Disciplinary Literacy- Math

Synthesis:

Chapter 7

The chapter begins by explaining current perspectives and approaches to literacy instruction in a math classroom.  The first problem is that literacy coaches lose site of the roll a content area teachers plays.  Content area teachers have a job to develop area expertise.  Yet it’s important for these teachers to focus on general print literacy.  The goal of literacy in mathematics is to support student learning in that area.  The second problem, is that literacy educators assume that math teachers only teach computational fluency.  The last misconception is that reading print text or incorporating any general literacy instructional strategies is appropriate for mathematics classroom.  

The second area the chapter talked about was reconceptualizing literacy instruction for mathematics classrooms.  The term literacy must be broaden to truly understand literacy in content areas.  “Text- like” objects play a roll in constructing meaning in math.  Text includes patterns, symbols, drawings, spoken word, graph, or series of gestures.  When the term literacy is broaden, it includes all objects that are created and interpreted when learning.  When the term literacy encompasses these aspects, the math room then becomes a literacy rich environment.  

The last section of this chapter discusses creating and sustain collaborative environments between literacy and math.  Literacy instructors need to approach math teachers as learners, not as experts.  The teacher should have a desire to learn from the math teachers.  It’s important, as a literacy specialist, to reach out to experience math teachers.  Do not single out young or struggling teachers.  When the expert math teacher and literacy coach work together, they will have a better chance of helping the struggling teacher.  The next area when working with teachers is to sustain these relationships.  Literacy and math teachers need to develop a shared purpose.  They can come up with goals together.  When working together, work from each others strengths.  These teachers should work together to plan lessons and instruction.  Getting content area teachers and literacy teachers working together with help the common good of a student.   

Chapter 11:

The teacher, Ariadna, wanted to help her students learn new mathematical concepts and language.  She implemented a design that would help her students learn more that just computational fluency.  The first step she had students explore new concepts while using their prior knowledge they had with math.  Then she has them use their new terms and prior terms they've learned in writing, orally explaining.  After this she has students to produce definitions and to work problems of their own.  They apply the new knowledge in expert ways.  By using this outline, teachers can teach math beyond the computational boundaries.  Students are applying what they are learning in other forms.   By helping students learn math in other ways will explained their knowledge.  When students orally explain and write the material takes on different forms of  meaning.  

Response:

Text to Text:

These text go to gather well.  I feel like one is more of an explanation of how literacy and math teachers can work together.  The other chapter gives a practical way to incorporate literacy in the math classroom.  I really enjoyed the idea of expanding the literacy definition.  By broadening this term, you realize how much literacy is already in content area classrooms.

Text to World:

Students/content teachers need to be incorporating reading/literacy in their own rooms.  Literacy is everywhere in the world.  By giving students literacy strategies that apply to their discipline area, they will begin to make new connections wit the material.  

Text to Self:

The chapter that talked about how literacy and math teachers can work together was very helpful.  Since I will one day be a reading specialist/literacy coach, I will need to know how to work with everyone in the school.  I like the section that talked about how to talk to a math expert.  Come as a learner, not someone who tells them how to do their job.  I think this is important to remember for everyone.  Always be read to learn something.  Don't assume you understand and know it all.  

Questions: 
!.  This is not really a question, just something to ponder.  Since I've been in the elementary schools, I feel it's easier to be a literacy coach in that environment.  It kind of intimidates me, the idea of going into a high school and being the literacy coach.  Besides high school having a lot of teachers, I think it would be hard to foster an open collaborative environment within the school.  Unike elementary, it's pretty easy to all work together.  What are you thoughts?  

Re: Disciplinary Text

Synthesis:

Chapter 10 Hinchman Thomas

This chapter focused on reading and writing across multiple text.  In our modern world it is important for students to explore reading different text from multiple view points.  Students can acquire knowledge through newspapers, tv, websites, billboards, books, and magazines.   Students need to be taught how to decipher through the plethora of information they receive and decide if it is reliable.  Another important strategy is to teach students to read across varies text genres and write about the similar topic, yet in different modes.  

One of the strategies mentioned  was a process including: sourcing, contextualization, and corroboration.  This is a process historians use to comb through information.  With this method, students learn to find information, think about what the information is saying, and find similarities and differences.  

There can be issues when using multiple text.  Text complexity can become an issue.  Teachers also struggle with deciding how many text to use.  Lastly, decide what instruction is appropriate based on the content area being taught.  

Students are reading multiple text everywhere.  They know how to do this instinctively,  but as teaches we must instruct them how to do this properly.  They need to understand how to read with a critical eye.  Students must also understand how different text types go together.  With teachers help, students can learn strategies that will help equip them with a successful future.    

Chapter 12 Hinchman-Thomas

This chapter was about reading challenging text in high school.  The beginning of the chapter focused on how students have trouble reading, with interesting, complex text that is picked for them.  Yet outside school, they are reading higher level text for enjoyment.  This is important for teachers to remember.  Students will not always get the choice though.  The chapter then goes on to explain the 6 types of skills needed to make sense of text.

1. Semantic knowledge-  Semantics is making sense of the words.  First and for most students have to have an understand of     

            what they are reading.

2.  Mathematical Knowledge- Math has it’s own special language.  Understanding and mastering those specific terms will help 

             with comprehension.    

3.  Historical knowledge- Having knowledge of past events, data, people, and social and political issues and conflict.

4.  Geographic Knowledge- Know about countries: location and facts.

5.  Discursive Knowledge-Knowledge that the construction of texts is tied to the domain in which they are written and to the 

             purposes doe which they were originally written.  

6.  Pragmatic Knowledge- Recognition that text can be questioned.  

Motivating students comes from using interesting text.  One reason students may find disinterest in text is because of the tone the book is written.  Taking this in to account and implement different text forms can help.  Another way to build engagement, is develop semester units over topics they find amusing.  Take into account the beliefs students come to school having.  This can make a difference in how they interpret readings.  The chapter then goes on to explain 6 teaching practices that engage students in reading content specific readings: (1) problem framing, (2)whole group knowledge, (3) scaffolding, (4) questioning, (5) visualizing text, and (6)summarizing and synthesizing ideas within and across text.  

It is important for teachers to take into account the above ideas.  There are ideas that can used across curriculum to help motivate and keep students engage in higher level text.  Students who develop the skills and excitement to read higher level text will be more successful through their schooling. 

Chapter 5 Jetton-Shanahan

This chapter discuss the 3 approaches to literacy instructions. A functional Literacy approach teaches students to be successful in school and life.  Cultural Literacy focuses on teaching morals and values.  A progressive literacy approach teaches students to read and write based on themes and topics that interest them.  The author argues on to suggest that these approaches need to be questioned.  If literacy is only approached these ways, literacy becomes dull.  More strategies and instructional practices must be incorporated to allow students to use higher-level thinking skills.  The current ideas on literacy suggest it should be a layered approach.  The researcher, Kucer, explains 4 dimensions of literacy: cognitive, linguistic, sociocultural, and developmental.  A challenge that come with teaching reading in literature comes from text selection.  Another challenge comes from teaching writing.  Do teachers stick with teaching to the test or engage students in a rich multimodal world?  Last challenge mentioned is teaching to a class of digital consumers.  With all these challenges and more, teachers are bombarded with a multitude of advice and research to syphon through and decide what works best for their students and them.  

Response:

After reading these chapters, I felt I had a realization of how hard teaching high school must be.  Since I am early childhood teacher and we have our own set of challenges, I never gave much thought to higher level grades.  With our ever changing digital world, teachers are having to decide how to interact with this generation.  At times having to learn a whole new skill set to teach them.  The chapters from Best Practices in Adolescent Literacy Instruction, focused on reading across multi texts.  This chapter was insightful.  I thought it suggested a lot of good ideas and backed it up with research.  I also like how it touched on different content areas and how to teach within those.  I thought ch. 12 had some helpful suggestions on teaching difficult text.  The different types of knowledge would be helpful when teaching high school students.  Those categories seemed to be things that wouldn’t be talked about unless you made an effort to include them in your teaching.  But without them, text would be dense or meaningless.  The last ch., chapter 5, had really good examples on how to include the ideology suggested.  It made the approaches realistic.  

Question: 

1. If a high school teacher chose not to use the canonical text, what are some good adult literature books they could replace the classics with?

Re: Text Complexity

Synthesis:

There are there components of measuring text complexity: quantitative, qualitative, and reader and task considerations.  Quantitative measures take formulas, word repetition, sentence length, and syntax into consideration to determine readability.  Using quantitative measures are not always accurate.  Teaches must take into consideration the level and also the content within the book.  A book may be at a child's level, but contain subjects not suitable for their age.  Qualitative measures use four areas in determining complexity: levels of meaning, text structure, language conventionality/clarification, and knowledge demand.  There are many resources of determining qualitative measures in the book.  Another important aspect for determining text complexity is considering the reader and task.  This includes student motivation, stamina, verbal reasoning, general reading ability, English proficiency, and prior knowledge.  When considering text complexity teachers must also remember to have student "deliberately practice."  If never given the opportunity to practice, their text complexity will never have the opportunity improve.   Feedback is essential when practicing.  Students need to know if they've met goals and task.  Feedback is a simple way to build intrinsic motivation.  

Disciplinary text seem to be an area of difficulty for students.  It is important for teachers to teach comprehension strategies and instructional strategies.  Yet there is a difference between the two.  In this chapter the author explains there is a difference between the two strategies.  Reading strategies need to be explicitly taught.  Reading strategies are taught through instructional strategies.   Teaching comprehension can be done through several models: DIME, KWHHL, RAP, and SRSD.  Teachers can also use word maps, paragraph frames, and reciprocal teaching.  Online text is a great way to help with comprehension.  Students can find word meaning in certain programs.  Text can lead to other text to help with understanding.  Yet, the sheer volume of information on the net can be overwhelming.  Rich classroom discussions are helpful with students in create meaning.  

Response:
Text to Text
These articles over text complexity seem to fit with the last few weeks of reading.  Text complexity is yet another component of reading.  Just like comprehension, it's equally as important.  When designing lessons teachers need to consider text complexity so that it pushes children and helps them grow.  If text is too easy or hard it can effect children's progress.

Text to Self
This weeks reading was a good reminder of helping students pick books on their level.  The section on determining text complexity is a good reference.  I thought it had several helpful tables and resources that will be helpful when determining students reading level.  Keeping student interest in mind is vital, yet you can't always let me them pick the books they want.  It's good to help guide them.  I think working together to pick out books would help motivation and engagement.

Text to Word
Teaching students how to read different text is important, not only for school, but for life.  Students will encounter a plethora of different text types in their lifetime.  Reading different text also helps in developing a love for reading.  When students are exposed to many genres and levels of reading, it prepares them for their future.

Questions

1.  Why is there such a difference in text complexity from elementary to middle school? and middle to high school?   I don't understand why it isn't a smooth transition.   

Week 3 Comprehension

Synthesis

Ch. 4 (Jetton and Shanahan)

This chapter focuses on the idea that teacher planning is an important part of the learning process.  Planning involves the preplanning ideas and organization that occurs before presenting a lesson.  Research has shown that more experienced teachers use a skeletal planning framework, while newer teachers are more detailed in their planning.  Planning can be effected by a multitude of factors: school budget, class size, ongoing activities, culture, and types of students.  There can also be different types of planning; long term or short term.  Teachers  understand that as much pre-planning that goes on, it’s crucial to be able to make quick decisions during the lessons.  

Keeping student identity a key component while planning, will help lessons be more applicable.  Students come to classrooms with an identity, but their identity is always changing depending on their surrounds and what they are learning.  By using a culturally responsive pedagogy, you will immerse your students in the lesson.  

The classroom environment influences decisions in pre-planning.  Having a “norm of practice” for each content area will help student learn and understand the process, procedures, and discourse of each subject.  Involve students in the subject’s learning goals.  They will be more likely to want to learn.  They will see the whole picture if they are aware of the end goals.  Allowing students to be a part of unit planning and assignments, will lead to motivation and ownership of the classroom material.  

When planning lessons, it’s important to implement strategies that help with the following areas: activating prior knowledge,  text importance, mental imagery, text structure, questioning, and inference making.  These areas all help with comprehension.  As teachers, we should try to incorporate learning segments that focus on comprehension and give students opportunities to practice.  By giving students specific goals and strategies while reading, they will learn to comprehend better.  

As teachers plan, they need to reflect on their planning practices.  Looking at the learning goals long term is vital to student success.  Seeing the whole picture, instead of tiny blocks of time, will generate a more cohesive and integrated lesson.  

D2L (Fisher, Frey, and Ross)

Background knowledge and comprehension accompany each other.  What a readers knows about a subject predicts what they will learn.  Students need to be able to read things they understand.  Books that are above their levels will not teach them more.  They will likely not understand the books. 

When students read, they need to have a purpose.  Many times students are assigned a book but don't read it with purpose.  Therefore they don't know what to pay attention to.

Students must have a large vocabulary to figure out what the text is about.  Simply increasing vocabulary helps student's grasp what they've read.   Using semantic maps and graphic organizers can help improve vocabulary.  

Modeling helps students think in a variety of ways.  Students who see  teachers explaining their learning process will help students learn new ways to comprehend.  The article suggest 4 ways teachers can model.  They can use comprehension strategies.  Show students how to decode unknown vocabulary.  Teach students to decipher between text structures and text features.  When these strategies are modeled, students will begin to use them in their own learning.  

Another comprehension approach is using reciprocal teaching.  Allow students to be the teachers and guide their peers.  They become the leader in their own learning.  The following are 4 steps to reciprocal teaching: summarizing, questioning, and clarifying, predicting.

Ch. 8 (Hinchman, sheridan-thomas)

Comprehension is  essential for adolescents to have success in learning.  "Simply surrounding students with complex texts and then expecting something to happen is magical thinking- if that was all that was necessary, we could merely send students to the school library and be done with it" (p 140).  This sentence from the chapter stood out to me.  Many teachers assume this to some degree.  If we never allow time and teaching of strategies for comprehension, students will learn nothing.  

Research has shown that an extensive vocabulary helps students comprehend various levels of text.  Teachers need to realize this is an area of literacy that needs attention.  Vocabulary lessons should be incorporated daily.  

Letting students know what the purpose of learning certain material helps them take ownership.  Everyone want to know why?  When students know why, they can  focus their attention.  The material seems relevant to their lives.  

Middle and high school material becomes more difficult as they progress.  Modeling helps apprentice students to show them how something is done.  This guides students in to different ways of thinking.  

Response

After reading all the articles and chapters  it became evident there were major themes.  One that stood out to me was vocabulary.  Students must continually broaden their vocabulary in order understand harder text.  Another theme I saw was reading with a purpose.  Students are always asking "why do I need to know this."  As teachers, we should have an objective with what we teach.  Keeping students involved with that objective helps them understand the whys.  Even when I was teaching pre-k, I always put up an objective.   It was a pretty simple objective, but students began to be explorers of their learning when they knew the objective.  Each week they'd come into class and look for the new weekly objective.  They also began exploring outside the classroom for those objectives.  I found it interesting that in the readings the authors mentioned that text complexity wasn't always a good thing.  If students can't read and understand, then they won't comprehend.  They must be able to read and grasp the ideas.  

Questions

1.  What are some of the ways you build background knowledge?

2. In a room of diverse learner with different reading levels, how do you resolve the issue of text complexity?  Certain books are required at different grade levels, how do you get through those books when some kids can't read them.

Re: Week 2 Vocabulary

Synthesis:
           This weeks reading got me thinking about my own vocabulary teaching and how I have taught vocabulary in the past.  The chapter and D2L readings inspired me to dig deeper and have a better understanding of how teaching vocabulary, even in the younger grades, has a profound impact on one's life.  I felt the over arching theme of all the readings was there has been a decline in teaching vocabulary.  All the readings seem to hit on the fact that vocabulary development is essential for success in school and life.
           Hinchman-Thomas:
This chapter discussed how important having a large vocabulary is.  The authors go on to explain what tier I,II, and III words are and how they are crucial for the understanding of subjects.  Words are learned many ways.  Good teachers understand that  students learn through a multitude of lenses: schema, modeling, mentors and coaches, socioeconomic status, reading, and relevance.  Active engagement is necessary in mastering new vocabulary.  The chapter gives 5 specific strategies for engaging vocabulary learning
          1. K-W-L charts (know, want to know, Learned)
          2. Teach-Teach- Trade
          3.  A Word a Day
          4. Root Words
          5. Digital Words

           Manzo, Manzo, Thomas:
This article stresses the importance of low and high frequency words.  I found it startling to read the statistic of students in 1940, knew the meaning of 80% of the words on the standardized test.  By the mid-90s, an average student scored 30% on that area.  Understanding that standardized testing uses a lot of low frequency words, teachers/districts need to get on board with teaching vocabulary.  Vocabulary instruction has been neglected.  The article seems to suggest this has happened over time.  Research has shown the importance of sustaining a rich vocabulary as a culture.  For example, research suggest, "word power is painlessly acquired way to feel and be more effective and, therefore, to raise self-esteem."  That is one aspect of the research suggest in this article.  There are many more that are convincing arguments as to why we need to sustain vocabulary development.  The two approaches to teach vocabulary are community of language and hybrid cultures and media.  The community of language approach suggest having a list of words that everyone in a school is using at a given time: principals, lunch helpers, crossing guards, everyone.   This would allow children to hear words over and over.  The next approach is hybrid culture and media.  The author suggest that the new literacy world is a common ground for students.  They come to share and learn through different modes of technology; their bias, cultures, and social status are not as big a deal.

               Harmon, Wood, Medina:
This articles discusses the importance of teaching vocabulary in content areas. Teachers  in content areas (mathematics, science, and social studies)  report having trouble explicitly teaching vocabulary.  The words are abstract and limited to mathematics, science, and social studies.  Many times students will only hear those words within those class.  Teaching vocabulary in these areas rely heavily on prior knowledge in those content subjects.  Though each subject has unique vocabulary, there are some similarities.  Each content area has technical terms, non technical terms, function or word clusters, unique representation, and common root words.  Knowing the significance of each area according to the  subject will help teachers teach the vocabulary better.  There are  key understandings that are essential to content vocabulary instruction.  They are as followed:
      1.  Vocabulary learning is closely tied to conceptual understanding.
      2.  Explicit instruction in content-area vocabulary builds and supports conceptual understandings.
      3.  Explicit instruction involves multiple, varied, and meaningful experiences with words.
      4.  Vocabulary learning occurs implicitly in content-area classroom.
      5.  The structure of expository texts can impact vocabulary learning.
      6.  Classroom instruction time for learning vocabulary is necessary and must be sufficient.
      7.  Metacognitive awareness of vocabulary learning fosters independent learning in the different
           content areas.
      8.  Different content- area words require different types of instruction.

A student who knows words and knows them well, will have a better understanding of the world around them.  As teachers it is important to continually seek new and interesting ways to incorporate vocabulary instruction.  If teachers do not make it a priority, we are at risk, as a society, of losing the essence of our beautiful language.  
       
Response:
These articles and chapter got me really excited and thinking about my own teaching of vocabulary while growing up and how I actually teach vocabulary.  I honestly only remember seeing a list of vocabulary words at the beginning of my text book chapter.  I then was suppose to go look up each word and put it in a special note book.  This was boring and mundane.  I learned very little from it.  To me it seemed like a time suck for the student and teacher.  I realized that in the older grades, my teachers did very little in explicitly teaching vocabulary.  I guess they assumed it was the elementary teachers job and I should already know everything or at least have the skills to figure it out.  Luckily I had them, but I'm sure that wasn't the case for a lot of student.  Therefor, they went on reading, having no understanding of the content.
       As an early childhood teach I feel we do a pretty good job of teaching vocabulary.  I know this is because students have the drive to want to learn and the excitement.  It makes teaching pretty easy.  When your audience is constantly asking, "why, why, why," they have the desire and the teaching just happens.  I do not have the experience of teaching older students, but I can imagine each year a student progress through the grades, it becomes more of a challenge of how to present vocabulary in a new exciting way.

Questions:
1.  How do you "not" teach to the test when all the standardized testing is tier 2 and 3 words?  It just seems like somehow teachers always get roped back into teaching to the test.  It feels like a trap teachers face daily.  I feel like all you would need to do is get a hold of the supposed testing terms for the test and just teach those.  Seems to diminish learning and teaching.  I know this question is rhetorical but I can't help but wonder this question throughout all the readings.

2.  As an early childhood teacher,  I'd love to hear some of the explicit ways you teach vocabulary in your classroom.  I'm always trying to add to my resource database.

Testing!!