Reflection 3: More Reading Strategies and Textbook (D&Z Chapters 5-6)

In chapter 5 of Subjects Matter: Every Teacher's Guide to Content-Area Reading, Daniels and Zemelman give a list of before-, during- and after-reading strategies. What's great about before strategies is that they provide a great opportunity to assess students' prior knowledge on the subject. And the before-reading strategies such as the anticipation guide and dramatic role play can also serve as great "hooks" to capture student interests. I really like the probable passage example (types of numbers example) and appreciate the authors' attempt to incorporate all subject matters. As for the during-reading strategies, my favorite is the coding text strategy (writing down letters on the margin to express confusion, interest, connections, etc.). As you're reading, being able to quickly jot down letters at the margin doesn't interrupt the students' reading flow and keeps track of their understanding. I also like the sketching strategy because it allows the student to create something and use skills outside of the content area (drawing!). My only worry that some students might get too carried away with the drawing task and that it might distract them from understanding the text. As for after-reading strategies, most of the examples the authors gave are pretty traditional (exit/admit tickets, mapping, pair&share, and extended projects). An interesting strategy is the written conversation. I wonder if just changing the format of the discussion into note-passing will make the task more interesting? Another strategy that caught my eyes is the RAFT (role, audience, format, topic) one as it provides structure and challenges the students to do some higher ordered thinking.

Chapter 6 talks about making use of the your content textbook. It points out that the American education system believes in using giant textbooks and some teachers (for various reasons) feel like they need to assign readings for most/all of the text. As an immigrant from another country, I noticed that this is very true! Even elementary students are using those thick textbooks. I think the textbook development people probably designed it this way to make the most information available to teachers/students. However, this means that teachers will have to work to select parts of the text to focus and use (based on state exam coverage and content standards). As for math textbook reading, I noticed that during my secondary education career, most (if not all) teachers don't teach reading math textbooks. Instead, they seem to use math textbooks almost exclusively for the practice problems at the back of each section/chapter. As a student, I found high school math text to be pretty easy to read/understand. However, as I got into higher level math courses (calculus and beyond), the math textbooks became more and more concise (packed with information) and difficult to understand. As a result, I tend to rely more on teacher lectures than reading math textbooks. When I think about it, this puts a lot of responsibility on the math teachers! So I can definitely see that teaching students to read math textbooks and selecting good textbooks are ways to empower the students to become independent learners (not entirely dependent on the teacher).

Textbook Challenge