Synthesis of Course

Being an English major, I've always been taught that literacy is important; I mean, that's what 75% of Language Arts entails is literacy instruction. However, the further I got into the education program, the more I realized that it's not a one-subject job: there is no way that English teachers alone could create a literate population, nor should they be expected to. That's one reason why I'm excited about the new common core standards--they mean that it will no longer just be on my small shoulders to educate the entire population about every facet of reading, writing, and oral language. That's a relief, to say the least.

While much of what I learned in this course was not brand new to me, I did find myself gaining a greater appreciation for the importance of different literacy concepts, such as teaching vocabulary or assessing students on their affective dimensions of literacy. Although I had previously learned how to do both of those things (and many more literacy-related things), I did not yet have an appreciation for how important those things were.

I think I'm finally starting to really get that.

And because I'm starting to get how important those things are, I've started to brainstorm strategies of how I could implement them in my classroom on a daily or weekly basis while leaving time to teach the other aspects of my content area.

What follows is a short bucket list of strategies and concepts that I'm going to implement during student teaching:

1) Explicit vocabulary instruction through root definitions: each Monday, I would present a new root to the class (such as "bell/i") and define its meaning ("war"). Then each subsequent day, I would introduce one new word within that root family. So on Tuesday I might present "antebellum," Wednesday "belligerent," etc. This would not only help students learn new words, but also help them to learn strategies for decoding completely unfamiliar words. It also would help some English Language Learners, as many of their languages will also be derived from similar roots.

2) Writing & Sharing For Authentic Audiences: after learning the importance of assigning writing tasks that require students to write authentic texts for authentic purposes and audiences, I have been brainstorming ways I could assign what's required by the Utah Core Standards while giving students some choice. One way I came up with is to research one of the many essay contests open to middle and high school students and have students write for that essay contest. For example, one contest might have to do with the theme of, "How I Will Change the World," which would be broad enough to encompass diverse student interests while at the same time providing a specific direction for students. After students had gone through multiple revisions and produced their best work, all essays would be submitted to the contest.

3) "Write Beside Them": I learned this strategy from a Kelly Gallagher book I read for my Teaching Writing class, but the principles are universal for any discipline--when assigning any topic to students or any written work, make sure that you as the teacher model on the overhead or on the DocCam the writing process. Oftentimes as teachers, we only include the an example of the final product, which only shows the students where we want them to be, not how they can get there. By modeling your own writing (even if it's messy!), students can see that writing doesn't come perfectly the first time and that often, multiple revisions are necessary to give our ideas the order and the quality we want them to have.

4) Give students opportunities to share what they've read or written. There is nothing that will kill the motivation of students more quickly than not giving them opportunities to share what they've learned and done. Besides keeping them accountable, it shows that you value the time they spent doing it.

5) Have a multicultural classroom, not a multicultural unit--if you only teach "multicultural" texts during one unit, then that gives students the message that those texts are only important under that context and not in any other way. When multicultural texts are the basis for all student work, then you're sharing the message that the text is important for its own sake, and not only for a "multicultural" purpose.

Although I learned much more than just these five strategies/concepts from this course, I think that they sum up some of the most important ideas I got from it that I wanted to apply to my own teaching. Overall, I've gained a greater appreciation for the importance of taking the time to explicitly teach literacy--my biggest take-home message would have to be, "TEACH IT, DON'T JUST ASSUME IT."

And that about sums it up for me.