Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Course Synthesis



I thought this course was full of useful instruction strategies.  I’m most excited to incorporate critical literacy into my teaching.  I think it’s critically important to teach students to evaluate sources for bias and whose voice is being heard, especially in science.  The media often has a slanted view of scientific issues, but will likely be many students’ main source of information about them.  Many of these issues are topics that students will one day be voting on and it’s critical that they are given the tools to make their own decisions about controversial science topics so they can act in their own best interests.  I plan to incorporate critical literacy instruction by adding scientific articles and videos, such as the video included here, and have students evaluate them.
I also think representation instruction will play a major role in my classroom because many science concepts are somewhat abstract and using representations and having students create their own representations can really help students understand what’s happening.  Right along with that, comprehension instruction can help students understand the concepts better just by giving them the tools they need to understand the text.  I also think that comprehension instruction leads into vocabulary instruction (or vocabulary instruction into comprehension).  Science is incredibly vocab heavy and exposing students to the words in the text and helping them understand context clues can help them piece together meanings.  Vocabulary instruction will also have to happen outside of comprehension instruction, however, because there are so many terms with similar sounds or meanings.  I really liked the balderdash activity for teaching vocabulary and can see myself using it in my own classroom later.
Finally, I find writing instruction to be nearly as important as critical literacy instruction.  No matter where my students go after leaving my classroom, writing will help them.  I had a geography teacher who incorporated weekly essays into her class.  I hated it at the time, but I am so grateful for it now.  I already had the writing skills I needed to be successful in high school, college, and beyond because she put in the time to read and provide feedback on every single essay.  I think writing is an important skill even for the students that pass through my classroom who don’t intend to go to college.  It keeps doors open to them that would otherwise be shut in their faces.  I don’t think I’ll be able to fit a formal essay into my science class every single week, but I hope to incorporate smaller  writing assignments and maybe one or two formal papers that help students become effective communicators in print.