Synthesis Blog #3: SM Ch. 6

As outlined in the chapter, one of the tactics that teachers need to use to help students more effectively use the textbook, is to not assign the whole textbook. We need be more selective in what we have our students read. I have had classes in the past where we were assigned huge, bulks of the text to read and other classes where the teacher would assign certain sections of the text in which he or she found important for us to know. I much preferred when the teacher pointed out which parts to focus on, because I had a better sense of what was important. Rather than reading the whole, huge chapter and not knowing which parts were most important and trying to guess which parts to remember and focus on, the teacher outlined that for us. By doing that, we don’t have to remember the whole text, in which there are parts that are not necessarily important, but instead, we can focus on what is important. As teachers, we should go through and outline the important parts of the text that we want our kids to focus on. In the chapter it said, “Not only are you a grown-up and a subject matter expert, you have also read your textbook five or twenty times before. The material may seem easy to you, but it may really by Greek to the kids.” Therefore, we should know what is important for our kids to read and focus on. This will make it easier for them to narrow down their focus to certain parts of the text, rather than having to learn and comprehend all of the text. It goes on to say, “make more selective assignments for your students. Instead of plowing through the whole book, make strategic choices about what is most important, assigning fewer pages and helping students study them much more carefully." Also, if the text is hard, or “content loaded,” the students are going to need more help. 

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Resource Blog 2

Link to Book

Link to Buy 

“What does evaluating student reading skills have to do with mathematics? When people I meet find out that I teach mathematics, they often say, “I did OK in math—except for those word problems.” This is a quote from the author of “Literacy Strategies for Improving Mathematics Instruction” that I think that we have all heard from someone that we know at some point in our lives. This book is a good resource for any future math teacher because it focuses on strategies that teachers can implement to help improve their students’ understanding of the text that we find in our math textbooks. The text includes vocabulary strategies to help students comprehend math terms, “reading-to-learn” strategies to help students extract important content from math problems and math texts, strategies to help students visualize math concepts and personalize their understandings, and discussion and listening strategies that help students access prior knowledge and communicate about problem solving. I think that this could be a really helpful book for future math teachers because it can help us to improve the strategies that we use while teaching math, to help all students in our class be more successful.

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In this week’s reading, one quote that stuck out to me was, “To help students understand and learn from the tasks we assign them, we must work with their reading process.” To do this, we must create supportive relationships, model thoughtful reading, promote self-monitoring, use materials that students can successfully read/provide support for more challenging texts, build engagement with the text, and provide books and materials in various formats. A main reason why students struggle with math word problems is due to the fact that they cannot visualize what is going on in the problem, in their head. From the chapter, the students that were trying to solve the problem about shining a laser beam at a reflecting panel, had problems visualizing this because they did not know what a reflecting panel was (just a mirror), or that a beam of light (laser) travels like an object. They could not picture the situation because they were not accustomed to it and could not relate to it. So, how can I, as a future math teacher, avoid this? One, I need to try to incorporate relative material that students can successfully read, in my problems. Since Fortnite has become super popular, giving students a question about Fortnite is something that they can probably almost instantly picture in their heads. An example question would be, “If you are playing Fortnite and you jump off of the roof of a house that is 20 meters tall and fall at a rate of 5 meters per second, how many seconds will it take until you land on the ground?” Second, (and what I think is most important from the list in the beginning), I must model thoughtful reading strategies. I can do this by doing “think-alouds.” If I model to the students how to effectively read the text, then they can incorporate those strategies when they read. Both points are important. I must provide students with material that they can successfully read, that they are familiar with, so that they can visualize and relate to it, and also model how they should use thinking strategies while reading to become more effective readers, by doing “think-alouds.”

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