Synthesis

Synthesis of the Course

 I decided that I would like to answer the following four questions!

How will you incorporate comprehension instruction into your discipline?

For my final project I was able to interview my clinical instructor and I learned a lot about how he incorporated comprehension into his instruction. He actually had the students read an article together with him and then they went through the article together to point out the important parts that would help them to understand the article and that is all apart of comprehension. I believe that is what I would like to do in my classroom as well is to teach my students the important information that they need to know, and how they can pick out that information from an article honestly if they learn how to do that they will be able to succeed at anything they do!

How will you choose and teach vocabulary words?

I love games and activities to help teach vocabulary words. There was this one game that I found online called slap it and you write all the vocab words on the board and then show the way you would use the word in a sentence or the definition of the word and the students with a clean fly swatter have to swat the board. Well, that could get out of hand fast, but it would also completely engage your students in the activity.

 How will you support your students in writing texts and producing other representations in your discipline?

I hope to support my students in writing texts by having them to have little writing projects through out the semester, not only will they learn to write but I as the teacher will be better able to assess their understanding. I know that as I write about a topic I learn more about it than I would if the teacher had just told me about it. So I want to provide my students with the opportunity to learn more by writing about specific topics.

What kinds of texts will you make available to your students?

The types of texts that I hope to have available will be the type that make the students more interested in science. There was the Science behind Batman book, and I know as a student that I would have enjoyed reading that book. I hope to provide my students with not only informational, but fun and exciting texts. I hope the texts in my classroom will encourage my students to learn more and to want to learn more about science in my classroom.

Oral Language

I decided to respond to the question:
"Please reflect back on your middle school, high school, and college-level experiences in your content area. Then, please choose one discussion in your content area that stood out to you because it was especially striking, compelling, interesting, thought-provoking, or enjoyable. Please describe that experience. What did the teacher do to facilitate the discussion? How did the teacher's facilitation of the discussion compare to the "five elements of effective discussions" recommended in the Van De Weghe article?"

It was during a college lecture I was in an evolutionary biology lesson. We were talking about all the different forms of evolution. I just really enjoyed all the different types of evolution we talked about. During high school biology we did talk about the different types of evolution but it was different in the college classroom. College has more freedom to talk about evolution during high school they have to be very politically correct in the classroom in order not to offend students or students parents. My college professor guide our discussion along by really just listening to us talk and then offering other options to talk about in even more detail. For example when we were talking about genetic drift he talked about how the distance would affect it as well as the species and we were just able to look at evolution from a completely different perspective.

How my professor used the five effective elements of effective discussion. First off he started the discussion with an authentic question or rather he was checking our knowledge of genetic drift. So first off he would ask us what genetic drift is and with that question he checked out uptake on what we had learned on the previous lesson as well as with the reading that he had assigned early in the week. After that we would listen to us talk about what genetic drift was, then he would give us a scenario and ask us what would happen if organisms were put in this type of environment would genetic drift occur why or why not. We would discuss that with our partner and then we would share some of the answers with the class with that he was evaluating how well we were able to understand the material as well as our cognitive levels of how we are able to apply our knowledge to each scenario. I really think that my professor was able to apply all of the five levels of discussions.

Critical Literacy

The question that I would like to answer during this blog post is: How do you define critical literacy? What ideas do you have for fostering critical literacy among your students after reading the article?

Well when I started to think about what is critical literacy and how can my students become critically literate. I thought that critical literacy is the ability to look at a text and then understand what that text means and be able to analyze the text. I wanted to deepen my understanding of what critical literacy is and I found a website on critical literacy and it had this definition of the website, "Critical literacy is the ability to actively read text in a manner that promotes a deeper understanding of socially constructed concepts; such as power, inequality, and injustice in human relationships. Critical literacy encourages individuals to understand and question the attitudes, values, and beliefs of written texts, visual applications, and spoken words."  The website address is http://thinkcritically.weebly.com/critical-literacy.html. 

Fostering critical literacy in the classroom

The Article that I read is, "Writing Voiced Arguments about Science Topics."  

In the article there were ways to start implementing voiced arguments now and the more I thought about a few of them I thought that you could also apply them to fostering critical literacy among your students.

I quoted these directly from the article. 

1. "Immerse students in an ongoing study of opinion/argumentative “mentor texts” so that they can see how writers of opinion/ argumentative texts advance and substantiate claims as well as address counterclaims and present rebuttals." How this can be applied to fostering critical literacy after reading the article is because then the students will be able to understand the important parts of the article and also what type of voice the author is trying to portray in this article.

2. "Guide students in developing a working definition of voice based on the text exemplars." I think that everything we read has a voice and if the students are able to understand the type of voice the author is trying to portray then they will be better able to understand the article.

3. "To help students appreciate other ways to “voice” or position themselves in their opinion pieces" Also this is the same as the two before with better understanding of the article then they will be able to more deeply understand the topic. 

I think by implementing these things in my classroom that I will be able to help my students in fostering critical literacy.

Digital Text

Well this was an interesting experience. I tried a pinterest account and I tell you what it was a lot of fun and a lot of the material on pinterest was interesting to look at. My grandma is a big pinterest person she has over five hundred different boards, and she is always telling me I need a pinterest account so that I can follow her account. She is always pining different things about science on her account.

https://www.pinterest.com/rieleybrotherso/

That is my account on pinterest but I am still brand new so I only have pinned a few different things for teaching about cells. I love teaching about cells that is probably my favorite thing to learn and teach about. I really enjoyed pinterest. The only thing that I really did not like was how I had to search for different things and how some of the searches pulled up totally unrelated information, but that is the same with any type of digital text.

There were lots of things that I want to apply to my discipline  I really liked some of the worksheets that I found as well as the bell ringer ideas. I have a little bit of difficult time coming up with stuff on my own so it is really nice to see other people's ideas and then use those ideas to form my own plans. I think that students can use pinterest for research of course they will have to verify but this could help students to find a fun way to do an assignment.

The article that I read was the Castek and Beach article. A few things that I learned are that there are science apps now and through those science apps you can do labs that you otherwise could not do in the classroom because of class sizes. For example it talked about the frog app, and you can look at a frog dissection that is interesting. Also it had multiple ways for me as a teacher to learn how to use a digital text.

This assignment was an amazing opportunity to learn more about digital text that I did not know before.

Writing Instruction

The question that I decided to answer is..
2) What kinds of writing assignments did you have in school that you particularly enjoyed, and why did you enjoy them? Please identify at least one particular writing assignment that stood out to you, describe it, and explain what the teacher did that made you love the assignment. What kinds of writing assignments did you have in school that you disliked, and why did you dislike them? Please identify at least one particular writing assignment that stood out to you, describe it, and explain why you disliked it. How did these experiences connect with concepts from this week's reading or PowerPoint? How will your answers from the previous questions influence how you structure opportunities for your students to write in your discipline?

I had to really think about this question what type of writing assignments did I have in school. The first one that pops into mind is research papers, but I did not particularly enjoy that type of writing. The reason why I disliked them is because I hated how long it took to write as well as the writing style that you have to use.  The way my teachers acted when they gave us the assignment as well was interesting. It was as if the teachers disliked giving the assignment as much as the students disliked doing it.(that maybe just my perspective because I really didn't like this assignment). I disliked how we spent so much time doing research, and then the extra time spent writing the assignment. Overall I just don't like writing research papers.

 So I thought about it and my favorite type of writing was a persuasive essay. I loved arguing my point of view. My favorite teacher Mrs. Dunsmore was my high school english teacher, and she taught me to love writing essays.

Mrs. Dunsmore described writing as an extension of oneself. (In case you cannot tell she was also the drama teacher.) She really made me think about what I wanted to state through the paper. She always was very accepting of all of the students opinions. She would say as long as you can back up your opinions with facts then you can write about anything you want to. That is the reason I learned to love writing. For me the easiest thing to write is a persuasive essay because that teacher took the time to explain and listen to her students.

I still have a hard time writing papers, but this teacher made me want to write. It was like I could make no mistakes, because she was there to help me when I made them. I am not quite sure how to explain it well, but I had her the last year she was teaching so maybe she had learned all the things she needed in order to be the best teacher. I just really liked having a teacher I could depend on to teach me as well as to help me to learn from my mistakes. Another point is that she loved teaching english and how to write papers and it showed.

My high school english teacher was really good about going through the levels of writing without us, as students even understanding what she was doing. For example one day in class we would write a paragraph about a topic we had a stance on, like I hate student lunches, or sports should be banned from school. We had to write a paragraph on why we thought the way we did. It was a level one writing very informal. Then before I realized it we turned that one paragraph into a five paragraph essay then we did partner checks and handed in the paper. She was very good at going through the levels of writing.

How I would like to apply this to my own classroom is to make my classroom a safe haven for my students. A place where we can learn to love the science without fear of judgement. Basically I want a fun learning environment where I can teach my major and love teaching and my students can love learning. I want the students to be able to write about science with confidences as well as the ability to write in a scientific community. I am still struggling with writing, but I want my students to be able to understand that it takes time to be able to understand science and then be able to write a paper about science.

How this ties into this week's powerpoint is "clear writing helps bring about clear thinking." I really liked that if we write about what we are learning about we are able to understand the material better. I think about it in a different way, I always repeat everything that I'm thinking out loud. For example this last group assignment we met before class, and you can ask my partners I kept repeating what we were going to do for the presentation a lot of times. That is how I was able to understand and clarify what we were doing for the presentation. It is the same with writing. Writing is just another outlet to help the students to understand what they are learning about better.

Vocabulary Instruction

There were three questions to choose from to answer and the question I chose was 

Please describe the methods by which your past teachers (either college professors or K-12 teachers) tended to teach core vocabulary words in your discipline. What did typical vocabulary instruction look like? To what extent did this vocabulary instruction help you to develop rich and enduring understandings of core concepts? How did this type of vocabulary instruction compare to the types of vocabulary instruction recommended in the Harmon, Wood, and Hedrick reading? Do you want to replicate your previous teachers’ practices, or do you want to teach vocabulary in a different way? Please explain.

Well my major is Biology, and the most memorable way that teachers tended to teach vocabulary was always through worksheets. Another method that I remember is copying from the textbook and writing the definitions by hand. In my high school experience those were the only two options that I encountered, but I was lucky one time my science teacher was teaching us all about cells and rather than teach us the exact definitions we talked about what each organelle did and related that to a specific word. So for example perioxomes clean up the cell and how you remember that is the word peroxide is it. I thought that was the best example and my teacher did that for every organelle in the cell. That for me made the test a lot easier to take and I still remember what most of the organelles do even now because of that lesson.

When I look at the question "To what extent did this vocabulary instruction help you to develop rich and enduring understandings of core concepts". I would have to say that the normal vocabulary instruction that I usually received I really did not develop a rich enduring understanding. I remember learning words and their definitions for the test and then the next day forgetting all about them. The reason I did this was because the vocabulary was unnecessary for everyday conversation. Of course that changed when I got to college and I remember the vocabulary because I wanted to rather than I was forced to learn.

Basically the way I was taught vocabulary did not have much if at all of the Harmon, Wood, and Hendrick. In the reading it talks about strategies to help understand the vocabulary words and these included prediction, questioning, summarizing, inferring and clarifying word meanings. Also in that reading it talks of a few specific things that were not used in my classroom setting very well.  We didn't really use instructional time to do vocabulary words or rather the teacher did not teach the vocab words to us rather we had to look them up on our as well as we did not read very many background informational text that explained our vocabulary words at all. 

In my opinion the way that the teacher taught me was not all wrong I did learn how to look up words and how to be able do work on my own. All that being said I think I would try to teach in a little different way just like how the one teacher I had that taught me the organelles of a cell in a slightly different way. I would like to find my own way of teaching vocabulary and make the way I teach help the students to remember it for a long time after I teach it, unlike how I was able to forget it the day after the test. I am still not sure of how I would be able to teach like that so I am going to start thinking of a way to do that from now on.  

Comprehension Instruction

The question I decided to blog about was number 1.

Please describe a time that a teacher really supported you in thinking deeply about a text, in such a way that you applied several of the comprehension processes that Buehl mentions on page five. What specifically did the teacher do to support your comprehension? How did the teacher’s approach compare with the approaches recommended by Buehl? For instance, did the teacher provide any frontloading? What can you learn from this teacher that you can use in your own comprehension instruction in the future?

First question was describe a time when a teacher really supported me in thinking deeply about a text. Believe it or not the one I remember the most happened just recently it was last semester in my Evolutionary Biology class my professor had us read scientific papers about evolution every week. 

After we read the text we needed to basically write a paper based on our understanding and in this paper we had to make connections with our prior knowledge. This professor was unique in a way that he hated for us to review what we read word for word. He wanted our opinions, and our own unique point of view.  He also really encouraged us to write down any questions that the paper brought into our minds. Also he wanted us to be able to know how we could answer those questions so he had us make a predictions about what would happen and how our own questions could be answered.  It was only through that assignment that I was able to determine what parts of the paper had significants and what parts were not as important to the overall experiment.

It took me along time to figure out exactly how my professor wanted me to be able to read the paper as well as exactly how to evaluate a science paper even now I have a really hard time reading and evaluating papers.

In all honest though the professor sort of explained the assignment but he really didn't go into too much detail about what exactly we need to do. So he didn't use any front loading. This teacher really taught me the importance of really being able to understand and comprehend what I read. Especially for the purpose of being able to write a paper about it. Also the importance about being able to make inferences. That is one thing that I really want to be able to bring into my own classroom. I want the students to be able to make inferences based on what they read. 

Introduction

 Well the first blog that I need to post is called my Introduction so I thought I needed to include a picture of myself. So this is me.

My favorite type of flower is the cherry blossoms or sakura blossoms I was able to see them for the first time in my life and thought that this picture would be the perfect thing to describe me. The next picture that you see is a sakura blossom. 

 My interests and hobbies include reading, watching movies, and I really love to go on walks just for the fun of walking around. I also really love watching fireworks and just relaxing or rather lazying around is one of my favorite things to do.

My major is Composite biology with a minor in chemistry, and the reason why I chose to major in that is because I have always hated biology during high school. I know a weird reason right but the reason why I hated it was because I was not able to get into the material. Another way of putting it is that I was not able to get my hands dirty and actually get to understand everything, but then when I took a biology course in college I fell in love with the topic until that point I had really been debating between a math major and a biology major. That one class tipped the scale in the biology favor. I just really enjoyed biology over math.  I would define my discipline as the study of the world around you, because biology really does include everything. It is the study of living organisms. That is another thing that drew me toward biology is because it can be tied into our everyday lives. Science is an amazing thing!

When I think of the term literacy, honestly the first thing that comes to mind is books. Maybe that is because I am currently helping elementary students to be able to read better, but that is the first thing that pops into my head. As I looked deeper into the term literacy though this is what I came to define it as "a persons knowledge in a particular subject or field." So the term literacy can also be applied to our everyday life as well as my major biology. So I can become literate or a person with knowledge in the particular field of biology.

I really look forward to this new semester and I am excited about this blogging idea. I have never done this before so it is going to be an exciting new experience.