Our course SCED 4200 is done. Looking back, at what I can
take from what was taught, there are many things that I will be able to apply
to my teaching methods when I become a teacher.
Critical literacy seems to be one of the
“staple items” taught in the education program. I do realize why. As taught,
not acting as the “ultimate authority,” on what I will be teaching, helps
foster an environment for my student to have critical literacy and is something
that I plan to do to. That’s one thing that really caught my attention in this
class, a great take-away. With that, math and Stats is my discipline, and
sometimes it’s hard to let students question what is taught but it is possible.
Doing so will lead to students having higher order questions. Those higher
order questions are key.
I love how we talked about actually teaching
comprehension instruction. In math teachers seem to never do this which is
incredible since the inability to comprehend math texts is causing students
more trouble than most everything else. The comprehension strategies are very
different for math based text which is why the Math teachers need to teach it;
they can’t rely on the English teachers to do it. This is another great
take-away that will help me achieve better test scores from my students.
This class has given me some incite
that I never would have thought of, especial in mathematics, which is
contradicting the fact that it is especially important in math. That incite is
very simple, just that you should only provide 5 to 7 vocabulary words at a
time. My math teachers never seemed to
consider that and just shoved as many vocab words down our throats as possible,
which just confused me more than ever. Applying this concept will help my
students follow what I am teaching instead of getting lost in the vocab. Besides this I also learned how important it
is to show students what to do when they encounter unknown words, such as using
morpheme analysis or just by looking at the context its used in.
There are many great I ideas from
this class that I plan to incorporated into my classroom. There are too many to
go into detail so I’ll just mention them. Using and providing multiple forms of
text will help students who have different ways of learning. Showing how the 6
traits of writing are critical for math and having a specific lesson to teach
them will help students know how to write in math. In addition to writing in
math, knowing the levels of writing and grading my students appropriately will
help me not frustrate and teach them efficiently. In conclusion, I have learned
many characteristics of teaching, in this class, that will help me in my future
career as a teacher.
I agree that the comprehension part is really important for each of the content areas to teach within their class, as well as the only 5 to 7 vocabulary words. As someone who usually struggled in math, I feel that I could have probably done a lot better and understood more if some of the ideas that you talked about had been incorporated.
ReplyDeleteI especially liked your focus on critical literacy. I think students are the LEAST critically literate in math because math is almost always presented as being entirely objective and free from human influence. I think it is dangerous to have students read media reports and accept any numeric claim, so I'm glad you're thinking of ways to tackle that perception that anything in numbers must be true.
ReplyDelete