Day 2 Reflection

Sara Williams
Multimodal Learning for the 21st Century Adolescent
Chapters 2 & 3

Vocabulary. We all know how critical it is to developing reading skills and content knowledge, but how is it best taught? Chapter 2 of our book attempted to tackle this question multimodal-style. Bean discusses the idea of "insider knowledge" and what I found interesting about this phrase was the word "insider." I had never thought of myself as a reading insider before, but I guess I am. I know what to do to work through difficult texts, I use "insider" languge like "reading apprenticeship" and "metacognition," and I feel comfortable when I'm met with reading challenges. As Bean says, my "speech distinguishes [me] from outsiders." Bean asserts that "spending a little time explaining the insider's language of our respective content areas goes a long way toward increasing student comprehension." This made me think of tier I, II, & III vocabulary words we discussed in our ELL training. Some things just need to be made transparent and our teaching needs to be explicit. Another thread running through Bean's discussion is that learning new words is "labor intensive." Funny how we've been saying this over and over about reading - it is work and it doesn't just happen magically. I'm learning that this is something I need to say out loud to my kids. A lot.

In our group, we discussed the specific strategies Bean outlines in these chapters. I think our overall opinion is that the strategies were okay, but would need adapting to work in our classes.

I find myself struggling a little with this reading - it's not holding my interest. Maybe it is because it is a professional text and I'm in summer mode after having been on maternity leave for 8 weeks and it's tough to get in the flow. I'm trying to focus on my purpose for reading by rereading the guiding questions for the book study and also asking the person in my group in charge of facilitating for the day what we'll be doing in discussion so I can read with that in mind.