The first article, Organizing Instruction for Struggling Readers in Tutorial Settings by Mokhtari, Hutchinson, and Edwards is an overview of the general steps that go into pinpointing and organizing specific literacy instruction for struggling students. I appreciated the author's use of the case study to show us how we are to design student instruction. Firstly, as teachers of literacy, we are to use multiple assessments in order to decipher both the strengths and the needs of our students. The use of Informal Reading Inventories such as our text in combination with other reading records, retellings, think alouds, writing exercises, and standardized tests such as the Iowa Test of Basic Skills as mentioned in the article (a test that I myself have taken as a student many MANY times) can give us a good idea of how to design and implement a cohesive literacy program (which is the second step). Lastly, monitoring student progress is stressed as extremely important in the article. Should a teaching method be superior for one student, but inadequate for another, adjustments should be made.
The second article, Linguistically Responsive Teacher Education: Preparing Classroom Teachers to Teach English Language Learners was extremely helpful for my confidence in that the authors, Lucas, Villegas, and Freedson-Gonzalez offers us sound suggestions and strategies that can be implemented our classrooms. I now see clearly the importance of students getting clear input and exposure to English through activities such as read alouds and student discourse as well as importance in allowing students many opportunities to create meaningful output through writing and conversation. I found the differences between conversational discourse and academic discourse to be very interesting which also gave me ideas on how to help students evolve from conversational to academic discourse in topics such as science and literature studies.
Reading both of these articles has, indeed, lessened my anxiety of designing curriculum for my own classroom by offering me a variety of potential teaching strategies for all my future students.
I agree with you, Vanessa, on using the ideas in these articles to lessen the anxiety we all feel as preservice teachers. Many ideas from these articles will probably guide us through our first teaching positions.
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ReplyDeleteI agree. It is so important that as new, future teachers we go into the classrooms prepared. It is neccessary to have one or two plans in place. These techniques give us strategy and options to help us prepare for our future classrooms.
ReplyDeleteI agree as well! I like the idea of read a louds the most. If the student is reading silently then how can you tell what their performance level is? Monitoring student progress was another aspect that even I caught on to as well!
ReplyDeleteNice job!
John