Talk:Stephanie's Portfolio Page

Good progress so far -- Jianwei Zhang 16:59, 4 March 2009 (EST)

The topic you've identified, needs analysis, and materials collected all prepare you towards productive course design. Good work. You need to work on the course-level objectives in performance-based terms, based on the reading of this week.

Re. objectives -- Jianwei Zhang 13:14, 28 March 2009 (EDT)

Re. COURSE OBJECTIVES, you listed:

   * 1. Participants will be able to (PWBAT) distinguish between narrative and informative text and discern which strategic reading strategies work best for each structure
   * 2. PWBAT identify ways in which they can encourage students to become metacognitively aware of their own reading comprehension in their classes
   * 3. PWBAT examine a text’s layout and note how the design of the page might lead to difficulty in comprehension
   * 4. PWBAT create authentic situations that will encourage students to become strategic, independent, readers in their classroom.
   * 5. PWBAT utilize graphic organizers, and other fix-it strategies, to assist students in categorizing difficult information (i.e. complicated word problems).
   * 6. PWBAT transfer the instruction of reading strategies to less obvious texts, such as political cartoons. 

These objectives are overall properly identified and stated, pointing to significant learning outcomes. Your list begins with specific reading strategies in accordance with different genres of texts. I suppose that a specific, likely the top need you should address is related to attitude and conception: why should content teachers care about student reading? How may integrating reading strategies into content areas contribute to effective learning of both disciplinary contents and language skills? The first several paragraphs and the conclusions of the following paper highlight the importance of doing so.

Sun, Y., Zhang, J., & Scardamalia, M. (in press). Knowledge building and vocabulary growth over two years, Grades 3 and 4. Instructional Science. pdf

On its reference list, you will see a book related to reading: Guthrie, J. T., Wigfield, A., & Perencevich, K. C. (Ed.). (2004). Motivating reading comprehension: Concept-Oriented Reading Instruction. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Objective 4: "to become strategic, independent, readers" You may want to make this statement more specific based on the indicators of being a strategic, independent reader.

Again nice work! You need to have your ICM asap.

Peer Feedback on your Mini-Course -- Colleen DePuy 08:27, 25 April 2009 (EDT)

Stephanie-

What a great idea for a mini-course! Reading strategies are definitely something that students should be using to implement (especially at the middle school age!). That transition into high school provides students with the motivation to learn and use these strategies, because they may be seeing that not all learning and reading material they encounter is going to be easy for them.After looking through your course, here are some modifications that you might want to consider:

My Portfolio: According to our evaluation criteria—you might want to consider adding some of your rationale for using certain methods and media. You might also want to provide some reflections on the progression of your course to demonstrate yourself as a reflective practitioner.

Evaluation Criteria:

Learning Outcomes- You may want to consider putting your overall course objectives right at the beginning for learners to see.

Content-goal Consistency- Thus far, your activities always correspond with your content-goal consistency.

Instructional Sequencing- I thought the sequencing of your first unit provided the proper scaffolding for learners to progress with ease. I look forward to seeing how the rest of your course unfolds!!

Engagement and Interaction- You do a really nice job of engaging the interest and explaining the importance of the particular lessons. I also think that you should consider providing the learner with a discussion area to share their reflections. You may also want to further engagement and interaction with the unit by providing the learner with some “typical” responses to use a comparison for their own observations throughout these activities.

Technical quality- You may want to consider including some video or audio to provide the learner with alternate ways to engaging with the course. All links included were working. You may want to consider providing the optical illusion by imbedding it in your mini-course.

Extended Resources- I know that you are working on your works cited, but as you do, you might want to consider some other resources that the learner can check out with regard to this topic and the benefits of teaching reading strategies to their particular students.

-- Jwkozel 13:15, 25 April 2009 (EDT)

Hello!

I found your unit one lesson to be well rounded and engaging. I am very interested as to how the students will respond to this. You used a nice mix of media, but I feel that it would be more beneficial if some of the media was included directly into the lesson itself (i.e. the image was embedded in the lesson), however you are probably going to do this when you transfer this over to the wiki.

Overall I think that I could learn something from your mini-course. Some of the things you talk about in terms of reading comprehension I implement in my English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. I tend to go between reading for gist (step one) and reading for specific information (step two). There is a large amount of information that goes along with this, but I feel that your topic is relevant to my teaching. In fact I am going to steal your activity 2 from lesson 2. It is a great idea!

I feel that you link your goals of the mini course well with your content. I feel somewhat limited in this evaluation in that I am not able to see the wiki page, but I am confident that you will do a wonderful job!

Feedback on your course unit 1 -- Jianwei Zhang 21:46, 26 April 2009 (EDT)

Your unit 1 was very well designed. I like how you designed the activities and guiding questions throughout your unit. A few issues:

(a) You need to add course-level objectives to your course into/front page, and unit objectives to the beginning of a unit.

(b) For some the activities, you may want to provide reading materials that can help the participants to deepen their understanding.

(c) After each activity, you may want to add a reflection/summary paragraph to highlight take-aways from the activity, and also inform the next activity.