Final Synthesis Blog

One of the most impactful moments from this semester for me, was the Ted talk about the “average” student and how if we teach in a way that suits the “average” student, then we are actually teaching for no one because every student has different skills, struggles, and needs. Therefore, there is no average student. One skill that can be very different amongst the students in any particular class, is each student’s individual reading level. We as teachers need to understand that in our class, from good readers, to bad reads, to ELL readers, they all have different needs to be able to read the same text and complete the same assignment.

            Some activities that we did and learned about that can help meet the needs of these students to help them become better readers was the Think Aloud activity and the differentiation lesson. Think Alouds are good for all students in the class because you can model to them strategies that effective readers use. According to the “Subjects Matter” book by Harvey “Smokey” Daniels and Steven Zemelman, effective readers visualize the text, connect the text to their own experience and events in the real world, question and actively wonder and interrogate the text, make inferences about the text, evaluate the text, analyze the text, recall the information in the text, and self-monitor the text if there were any parts that they were confused about and needed to read again. When doing a Think Aloud with our students, we focus on of these strategies and model to the students how an effective reader uses that strategy when reading a form of text. After doing this, they should know how to use that particular strategy on their own when reading through some text. You can also teach students how to read certain class content text. For example, if students are reading about the results form a science experiment, they may not necessarily need to read the entire passage about the experiment. You can teach them how to go through the text to find out what the experiment was about (in the introduction) and how to find the results at then end. All of the specific details about the experiment and every step about how they did it may not need to be read, so you can teach them how to find and pull the important information from specific texts without having the read the entire thing. Teaching students and preparing them (or coaching them how to take the test) for the reading that they will have to do on standardized tests is also a form of reading that requires certain skills to be able to do effectively. Using Think Alouds to demonstrate to the students how an effective reader reads a standardized test question from each content area is a helpful way to model to them how they should do it. Another helpful lesson was the lesson about differentiation and the video about content differentiation in third grade science. This showed how to conduct an activity and meet all of the needs of the readers in the class. Using multimodal forms of text is a way that can help all students to read and understand what it is that you are asking them to do. Having an interactive board that the students can manipulate, reading the instructions out loud so that struggling readers don’t have to struggle to read the instructions, and providing pictures, are all ways that can meet the reading needs of the students in the class. Nowadays with each student of most schools having their own laptop or iPad with their books on it, there are many ways that you can incorporate technology and multimodal forms of text to help out all of the students. Even the ELL students have open access to use the internet to help translate words from the text to help them understand. On an iPad, Siri can even be summoned to read highlighted text, so an audio option for struggling readers is available through technology. Technology can also be used to front load with images before your lesson to help students visualize what they are about to learn. It can be used for podcasts, dot-storming, play posit, and even tweet the text, which are engaging activities for the students to participate in using their form of technology (iPad, laptop, or phone).

            Each content area requires certain skills that students must use to effectively read the text and  material for those particular content areas. These are just a few of the activities and lessons that I thought were impactful from the semester that can be used in my future classrooms to help cater to the needs of all students, to do so. Certain students will need more help than others to do basic assignments and readings, but these lessons and activities can be implemented to help all students succeed and become better readers and better content area readers.

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