A Focus on Reading
My biggest take away from this week was the emphasis on meaning and meaning making (thanks to the group presentation btw). In my perspective, a lot of teachers are not able to convey meaning simply because they do not put themselves into the shoes of their students, particularly with ELLs. Teachers already know the message they are trying to convey, the students do not. I enjoyed the example that was used in the presentation about using hand gestures to deliver meaning about why dogs are better than cats and how he used his hands to illustrate an argument analogous to how the legs of the table help support the entire structure. This chapter provides a variety of examples and methods in order to help cultivate a culture of reading in the classroom.
I liked the idea of teachers being adaptive to kinaesthetic, auditory, and visual learners. Every class I had with a teacher who just stood at the podium and lectured made me want to shoot myself in the foot. Sure, there are some pretty engaging lecturers out there, but when he’s simply just reading off of his notes and not bothering to answer questions that his/her students had, then there is a problem. Zwiers encourages teachers to move and act out brick words to his/her students, to break it down, or have students experience the word for what it is. In an English classroom, for the most part, the only words students see bolded come from introductions or author’s notes preceding the actual text to be read and when there are words that are bolded or footnoted, they do provide and explanation that is very much surface level and not enough for students to fully comprehend what they are reading.