Christine Munzer
Subjects Matter – Everyday Teacher’s Guide to Content-Area Reading
Pages 1 – 48 (Chapters 1 - 3)
The text, Subjects Matter really focused on strategies that all teachers can use to make reading in the classroom effective, engaging and fun. For our first book study, we looked just at the first three chapters. These chapters offered very little strategies but really had me thinking about my own teaching, especially when it comes to incorporating a textbook.
The authors, Daniels and Zemelman open up the book with trying to get you to really think about how one is using reading in their own classroom. As a history teacher, I try to incorporate primary source documents, pictures, maps, graphs and to a degree, the textbook. However, is this “real-reading?” Real-reading teaches the kids to be lifelong learners and as teachers we should be getting them prepared for this task. Thus, in this sense, we should be offering authentic assessmentusing tools that can be incorporated to everyday learning. We should be teaching our kids how to read texts that will further their understanding of a concept and in doing so, our kids need to read more than just the textbook. Furthermore, the book goes on to explore how we read. By offering small passages and questions of how we deciphered the text as we read it, Daniels and Zemelman have tried to get the reader to focus on how they go about actually reading a text. The strategies in decoding text in this matter I noticed are things that I do anyways but need to now focus on explicitly teaching students to do the same. Finally, the book offered a great discussion on why we need textbooks in our class – a read I highly recommend to those who can’t fathom teaching without one.
In reading the text, our group used the “text rendering experience protocol” to discuss the three chapters that we read. In this protocol, each student will pick a word, phrase, sentence and passage that would be shared out during the discussion. We decided to work with this gradual build-up from word to passage to help work from the smaller main ideas presented to the big picture concepts. The strategy worked well in our group and I felt that this is something that would be really easy to facilitate with kids. In our discussion, we felt that when using this protocol with students, you’d have to set some parameters. For instance, it would be important to make sure that kids could not pick the same word or phrase and rotate who gets to share first in order to minimize the frustration of being the last one to share. This protocol is one that can easily be student lead and the focus can be shifted depending on the lesson. (i.e. having students find words that they are unfamiliar within the text). The strategy was a quick way for us to work through a very long text.
Do you question whether primary source documents are "real reading"? I think they are, and a great authentic text. I also think having a variety of them, making them accessible to students and giving students choice in the process is where Daniels and Zemelman are going.
ReplyDeleteI have used the "Save the Last Word" protocol successfully in my class before as well. I highly recommend modeling this for the students first. You might also want to limit what they pick out first. Instead of selecting a word, phrase, and sentence maybe just have them pick two of these instead of all three. I also have students read it out loud twice and write it on an index card so the other group members who might not be auditory learners can process it as well.
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