Addressing Literacy needs
In my future classroom students will have different literacy needs that I will need to address in my instruction. The most important thing that needs to be done is to see what students needs are through assessment. A lot of times teachers get pigeonholed in using assessment in the wrong way. When we were students assessments were reward for good work in the class and punishment for bad performance in the classroom, when in reality assessments are there to show teachers what students know and don’t know so that they can improve on those skills. Gutzmer and Wilder talk about the importance of using pre-assessments to see where students are before you start a new unit. (Gutzmer & Wilder, 2012) In history this could be something as simple as having students list everything they know about World War Two or whatever unit you are on before you start. If there is vocabulary for the unit having students take a vocabulary quiz as a pre-test to see what words you need to spend more time on. When you get feedback on other assessments it is important to look at those grades and see what students need more help with. If students do poorly on a quiz that is a reflection of your teaching more so than the students and it shows you need to go back and work more on that material.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjURdvzty4c
Another tactic for addressing students literacy needs is through the gradual release of responsibility framework. The gradual release of responsibility looks like I do, or Teacher gives examples or instructions, we do, or The teacher works with students to figure something out, you do together, in which students work with each other to figure something out, and finally you do, which is where students work on it alone. Fisher, Frey, and Lapp talk about the importance of guided instruction, which is the we do together part of the gradual release framework. (Fisher, Frey, & Lapp, 2010) There are four steps in guided instruction. The first step is asking questions that check for understanding. The second is prompting cognitive and metacognitive processes. This second step is basically asking students to think about why they said the answer that they said. The third step is to shift attention to overlooked information or something they missed. Finally, the fourth step is to model your thinking for the class. I actually used this process in one of the lessons I taught this semester. I did a lesson on Greek philosophy and I was having students respond to quotes from Greek philosophers. I was asking questions to check for their understanding. I would then ask why they thought the answers that they thought. Then I would shift their attention to material they were overlooking or missing. Then if they were not getting the quote at all I would tell them well this is what I would think when analyzing this quote. This seemed to work very, the students started to show more understanding by the end of the lesson. The Gradual release of responsibility framework is a great way to teach in a classroom. It lets you address the different literacy needs of your students by letting them do it themselves and give more scaffolding when they need more help.
Another way I plan on meeting the literacy needs of my future history classroom is by giving vocabulary worksheets or changing words in readings to make them easier to read. It is vitally important to use primary and secondary sources in a history classroom. The thing about these primary and secondary sources is that they can be hard for young readers to read. Documents like the US constitution sometimes have a doctorate level reading level, making it extremely difficult for middle school students to understand. An easy way to fix this issue is through doing things like making a vocabulary sheet to go along with the reading on words that I think students could struggle on. An easier way of fixing this could be to write the meaning of words or phrases on the board anytime a student ask about it and leaving it on the board for other classes. There are also websites like rewordify.com that will take out difficult words and reword a text to be easier to read. Sometimes the sources we want to use in history classrooms can be very difficult to read but anything that we can do to make that challenge easier needs to get done so that we can still use them.
As teachers we will have to work with students with different literacy needs. The first thing we must do is use assessments to see what our students needs are. Once we see what our students needs are we can use things like the gradual release of responsibility and guided instruction to continue helping our students though learning. Finally, we can alter our text or give cheat sheets for vocabulary to make the reading in our classrooms accessible for all students. Making sure we reach the literacy needs of all students is vitally important in teaching a successful classroom.
Fisher, D., Frey, N., & Lapp, D. (2010). Responding When Students Don’t Get It. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54(1), 57–60. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20749076
Gutzmer, C., & Wilder, P. (2012). “Writing So People Can Hear Me”: Responsive Teaching in a Middle School Poetry Unit. Voices from the Middle, 19(3), 37–44.
Fisher and Frey, directors. Gradual Release of Responsibility. YouTube, YouTube, 11 May 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjURdvzty4c.
I’m Not Sure if This is Hard Meme, retrieved from: http://ru.memegenerator.net/instance/58754167
Barbee, W. On the Fence. Retrieved from: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/314829830171029235
