Subjects Matter - Day 4

Christine Munzer
Subjects Matter
Chapters 10 – 11

This last section of text wasn’t as rich as the rest of the book. I felt that in the rest of the book, Daniels and Zemelman highlighted strategies that were effective and strong and by the end of the book, they referenced just other authors one should read to gain information about specific strategies to use with kids who simply can’t read. After reading the section on struggling readers, all I left with was to ask a SPED teacher for help or go read Kylene Beers’ book. I’ll have to admit that the chapter on inquiry learning (Chapter 10) was pretty good but I feel that at my school we have build a lot of common assessments around inquiry learning. It did provide me with some additional ideas for inquiry learning based projects that I could use in addition to what we already do.

For our last discussion we decided to use an after reading strategy and settled on written discussion. Since this set of text was less engaging then other sections, this was a perfect strategy. I was able to simply read the text using my own personal strategies and prepare for a discussion. However, I felt the pressure to read the text because I knew I would have to actively discuss some unknown topic that my partner decided to write about. This was a good experience because kids think the same way. They really don’t want to look dumb in front of their peers. After our discussion, I had an impression that this would only really be a good strategy for a text that could be used to introduce a topic or arouse an emotional feeling that they could write about. Beyond this, it would be hard to tell if kids were having a deeper level conversation.