion into a more meaningful synthesis of content information.

#4 Literacy Engagement Reflection

In my US History inclusion class at Baldwin High we are always struggling to find new ways to trick the students into reading historical documents. For my bellringer today I had my students read an article about Mary McLeod Bethune and answer some basic comprehension questions afterwards, which were listed at the bottom of the article. I noticed that some of the students, maybe even a majority of them, skipped down to read the questions first and then skimmed the text for the appropriate answers, not bothering to read the remainder of the surrounding material for context. So, I decided to employ the “popcorn reading” method for the remainder of the time. One student began reading, and at the end of the paragraph that student would pick a classmate to continue the reading, and so on. I found that this method engaged the students and kept their attention. Students who would have normally skimmed (or not read at all) were now able to answer the questions with a richer understanding of the subject matter. Popcorn reading also helps to develop public speaking skills, encouraging students who might not normally be active in class to have a direct involvement in the proceedings.

Overall, I believe that popcorn reading has a lot more of a personal impact on engaging a majority of the classroom as opposed to my lecturing the text aloud or imploring the students to individually sift through the page long text themselves. Although some students struggled with reading aloud and battled with specific terminology, overall, I believe that through fostering an environment of understanding and patience with readers that might be at different levels that this can help elevate not only those individuals specific reading handicaps, but also proved beneficial to the entire classroom's understanding of the text.

#3 response to readicide

Overall, I think Readicide lived up to its name and won me over as an interesting read considering it's anti-reading content. After I'd finished it I realized the book gave voice to some of the same troubling literacy issues I've noticed during my time as a student teacher, and Gallagher's suggestions for correcting said issues were insightful. He writes from a very opinionated, somewhat sardonic point of view---he believes he's right about the decline of reading in public schools, and the passion evident in his prose is persuasive.

I found one passage particularly interesting. Gallagher is dismayed when his students aren't familiar at all with a majority of the real-world issues described in an issue of Newsweek. He decides to order his class a weekly subscription (after an extensive search for funding), and asks his students to, among other things, decide "which article in the magazine is least newsworthy," and to "pick three articles and rewrite their headlines." This kind of hands-on manipulation of the news would seemingly immerse the student in the subject matter, and the creativity called for would certainly stimulate a rush of critical thinking, which I believe is vital to a well rounded public education.

This led me to employ my own version of this literacy engagement technique. Instead of Newsweek, I stole copies of the new york times from GCSU campus and brought them to my students at Baldwin High School. Considering our unit in AP US Government dealt specifically with the media's impact on American's political culture. I felt that this type of media dissection would prove invaluable to assessing my student's understanding of the conceptual content discussed throughout the unit. Each student was challenged to find an article that showed a potential cleavage in public opinion, or in other words, an article that would highlight difference and diversity among social class, or race, or religion, or region. The students would list the facts of the article and the feelings the article invoked. Feelings such as bias in the authors point of view, groups of people who would be offended or pleased by the article, and the students own opinion of the validity of the article. Overall, this literacy engagement proved very challenging to my students, yet also led to an interesting class discussion over which articles in a mainstream newspaper directly related to the issues covered in class. It seemed to connect real world events into the theoretical concepts that would have easily drifted over their sleeping 15 year old heads. Thank you, Mr. Gallagher, for the tip.