This week, the guiding questions to consider when reading are as follows:
1) How is fluency taught in Book Club?
2) What is critical literacy and teaching for social action?
3) What is cultural capital?
The read that you should be applying these guiding questions is Chapter 5 from Tompkins
See you all in class on Thursday!
3 comments:
Today in class we talked about what it means to be a "special needs" student and I felt that the discussion of Marcus was an interesting one. The point was mentioned that it is possible that each one of us as a student is a bit "special needs" and perhaps even a bit autistic in that we have security activities that we perform in the classroom situation. I agree with this statement because as College of Ed. students we have discussed that each one of us as a learner is different and unique and the teaching profession identifies some of these learning styles as "special needs". I think that it is important to remember when we walk into our first classroom that our students are never going to be homogenous and that by learning our students we will be able to avoid a situation like the one presented in the Marcus reading and we will be more effective teachers at the end of the day.
I always liked the idea of cultural capital and how extremely different it can be for each individual student. Cultural capital was definitely a reoccurring theme in TE 250 and it is interesting to cover it again in Tompkins for TE 402. I think it is important to make sure that, as a teacher, we respect everyone’s cultural capital and make sure it is valued. I think it would be a good idea to have someone bring in something that is uniquely important to them and share it with the class. This way, everyone gets to share something that is important to them and they can learn about each others cultural capital along the way; something that Tompkins stressed the importance of. Tompkins also touched upon schools leaving cultural capital out of the curriculum and treating the class as homogeneous, a term I got from class last week. As Trish pointed out, we need to realize our class is not going to be homogeneous and that when we get to know our students better, the better we will be at accommodating our students.
Reading fluency involves three main concepts; reading speed, word recognition, and prosody. Book clubs allows teachers to assess their student’s abilities in all three areas if ran correctly. For example, my CT has demonstrated how she runs small book clubs. They include one-on-one “read out-loud” time, silent reading time, group discussion and various types of worksheets. It seems to me that the one-on-one “read out-loud” time is the best way for my teachers to truly gauge a student’s competency in fluency.
I had the chance to run a small book club this week and it went well. It built some confidence in my ability as a language arts teacher. However, I was discouraged that my students were not performing to their best ability. The Tompkins text suggests that by third grade students should be reading approximately 100 words a minute, depending on the difficulty of the text. This seems rather high to me because I am in a third grade classroom and most of my students can not read this fast.
In retrospect, I was glad I read the Tompkins chapter, had my CT’s advice and remembered our class discussions because I would not have known where to start. In fact, I probably would have done a round robin type of reading activity because that is what I remember my teachers did. The text suggests that this approach is no longer recommended and rightfully so. I remember I felt very anxious and hesitant during these dreadful experiences and that probably contributed to me not enjoying reading when I was younger.
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