Why and how should before reading activies be done?

It Says:

 A B-D-A centered lesson that includes activity and discussion before reading reduces the uncertainty that students brings to an assignment.  Before-reading activities get students ready to read, to approach text material critically, and to seek answers to questions they have generated about the material.  The before reading dimension of a lesson… has also been called the prereading phase of instruction.  During this instructional phase, a teacher often emphasizes one or more of the following: (1) motivating readers, (2) building and activating prior knowledge, (3) introducing key vocabulary and concepts, and (4) developing metacognitive awareness of the task demands of the assignment and the strategies necessary for effective learning.

I Say:

Given a reading assignment without preparation can be confusing and intimidating for students.  They will not know where to begin in their thoughts.  They will not know what they are reading, or how to read it.  It is thus necessary that teachers do activities before a reading to prepare students for the reading.  The students will then be more willing and able to do the reading, and will get more from the reading by understanding and appreciating it more.

And So:

I think that this is very good advice for teachers.  When giving out readings, I think that I would typically have just previewed it by saying what the students are reading.  This might help the students know what to expect content-wise, but not style-wise.  It also would not necessarily motivate them in their reading unless they knew and were already interested in the subject.  I will thus need to work on being able to motivate students to read by explaining to them the importance of the reading and how it is interesting and relevant.  I will also need to preview any difficult and unfamiliar vocabulary in the reading.  If students do not understand a word, they will probably just skip over it, and then miss out on a piece of the reading, and might not understand it as well.  Similarly, I will need to help activate students’ prior knowledge as it relates to the reading.  If I, as their teacher, do not activate their prior knowledge, they might not relate the reading to what they know.  I will thus also be teaching them how to relate new information to old information as a skill, in addition to relating it for the particular assignment.  What I will need to learn more about, though, is teaching students about the skills they will need to use in reading a certain piece.  I am just not comfortable, yet, that I could recognize what skills students will need to be able to do to read.

Trade books and writing to learn

Chapter 11 of Content Area Reading talks about using trade books in teaching.  Trade books are typical books like biographies, story books, fiction books, histories and other types of books one would tend to find at a bookstore.  These are different from textbooks that one tends to find in schools. 

There are many benefits to using trade books versus only using text books.  For starters, text books are not always the best sources of information.  They tend to just mention important events and important people without going in to great deal.  This is because they have so much information to cover.  There is no room for depth in text books.   Text books can also be confusing for students and students can be intimidated by their size and style.  Trade books do not usually have these problems.  Trade books will go in to depth on a particular subject.  Thus students can both learn more about that subject and learn how to read about that subject.  Text books are sort of artificial in that, outside of school, people do not encounter them.  Thus, by using trade books in school, students learn how to read and learn from books they will continue to encounter throughout their lives. 

Trade books are also written in many different styles and levels of difficulty.  They also cover many different areas of interest.  Thus trade books have something for everyone so that all students can truly come to enjoy reading what they are assigned. 

As I will be teaching Social Studies, there will be a lot of different trade books I can use.  There are many biographies and histories written in many different styles and subjects.  My concern though is how these books can be obtained.  To have enough books for everyone and enough so that everyone has a selection to choose from would be expensive.  This is especially true if I were to plan to use trade books for multiple different units.  Since book budgets are spent on text books, I am not sure how it would be feasible to have an adequate collection of trade books.  The book suggests library sales and book fairs, but this seems unlikely to provide enough books for a cheap enough price. 

Chapter 2 of Content Area Writing introduces us to the idea of “writing to learn.”  The authors claim that much of the writing we do in daily life can be considered writing to learn.  They thus suggest that teachers should incorporate writing to learn in the classroom.  This type of writing is different than public writing.  Public writing is about writing papers and essays for an audience, whereas writing to learn is for the self.  Writing to learn is informal, and should be ungraded.  I look forward to the next couple of chapters of the book as they talk more about how to use writing to learn effectively in the classroom. 

The authors made a point in the chapter that I found interesting.  It was not the focus of the chapter, more of an aside, but was still interesting.  They stated that the intensive corrections of student papers by teachers do not make students better writers.  I do not know enough about this subject to disagree with them, but I am curious how students become better writers, if not through writing and seeing their mistakes corrected. 

What are the best methods to assess students, and how should these methods be used?

                Chapter 4 of Content Area Reading mentions a number of ways to assess students.  The authors made a distinction between high stakes testing done through standardized tests, and authentic assessment done by teachers.  What I found important about what they said concerning formal assessments was how a teacher should use them.  A teacher should use them to find students with major reading difficulties or compare reading abilities among students.  A teacher should not, however, use such tests to determine a student’s content knowledge or ability to comprehend course materials. 

                What I was more interested in was what the authors said about different forms of informal assessments done by teachers (and students).  Everyday teachers can assess their students through observation.  Teachers can jot notes in journals each day about their students and how they acted and performed during the day’s lesson.  This entails being a good listener and watcher of students.  The authors also recommend using a frequency observation form.   On this form, the teacher writes down observations that he wants to observe, and puts check marks next to the observations each time he observes them.  This is a simple way to keep a tally of student behavior.  This would be useful for meetings with students or their parents. 

                Another form of assessment they discuss, which I would like to learn more about, is the academic portfolio.  Portfolios can provide a holistic view of students’ work and achievements.  They include pieces of student work from throughout the year, and from different areas.  The portfolio is essentially student led, as students decide what should go in the portfolio.  The students then write about why they chose to include that artifact in their portfolio.  The defense of their choice seems to be more important than the artifact itself as it helps to display that the student truly understood the subject matter and the assignments they place in the portfolio.  They also require students to really think about their work on a deeper level.   Students and teachers can also use portfolios to see how the students progressed in their abilities throughout the year.  I would like to know more about portfolios, such as how to introduce and explain them to students, and how to guide them in choosing the best artifacts to place in them.

                A final form of assessment they discuss is interviewing students.  They discuss different kinds of interviews like formal and informal types.  They discuss a Reading Comprehension Interview to find out how well students comprehend a reading and its purpose.  They recommended, though, that teachers could have the students answer RCI questions on paper instead of in interviews because this will save time.  I question, though, the usefulness of such written answers.  One question, for example is “How good are you at reading this kind of material?  How do you know?”  Such a question is hard to answer.  I think that without teacher prompts during a verbal interview a student’s answer would be useless.  These self-reflective questions are difficult for anyone to answer, let alone school students. 

Content Area Reading and Content Area Writing Chapter One

In Content Area Reading the authors write about how skilled readers have reading strategies at their command that they use to comprehend texts that they are reading.  Now, I presume, hopefully correctly, that I am a skilled reader, and therefore must have multiple reading strategies at my disposal.  Ask me to name them, though, and I could not do so.  I am unaware of what my reading strategies are, and prior to reading this text, I was unaware that I had any.  Hopefully, as I continue to read further, and reading strategies are described, I will begin to recognize these strategies in myself, so as to become more self-aware of my own functioning.   This will, I trust, enable me to better help future students who struggle with reading comprehension by allowing me to teach them the strategies. 

Another interesting point the authors of Content Area Reading make is that, in reading, content determines the process.  That is, the process of reading changes depending upon the content of what is being read.  So, a skilled reader reads science differently than history.  This is interesting and would be curious to know more about this idea.  I can understand that in reading different subjects the use of jargon changes, but it does not seem so readily apparent that different processes are used beyond the specifics of style. 

I really enjoyed the writing style of the authors of Content-Area Writing.   Their personal and humorous style makes for quick and interesting reading.  I am looking forward to reading the rest of their book.  I am excited to learn from them new ways to incorporate writing into my classroom.  It seems that when students write things of their own composition and not just class notes or copying answers from text books, they can really learn the subject matter better. 

My favorite point they made was that teachers teach too much stuff.  Because of the amount taught, issues are covered very shallowly, and little time is left for doing meaningful exercises like writing.  By teaching too much, whatever the students learn, they forget soon after the test because it is too much to remember and is covered in an uninteresting manner.  The authors, therefore, recommend that teachers teach less, only covering the most important things.  In doing so, they can better teach their students the methods of the discipline, enabling the students to reason more like an expert in the discipline.  This way, when the students encounter new information they are unfamiliar with, they will be able to reason through it on their own. 

Of course, the teachers will need to decide what is most important and therefore must be taught.  This would be a difficult task.  The authors give some criteria for what should be included.  This criteria includes asking if the topic resides “at the heart” of the discipline, and without which the field cannot be understood.  This criterion and the other criteria do not provide much help, though, as even by eliminating the obvious choices, there is still a lot left over.  Choosing what to eliminate and what to keep would be a very difficult matter for any teacher.