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.