Micro Teaching

This was a great experience for as it allowed me the opportunity to put into practice some of the strategies I have learned about in Content Area class. The comments I have received will definitely help me better my practice.

Thanks to those who attended class and thanks to Miss Polius for giving us this chance to put theory into practice.

Micro Teaching

QUOTE

''These researchers noted that content area teachers, trained to be content specific specialists, define themselves by their specializations as scientists, historians, athletes, and musicians first and teachers second. This doesn’t mean that they are not committed to their students; it just means that they are intrigued by a content specialty that through study grew into an area of expertise they want to share with others.'' Pg. 378

REFLECTION

This emphasises my belief that a teacher may have a wealth of knowledge in an area and may not be able to impact students’ learning in the classroom. Thus the best teacher is really one who understands, caters for the students’ learning needs by employing the most effective strategies during instruction.

Teachers such as those alluded to in this quote may easily get frustrated when students cannot grasp the concept that they (the teacher) think is intriguing and easy to understand. I certainly cannot compare to such specialists as my level of education does not allow me, but many times I found myself thinking inwardly about the number of literature students who did not seem to enjoy poetry like I did.

I now note that my motivation was my love for literature and not a desire to get all passes at the end of the term. As a result, the students who were better excelled in spite of the difficulties they faced while the others experienced failure because of the complexity of the material / content.

Reflection 2

The role of the content area teacher is a difficult one in light of the fact that 'every teacher s a teacher of literacy.' This role is made even more challenging if students have not learned to read in the earlier stages; and this is of great concern to me.
It is very easy to say that every teacher should focus on enhancing students' reading and writing skills, but the problem arises when teachers have to put this into practice and complete the syllabus within a given time frame.

In light of this, it is not at all suprising that most teachers do not consider equipping the students with the prerequisites (reading and writing skills) they need to understand content area befor teaching the meat of the matter.The end result is usually dismal failure which is often passed off as a lack of motivation on the part of students.

I believe that that the job of the content area teacher can be made easier if the necessary reading and writing skills are fostered in students from the primary level as is advocated by Chall. When this is not the case, the onus is on every secondary teacher to ensure that the students they instruct have the necessary skills which will make them competent in the subject. In some cases, teachers may have to provide instruction in word study, voocabulary,fluency and so on.
If this is done, then english language will serve as a consolidation class in which students wiil be exposed to the reading and writing strategies in detail. This will enable content teachers to maximize teaching time as students will use the skills to they are taught to teach themselves.

What is being advocated now,can only be achieved through intensive and extensive planning, and with the cooperation of all teachers. This is when teaching moves from being a job to being a profession and a way of life.Only teachers who truly care for students reach this level. Let us pray that we do for the sake of the nation's children.

Group Reflection on Comprehension Strategies

Tierney & Pearson (1998, pg 85) in ‘Reading and Writing Connection’ by Carol Olson advocate that ‘teachers must participate as senior members of the school community by sharing and modelling how they negotiate complex learning tasks, thereby making the use of cognitive strategies to construct meaning visible to inexperienced readers and writers.We are in agreement with this statement as we know that often times students model the behaviour of their teachers; even the teaching strategies that they apply in the teaching - learning process.

What Tierney and Pearson call for however, can be a challenge. Many teachers are not aware of exactly how to use the strategies, or are not even aware of the strategies because they are not trained in the area.One of the group members explained that, many times, in her subject areas of English and Literature, in presenting texts to her students, she would employ some of the learning strategies that we are studying, but not necessarily outlining their names, or the steps involved for the students because she was not aware of them. She now realises that she used the following comprehension strategies to enable her students to get a deeper understanding of the texts:

Deducing the main idea
Summarising
Making inferences
Making predictions
Forming interpretations
Tapping into prior knowledge.

She admits that these strategies were of tremendous assistance to the students who faced difficulties in comprehending the texts. However, the higher order strategies such as reflecting, visualising, analysing authors’ craft were often neglected. We recognise that literature affords the students opportunities to use such strategies as they are constantly required to critique, analyse, evaluate or draw conclusions based on the actions of the characters, and issues in the play, novel or poem.
How well we employed these strategies is questionable as we had little, or no concrete knowledge of how to use them effectively to make the activities very meaningful. Had such strategies been made clear to us as students, while they were being used by our teachers, me might be better able to utilise them as teachers, and to understand their importance in the comprehension process.
This course has made us realise that in fact we are strategic readers as we have been using the strategies in our own reading. However, we did not know that they were actually comprehension strategies! Our ignorance of these important strategies we realise may have been detrimental to some of our students who were not able to develop the three types of knowledge which are critical if they are to be strategic teachers – declarative, procedural and conditional.

Reflection 1

Reading is an interactive process in which readers research, develop thoughts and share ideas about a particular piece of literature. It becomes a meaning making process when individuals read to understand, and formulate view points about a topic or issue. It also enables readers to develop vocabulary from, and construct knowledge based on the information they have encountered. Reading in content area should produce these results for students. However, many times it fails and this is why I think such a course was developed.

My understanding of Content Area Reading and Writing is that it aims at helping teachers develop an awareness of their students’ reading and writing abilities in content areas. It also considers the various techniques that teachers can employ to enhance their students’ skills in reading and understanding the contents of the subject texts that they read.

Many students, even those who excel in English, encounter problems in content areas because of an inability to read effectively. Even while teaching Literature I realized that students had comprehension problems because the language of (Shakespeare – Old English), and experiences in the text were foreign to them. Research, role play, poetry writing, drawing, discussion, and shared intensive reading were some of the strategies used to get them interested and involved in the lesson. Many of the strategies helped bring out the students’ responses to the text; these responses were later documented as their notes.

In some circumstances, content teachers do not address reading and writing problems in students as they believe this should be done primarily by English teachers. They deal with writing problems by accepting phrases, and not proper sentences, as responses, even in exams. This makes the job of the English teacher even more difficult as getting students to break away from using phrases to write well is challenging. What worked for me was helping students develop an appreciation for writing by helping them realize that it is an effective communication tool, it is a response to what they have read and this response highlights their understanding of the text, and it presents an account of them.

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