Final Synthesis Blog

                From the first day of class when we were presented different text samples, and display our understanding of those texts, to group presentations, many readings, and many assignments that all guided us to our goal as non-ELA content area teachers: Integrated Literacy. We found from day one that if we do not have past knowledge on our topic, that it is even hard for us to understand what we are reading. As college students, I would believe that we are all at least above average readers yet still have trouble. That’s why one of the things as future teachers that we need to be prepared for is a prior knowledge base for our students. Especially as my main content area is social studies, I will need to step back on a unit, and have these conversation with myself, “ What knowledge that I have, makes this an easier topic to understand.” Then I add that in. I have learned from this class the importance of communicating to my students and polling them on what they know and don’t know. Then, from our think aloud assignments, also the in-class tasks we had with reading strategies, I realized that I did those things without knowing I did. I also realized how important it is to have those strategies and to teach those strategies so that they can do well in my classes. This class has been a guide to what I already wished to do, being the best teacher for my students.

                Another thing this class has showed us, through our readings from our textbook and discussion in class, is the use of a textbook. From the point in time I decided to be a teacher, I knew that I would not use the textbook often, and this class showed me that we do not have to. I recalled from my time in high school and middle school, where a few teachers would just pull it straight from the textbook with no other pulled text. It made learning boring and almost agonizing. We have learned that textbooks should never be used in that way. Through our readings that confirmed that, and our discussions where we unanimously agreed that the textbook should be used as a supplemental reading, along with other readings pulled by the teacher. That’s more work, perhaps why some teachers sadly just use the textbook, but far more rewarding for your students and you as a teacher. It has been made easier for us thought through this course as we all had to find at least five resources that would help us supplement our classrooms in some way. If we do not use the ones we selected for our posts, we at least have had some practice in finding those resources, which I find more valuable. It is the difference in giving a person food or teaching the person how to grow it.

                The few of us who did journal clubs did the same thing. The journals however were not for supplementing the classroom but supplementing our own knowledge as teachers. I found that reading and finding a journal was an eye-opening task. I never realized until now the vastness there is on the library that is the internet, available to us as teachers. That vastness including research studies on different styles of education, like a study my group found on the use of journal clubs in a classroom, to other educators analyzing other educators, to even reviews of resources that would improve one’s classroom. This task and the one we did in class were extremely helpful. It showed the importance of them. As we read through many of them and it came to critique them, also reading some in other classes I had this semester, I recognized that we do not have to agree with them.  Even some of the research, where the authors present it as facts, you showed us how to analyze where there can be fault in their research. How small their sample groups were, how specific it was, for example one of the research we investigated was based on one single classroom, where the results of the research could be the opposite for another classroom. When it comes down to it, you showed us that this journals are again, merely a supplemental resource for us as teachers, a resource that we can pick apart and decide for ourselves what is useful for us as growing and always developing teachers.

Word Count: 744

Journal Club- Single

Journal Club Entry: Teachers and content area reading: Attitudes, beliefs and change

*the journal given to us in class

                In summary, this journal is a review of research into content area teachers that are either preparing to be teachers or in-service teachers. It is about the attitudes and beliefs that these teachers have about incorporating and teaching reading in their non-literacy-based content areas. The research also displays how and in what ways these can and do obtain the techniques needed to do so. At the most basic of their research, they are polling teachers and gathering information on how these teachers feel comfortable teaching reading, and if they believe that it is their job or not. This research arguably proves that teachers can change their mind about wanting to teach reading, but that they need more resources, not just positive reinforcement on the benefits of it. The data showed as far as the attitudes towards teaching reading in their classrooms, the pre-service teachers believed that either shouldn’t or could not in their content areas. Then in-service teachers stated that most do, but they were also a lot that stated they felt they should but did not know how.

                An article I read in my first journal club, focused on literacy in a social studies classroom and its importance. It showed my group, and I believe changed some of our minds, on whether we should teach reading in the classroom. Another connection I made was the activity we did in class one day. We went around the room to the area we felt like we were in. Most of us, thankfully went to the side of wanting to teach reading in our classroom. I feel like our polls would have been different in the beginning of the semester though, as I believe we have all learned an abundance from articles like these, showing us the resources we can have as in-service teachers, and the importance of getting more resources now so we can better be prepared to teach our future students literacy skills.

                This was a very professional journal, with countless references to other prestigious works and researches. I wish they included more tables and gave an easier way to understand the graphs. I had to search through the journal back and again to understand what graph was telling me. I felt that it would have been easier to say what the authors represented as well, not just the author, as I kept forgetting what each stood for. Otherwise, the journal was laid out well and provided a good amount of helpful information.

                This journal is important because it reviews the research that shows us that we have a problem. We have teachers who have this attitude that they believe it isn’t their job to help students with reading. That their past teachers were just failures and it isn’t their job to catch them up. That is where they are wrong. Helping students with literacy will only help them be more successful at everything they do. This journal informs teachers on how they can fix the problem as well. If teachers do not know how, they are ample workshops, conferences, and plethora of resources to improve our skills as teachers in implementing literacy and reading strategies into our content areas. This review of research shows us that us pre-service teachers need more than just the one literacy class, that’s where these supplemental resources that are available to us will come in handy.


Word Count: 574

Strategy Lesson

During our strategy lesson about clustering and mapping, one thing I believe could have helped us would have been more time to do the lesson. I thought several things went well, and got reported that went well, like the brainstorming in the beginning, got everyone in the right state of mind. I felt like it gave the class an opportunity to get focused in our topic. Some grows that we received, were focused on our video. Not that our video was uninteresting, but that we should’ve stopped on important points to engage with the class. Some glows were our explanation of the instructions and giving them a good example of what we were looking for as well. A grow was having questions on the board to focus them during the videos. So overall I think our biggest improvement would’ve been to have more time, and added in our planning to have some type of way to keep them on track during the video so that the class takes away what we need them to for them to be able to do the assignment afterwards. An unexpected challenge was as a teacher, getting most of the words that students shouted out in the beginning written on the board, although it showed enthusiasm from them, was a difficult as a teacher to make sure everyone was heard, and their input recorded. If done again, with more time, improvements on how the video is watched and understood, and possibly broken up groups for the beginning brainstorming so that everyone is guaranteed to participate.

Word Count: 260

Podcast Link

https://anchor.fm/jared232/episodes/Journal-Club-e8v5mq

Journal Club posting

Integrating Literacy with Social Studies Education: A Review of Popular Texts for Social Studies Teacher Educators

Written by Andrea M. Hawkman and Antonio Castro

This Journal that I found was an excellent resource for finding and giving a review of widely used and great resources for the integration of literacy in Social Studies. The authors gave brief overviews of the resources and gave their importance and uses for the sources. They laid them out in the way that they related, with a grouping like strategy. For example, putting the two sources that related to the integration of literacy in social studies improving people citizenship and the student’s ability to participate in our society. An interesting thing that I found was one of the articles, “Teaching Like a Historian”, me and Haley have read excerpts of in our SS methods class. Another connection was the mention of the C3 framework, something we are working on currently in our class for our final project. I thought this was an extremely useful article for us, as upcoming SS teachers, in finding useful texts that improve and change our teaching strategies. I see this best used as picking and choosing portions from these sources that best works for us as we see ourselves as teachers, and how we wish to teach and implement these other educators frameworks.
Word Count: 223 Cross Cur.

Resource Blog #5

https://www.metmuseum.org/

                I decided to go for a field trip style of resource, or just to look over the website and look at the featured art that is on the website. This is tying in historical art with your classroom. You could have assignments on finding the history of art pieces and the background of the artist themselves. The ideal use of this would be to have a similar assignment but you get your info from going, which can be expensive to get the students there and pay for students’ entrance.

                This is giving you another opportunity to get your students out of the classroom and getting to delve into a different type of history that might interest some students and provide an opportunity to increase the stamina of your students as they will be researching these art pieces based on the plaques and information provided at the art museum. I know personally that as rare as they were, I can remember field trips and things I learned on them more than I can remember anything I did in a classroom and believe that field trips are becoming undervalued. Its one thing to see something on a screen and then to see it in person.

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Synthesis Blog #5

In preparation to be apart of a book club/Journal club reading process, I felt this chapter not only prepared me to participate in one but also to facilitate one in the future. In summary, the beginning focused on the history and the start of book clubs and what can be considered in the realm of a book club, all I found useful. I never realized there was so many iterations out there, and how many I have been involved in and did not realize it.


What I found the most helpful was the strategies that it entails on how to form one with your students, to how to get them into groups, how to test and get them prepared for discussion with each other, to even how to grade them effectively. Not necessarily just giving them an obnoxious quiz or test, but rather grading them on this pass/fail mentality on how well prepared they are for discussion.


One thing that rubbed me wrong was forcing them to do all the reading for homework and that giving them a fail if they do not talk in ten mins while I or the teacher would be standing there. We do not know what goes on in the child’s house, the fact is, it could not be a place that allows them time or concentration enough to get through a chapter book. Then as far as the discussion while a teacher is hovering over, a student may be intimidated by the teacher a clam up. They may still be prepared, and they may even still discuss while you aren’t hovering over.

Word Count: 268

Resource Blog #4

https://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/explore/exhibitions/cyclorama-the-big-picture#

                I tried to go for a different type of resource this time, finding websites began to get boring so I landed upon finding a field trip opportunity for my students. Acquiring information from an event or place, enticing the interest of my students, and a chance to see some wonderful bits of history. The Cyclorama of Civil War battles, coined the Big Picture, is a place you can schedule your students to come and watch a show and learn tons about the civil war and the history of the painting itself. The 10,000-pound painting that encompasses an entire room, was like going to the movie theaters for the 1800s, is now a way for us to learn and experience history. This resource is primarily a social studies resource, heavily focused on the history of civil war with no scientific or mathematical opportunities for learning unless you wanted the students to calculate an estimate of the mass of the painting. This could however be an opportunity for literacy students to come as well, especially if your students are learning about the varying forms of text. This being a painting, which can be classified as text, would be an excellent opportunity to show your students how a painting can hold just as much information as a book.
Word Count: 216

Synthesis Blog #4 Journal Club Reading

Summarize:
This article at its core, was and is a resource on how you can bring together science and literary sources and for novels to increase interest in both science and reading. It gives examples of good and not so good literary works to be used or not used in the classroom for varies reasons.

Connections:

• Connects to the history article I read in the sense that they had similar reasonings of why certain material works and others don't.
• Reminds me of other works I have read in the past. Ex: Dark Life
• This article not only references how science and lit relates, but also references how in these science novels, it is not uncommon for politics, economics, and other social studies elements within the texts.

Critiques:

• Gave ample amount of examples of text that relates to science and literature relations.
• They effectively tie those examples back into the big picture.
• I do wish the article provided science teachers more strategies and options on how to incorporate literacy elements in science instead of focusing on bring science into lit classes at the conclusion. 

Explanations:

I think the most important thing to draw from this article is the potential to incorporate reading into our separate subjects, in this case the science field. There are a multitude of options that we as teachers can use to provide our students further understanding on our subjects and to be working on our students reading strategies, which will help them understand and analyze all texts. I see this as a great way to provide students with supplemental text to aid in their understand of topics we are learning in class. I could also see this as a way for some formative assessments, allowing my students to pull out information and quotes that relate to our subject and topic.

Word Count: 303

Resource Blog #3

For this week’s resource blog, I went with a less traditional form of text, a Podcast. “The Daily” podcast is a ran by the New York Times, suggested by my current social studies professor, Joe. I found that this was an excellent resource for my content area, as they post as their name states, daily, with the exception that they do miss a few days sometimes, with news updates about things happening in the USA and global events. I find this as an excellent way for students to start thinking about what is going on in the world around them and being able to tie current content and standards into real world problems and events as a teacher. They have been doing this podcast since last year, so you could even take podcasts from the past and use those topics from then to bring up past issues that relate to the current topic. I can see other content areas using this resource as well, if the discussed topic relates to their field. For example, the amazon rainforest fires were talked about in the podcast, could be used in science class when learning about the importance of the environment or even when learning about how trees oxygenize our planet. Overall great resource that provides consistent and updated information, however it is the New York Times so there is bias, but a good dose of Fox News in the morning with my cup of joe, before I leave and listen to the Daily on my drive to school keeps me well balanced.


https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/podcasts/the-daily/elizabeth-warren-rally.html


Word Count: 255

Synthesis Blog #3

I found it very helpful in understanding this text when we discussed in the classroom and used the strategies for the reading. As far as the text itself, very useful in understanding how we should manage the use of a textbook in our future classrooms. Whether it be used more heavily or more as a reference every now and then I think is the choice of us teachers. I do believe that we can all agree using the whole textbook like the reading is not a healthy learning space for us or the students. How I wish to run my future classroom is using the textbook as a supplemental resource, just like resources I will supply my students and I hope to get them to gather for themselves. In social studies, I feel like it would be trivial to simply use the textbook. Afterall, it contains the standards in it, and even has questions I could use to supply my tests. Practically doing my job for me. I know that it be devaluing my students, would make me hate my job, and therefore make my students hate my class. I see the value in the textbooks. Excerpts from the textbook would be great way to introduce some vocabulary that students are not aware of. As from the reading, our tasks as teachers are make sure our students understand what is being talked about it the classroom, not worry about that later when they pass or fail a test.

Word count: 248

Resource Blog #2

https://www.discoveryeducation.com/community/virtual-field-trips/

My new resource for our second resource blog comes from the Discovery Education website. They have a section called virtual field trips. This section of the site specifically focuses on high quality video productions that works for any subject. It takes you through a tour of a subject, ranging from STEM subjects, literacy, history, technologies, and even college readiness programs. They are varying long videos that take students through that subject, in a combination of a simulation/documentary styled video. This resource was good for either social studies or any other content area. It allows for an overview video to aid in reviewing for a subject or introducing a subject. I would not allow these virtual field trips to take the place of teaching, but I still thought this was a valuable asset to teaching my content area as the videos were interesting and I think would hold the attention of middle schoolers.

Word Count: 156

Synthesis Blog #2

      I found that, even though I consider myself an avid reader, that I had some trouble with some of the passages that these teachers used to challenge their students. As I continued through the chapter, I found that I recalled myself thinking the same way as the students. For example, on page 284 of the text where a student is calling out the teacher for the teacher expecting them to “know what they know and know what they don’t know.” I remember thinking with the same reasoning in middle and high school about my teachers that would say that. Now as a future educator and a college student, I understand the value of self-monitoring now, simply because it is a necessary skill. College professors do not baby you and that is either a make it or break it point for students in my opinion. As a future teacher, I hope I can break my students for relying on me for the answer, but instead, get them invested enough that they want to find it for themselves. Achieving that will require me to use the strategies in this chapter, by assessing where my students are on their reading levels, and building the type of relationship with my students where they are comfortable to ask me to explain a text and walk them through it.

Word Count: 223

Resource Blog: Social Studies

Resource Link: https://teachinghistory.org/

                For this resource blog, I found this website that is a gold mine for teachers K-12 whom are teaching social studies. There are separate sections for the separate grades that one teaches that takes you to the grade specific part of the site. In those separate sections, there are lesson plan ideas, list of good primary sources to share with students, videos of professional speakers, and even has some online activities that students could do. Another great tool that this site had was the ability to communicate

 with historians and what the sites call a Master Teacher, someone who has been teaching for a while and draw from their knowledge and experience.

Word Count: 120

Blog Post #1: Chapter 2

                I have also heard teachers and others say the very same thing the text states,” Weren’t these kids suppose to learn how to read in elementary school?” Until now, I had a similar disposition. Purely because I sadly have not put more thought into how and why kids did not understand or comprehend certain texts. Mainly because I have never been MADE to make the critical analysis of why. It makes so much sense that it is their understanding and conceptualization of what they are reading. When I read the cricket passage before I knew it was cricket, I had a hard time concluding that it was even a game! Coming to the realization that students have just as much issue with subjects they have no background information, nothing for them to make it “click” for them, I believe is the greatest lesson from this text. Creating a connection for our students, connecting the geography or history of country to something that is relatable to your students, for example, might be the key in unlocking their understanding of the subject. I think it is of the upmost importance that if we take anything from the class, it’s the duty as a teacher of any subject, to put to practice the method of using connections or “niches”, like stated in the book, so the student can construct their understanding of the subject you are trying to teach.

Word count: 241

 

This is my rendition of the great Dr. Seuss's "Fox in Socks". A true ballad and set of rhyming action. The fox and all the creatures are a great time. I hope that Arya enjoys and all that come to this blog enjoys my lovely voice. Hopefully you can keep up with my mad rap skills.

Word Count: 56 words