Talk:Bonnie Blood: Reading Strategies in the High School Curriculum

revisions -- Jianwei Zhang 09:26, 10 March 2009 (EDT)

Your revisions have worked out very well. This should be a very solid and useful mini-course.

There are a lot of strategies related to reading, and I guess you won't address all of them at depth. Do you have a clear sense now which strategies you will mainly focus on?

Task analysis and prerequisites -- Jz833665 10:41, 17 March 2009 (EDT)

Hi Bonnie.

Re. your prerequisites, it would be helpful if you can visualize how the prerequisites are related to the performance objectives of your whole mini-course, using curriculum maps. This will help you work on the sequencing of the contents in relation to each objective.

As well, the prerequisite of "having basic knowledge of curriculum development" is too general. You should indicate what specific concepts/skills are required related to curriculum development.

As an example, you may want to look at a similar project at Diane_Hamilton's_Portfolio_Page#Task_Analyses

Jianwei

Re. objectives and ICM -- Jianwei Zhang 09:22, 31 March 2009 (EDT)

Bonnie--

Nice work in task analysis and creating your ICM.

(a) Re. you ICM, I think it would be proper to assume that teachers should already understand the differences between narrative and informational texts so that you don't need to teach them in this course.

(b) I want to bring back a comment/question I wrote earlier: Do you have a clear idea in mind in term of what reading strategies you will focus on and what teaching model you will recommend the teachers to use to teach students reading strategies? A wide range of reading strategies have been developed in research and practice, and you may want to focus on a core set of strategies that have a solid research base.

Here's a suggestion for you: One of the most successful programs of teaching student reading strategies is called "reciprocal teaching(RT)," which uses a collaborative learning approach to model/coach/scaffold the use of four core reading strategies: summarizing, questioning, clarifying, and predicting. A lot of research studies have been done on reciprocal teaching. I'm wondering if you want to use it as the basic framework to focus on in this mini-course. It addresses the two questions I asked you in the first paragraph (what strategies, what teaching model). Adopting this framework only helps you clarifying and narrowing down your focus, and the analysis work you've done so far still stand. But you do need to read some basic references on RT and then clearly name the strategies in your performance objectives and ICM.

Below is a brief summary of RT: http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/students/atrisk/at6lk38.htm

More references:

http://pers.dadeschools.net/prodev/model_lesson_.htm (You can find many lesson plan examples like this online)

http://www.newton.k12.ks.us/Dist/curr/bp/lit/reciprocal_teaching.htm

Palincsar, A.S. (1986). Reciprocal teaching. In Teaching reading as thinking. Oak Brook, IL: North Central Regional Educational Laboratory.

Palincsar, A.S., & Brown, A.L. (1985). Reciprocal teaching: Activities to promote read(ing) with your mind. In T.L. Harris & E.J. Cooper (Eds.), Reading, thinking and concept development: Strategies for the classroom. New York: The College Board.

Palincsar, A.S., & Klenk, L.J. (1991). Dialogues promoting reading comprehension. In B. Means, C. Chelemer, and M. S. Knapp (Eds.), Teaching advanced skills to at-risk students. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

(c) Stephanie is working on reading across content areas, so you may make your focus slightly different from hers, with an explicit focus on teaching of reading strategy and less on content areas. Stephanie's_Portfolio_Page

Feedback on your course -- Jianwei Zhang 22:01, 26 April 2009 (EDT)

Nice progress! Your mini-course is clearly structured with solid content. A couple of suggestions:

(a) Your unit 1 might become more engaging and inquiry-based, if you move the "Lost in Translation" activity to the beginning of this unit, so that the participants will begin their learning with an anchoring problem/example, followed by reading the text to deepen and explicate their thinking. (That is a way to enable learning through problem solving).

(b) Your unit 2 introduced a number of important reading strategies. I think you need to provide an activity or example for each of them so that the participants can better understand the strategies with deep interest.