Module 2 Summary

Videos: The goal for differentiated instruction is to get to know your students and assess their biggest needs to reach them at their instructional level. It's important to find the best way to approach your students to make learning fun and engaging for them. 

Differentiation came about from Tomlinson being a young teacher and using different activities with different students. It evolved in her middle school classroom. She had students who were four years under grade level and students on grade level so she had to use different approaches for these groups of students. You have to look at your class as a whole to see the big picture and the different variables to best teach your students and make sense of your classroom. 

Presentations: The challenges we face in learning literacy is not following the simple rules laid out for years before us but being innovative in finding ways to create problem-solving skills in our students. It's using new and exciting ways to engage students to help progress as learners. Strategic reading sessions are teacher-guided with purposeful, planned out purposes. It's a way to guide students through the reading process on how to build background knowledge, engage in the pre-reading, and reflects on what they have learned and to reread when they are done. It's important to get students engaged and excited about what they are reading so they can find purpose in reading. The teacher must plan ahead to figure out what is needed before reading for students to be able to dive into the text. 

Content area reading is much more difficult for students and must be scaffolded to get the most out of the text. The teacher must analyze the text beforehand for readability level to get students prepared for the task that could at times seem impossible. Teachers should modify if the text is too high and allow for focusing in on only a few vocabulary words. It's important for teachers to point out the different patterns you see in the different content area texts so that students can associate organization to each of these. Also using different strategies of teaching before, during, and after reading. 

Reading has a scaffolding process that goes from "I do you watch" to "You do I watch" through the steps of "I do you help" and "You do I help" to get students from the read aloud stage to the independently reading their choice of books stage. 

Bloom's Taxonomy was developed with many people to show the different stages of questioning development with students. There are different verbs that apply to the six stages. When you are questioning your students in small guided reading groups you should use Bloom's as a guideline for the results you are trying to achieve. 

Module 1 EDRD 7718

Throughout module 1, I learned more about expository text and why it's important to our classrooms and different reading strategies for struggling readers. Readers who are struggling need to work on decoding and sight words to work towards being fluent. Once you are a fluent reader that means that you can read with accuracy and expression. Vocabulary is important and should grow with age to increase understanding of unknown words. Comprehension is the most important goal. All readers should read to gain meaning. We also learned through the powerpoints about the different text structures and why it's necessary to figure out the signal words that indicate how the text is structured. When reading expository text we must realize whether it's a problem/solution, cause/effect, compare/contrast, or a sequence structure. This allows for you to organize your thoughts from the text to gain meaning. It's not only important to use graphic organizers when writing an expository text but it's just as important when reading one. In the Vacca, text I read about why content area textbooks are so difficult. Textbooks, especially for ELLs, become intimidating if the text is not readable, the pictures aren't enticing, and the words are beyond their scope. It is good to expose students to new words but when the new words overrun the known words it becomes too much. I have found in my classroom how difficult it is to use many of our textbooks because they no longer align to our standards. The only textbooks I still use occasionally are science and social studies because we are still using GPS standards. Textbooks need to be readable too. There are many methods to test readability but Fry has made a method that is used most often. As mentioned in the Vacca text, many teachers have steered away from using conventional textbooks and found more interesting ways to engage their learners to get the content taught.

For the Fry Test my classroom’s science textbook had an average of 10 sentences and an average of 139 syllables, therefore, it fell into the readability of 5^th grade which is the grade that I teach. When I did the Irwin checklist, this textbook stayed for the most part in the adequate section with a few poor areas and a few excellent areas. The weaknesses of this text are that it is very average level and doesn't apply to a variety of ability levels. The assets of the text are that it is appealing to look at and has excellent resources like the index, glossary, and table of contents to help narrow down research for students. The best way to utilize this tool is to use it as a secondary resource for instruction and not the primary resource. The limitations of using these types of readability tests are that we don’t really get an idea of how well the students can comprehend or understand the material.

Textbook text patterns can help students when reading paragraphs or informational narratives because they have seen it before with you.