Readicide

The decline in student interest for reading has been a controversial topic for a while among educators.  As standardized testing becomes more popular, Kelley Gallagher mentions that reading interests decline.  I thought this was an interesting statement.  There is still resistance to use standardized testing and there’s debate around that as well.  So when Gallagher states that some teachers may not focusing on interest reading but instead teaching reading to the test, students lose interest in reading.

I could see this being an issue.  As a future teacher, I try to focus on finding texts that will interest my students before I introduce the material to the class.  Then, I will give the students background knowledge and explain the importance of the text and how it relates to them.

I have some students that are at a lower reading level that love to read.  I was one of those once I figured out why I was having a hard time reading myself as a student in elementary and middle school.

I also remember not learning how to “critically” read a text until almost 8th grade.  Many times the teacher would read and we would follow along and journal about what we read afterwards.  I didn’t learn to ask “why?” or “what did I just read?” until 7th and 8th grade.  I had already created reading habits that didn’t work well for critically analyzing a text.  I was a “fake reader.”  As Gallagher mentions, many students are falling into this.  I am happy that there are methods given on how to help students avoid losing interest in reading.

I Read it, but I Don't Get it

I thought this was a very interesting read.  I have read a few works by Kelly Gallagher on how to teach students about writing.  I am so excited to see books like this written by Tovani.

As a student, I remember struggling to learn how to be an "active/engaged" reader.  I still will catch myself blindly reading through a text and realize that I don't remember anything that I just read.  It has happened a lot for me over the years.  This book, however, has some amazing strategies for helping teach our students how to overcome this type of reading.

First of all, I love being able to share stories with my students to show them that I am trying to help them achieve.  So, by telling them that I have read with the same struggles would help them connect with what I am trying to teach.  It would help bring the learning to them in such a way they have a connection and motivation to learn.

Social Justice

Social justice is an important topic among educators.  It is the act of creating positive change.  We can all do this, whether it's in our classrooms or in daily activities.  As educators, we need to think of how we can implement this in our classroom and teach this concept to our students.

First of all, teachers should not look at implenting social justice as an add on to their lessons.  Our lessons show be focused around social justice.  This could be as simple as connecting the lesson to the everyday lives of our students.  We should be thinking about this connection for our lessons to begin with.  When I think back on when I was a student, I didn't stay engaged with an assignment or lesson unless I knew how it related to my life.  Even now, I hear students walking down the halls asking each other when they're ever going to use certain parts of lessons.

Secondly, if students know they can make a positive change, they will be more likely to act.  Back in high school we had to do community service projects to graduate.  Many classmates complained about how boring or time consuming it was.  I always enjoyed doing the community service, but I saw the positive effects it had on those I helped.  But, our teachers never mentioned why it was important to us to participate in community service.  Many families got the help they needed to get back up on their feet and some of the people in nursing homes had a little bit of joy brought back into their lives.

Lastly, social justice is important to our classrooms for many reasons.  It helps bring students together.  Students learn they have a voice and can change what is going on in the world around them, they can stop negative things happening in the school.  Students also get to connect better with what they are learning.  The better they connect to the lessons, the more they will comprehend and they will lead themselves to a higher level of thinking.

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/creating-classrooms-for-social-justice-tabitha-dellangelo

Philosophy of Education

When thinking about teaching and methods of how to teach, we are given so much information of the "best ways" to teach and the "worst ways."  Research shows us the positive outcomes to certain methods of teaching.  Why is it not every teacher teaches to their students in the "best ways?"

As teachers, we want to give our students the best chance for success.  This usually means giving them information.  However, we do this at such a rapid pace, we may sometimes forget to help make connects from our lessons to the world our students are currently living in.  When this happens, we've all seen it, the students start to not care about what they are learning.

As students lose or never gain an interest in learning, we have to ask ourselves, "What could I do better?"  Teachers have the ability to make learning a fun and creative thing for students.  We should be finding new ways to teach the same materials that were taught to us.  Think about what would help get our students engaged in the learning rather than "regurgitate" the information we give to them daily.  As teachers, we should not be using what is referred to as the "banking" method of teaching.

Student success first begins with effective ways of teaching.  I know that as a student, I have always enjoyed learning.  I never saw any down-side to it.  However, as I got older, I got bored doing the same routine over and over again.  Show up, sit down, take notes, lunch, take notes, go home, and repeat.  In middle school, I started to lose interest in school.  I began wondering why we were learning what we were learning and if it was even useful to us.  As students, we were told that it would help us in "the real world."  But, it never clicked until junior year of high school when we started applying for colleges.

Now, I thought it was interesting to read that the "banking" system of education is referred to as oppressing students and their creativity.  I had never heard of that before.  I plan to do more reading on this topic to further my knowledge of the subject.

Assessing and Evaluating Students' Learning

This was a very interesting article to read.  Many different teachers and people feel there are many different ways to assess a students' learning.  With all of the studies that are around about how to assess and evaluate a students' learning, not everyone is using those methods in their classrooms.

What I liked about this article is it mentions that as teachers, we have the ability to chose what we emphasize as important.  We will then create our lessons with that in mind.  Our students then need to know what we are putting importance on for them to learn.  Therefore, we need to be aware of our choices in the classroom and how we will be evaluating and assessing our students. 

My eyes were opened to the idea that some assessments are actually "correct answer" assessments (225).  While we start assessing our students, we need to be aware of how our assessments are affecting our students in their educational confidence.