Adolescent Literacy Instruction

As I read this weeks assigned reading Assessments to Guide Adolescent Literacy Instruction, a few points resonated with me. This article, specifically the 20 pages or so assigned provides empirical evidence as to the success of formative assessments within the classroom on not only learning, but student achievement of state standards. As the article states, " To be maximally effective, both instruction and classroom formative assessments should be aligned with state standards." This statement does not sit right with me to say the least. I understand formative assessments are only as successful as the instruction provided however, if aligning our assessments with state standards has proven successful why are students still underachieving? Isn't the entire reform of public education thus far been to promote achievement following the failure of No Child Left Behind and the currently controversial Common Core? Isn't it possible that higher performing schools have an easier time adopting assessment and instruction to their curriculum than lower performing schools? This article states the common trend that lower performing schools according to Langer tend to use test preparation strategies to teach rather than formative assessments. However, what does the data tell us when lower performing schools incorporate differentiated instruction and formative assessments?  I have a difficult time accepting that formative assessments and differentiated instruction are as successful in achieving standards as this article states.

Furthermore, the article suggests instruction is more important in regards to student achievement, "evaluations of classroom-based formative assessment are as much an evaluation of the instructional adjustments resulting from the assessments as they are of the assessments themselves." I think this article demonstrates the instruction we as educators provide as essential to achievement rather than the assessments themselves. Feedback and gauging where students struggle is effective when altering lesson plans and focusing on improvement. Essentially, I disagreed with the first 10 pages or so of this article, but I found the section dedicated to proper instructional strategies and formative assessments intriguing.

If we are doing formative assessments, but nothing is done with the assessments in terms of instruction they assessments become pointless. Offering pre and post assessments as this video states is a way of understanding the achievement of where the students are struggling and need improvement. However, if nothing is done in terms of instruction following assessments, the students fail to learn accordingly and nothing changes. Incorporating rubrics prior to assignments is a point this article makes early on. From my experience I firmly believe this is a useful assessment when preparing for large assignments such as essays and projects. Moreover, the use of group discussion as a means to improve reading and comprehension is something we see on a daily basis in higher performing high schools. I find the instructional strategies provided in this article as useful for us as future educators, but the alignment of standards and assessment is still something I feel is difficult to do successfully.

Do you believe if all states provide nationwide formative assessments we can successfully achieve standards? The video above provides examples from Michigan as educators collaborate to study formative assessments and effective instruction, and is quite informative on this entire process.

Digital Literacy in the Classroom

Today's young people are often referred to as the "selfie generation." Today's technological advances have made it possible for us all to stay connected and even a little narcissistic. Technology is ubiquitous in every aspect of our lives'. Why shouldn't that be the case in our classrooms as well?

This week's article provides insightful strategies in which we can teach digital literacy to our students. Brianna Crowley uses The New York Department of Education definition for digital literacy: “having the knowledge and ability to use a range of technology tools for varied purposes.” If an individual is digitally literate, they will have the skills to strategically find and evaluate information. This is especially important in the discipline of history. Our students will need to develop research skills in order to write coherent and argumentative papers. 
The links provided within the article are extremely helpful resources. As educators we should provide guidance, instruction, and practice so that our students understand what it means to be positive and productive digital citizens. We have to teach our students how many things online are not real or accurate. We must teach them the "benefits, dangers, and opportunities technology provides." 

One resource Crowley mentions that has been very beneficial in the classrooms I have been observing, is Google and YouTube. 

We can help our students become efficient searchers. In all subject areas our students will need to be able to find and access information. Whether it be for projects or research papers, they can use resources like Google Search. 

"A Google a Day" is a great way to teach our students essential research skills and engage them to go deeper into exploration. 

As we are teaching our class how to use the internet for research purposes, we must also incorporate ways to make sure that the information we are gathering can be trusted or accurate. If our schools are fortunate enough to have the resources, we should teach our students how to take full advantage of them. Here at UIC, for one of my History classes, I really appreciated learning about the UIC library's services and collections. I felt more confident in my ability to research and gather the support needed in my paper. 

Social Media
As 21st century learners, our students will probably be very excited to use social media as part of an assignment or project. (I'm even using it currently for my HIST 255 "History of Chicago" class. We are suppose to take "selfies" at the museum/neighborhood we will report on. And of course this class!)

Here's, a great article on 7 ways we can use social media in the classroom. 

The Time article, Crowley presents, argues that society's response to kids with devices has been "fear-based and reactive." I find this true because I'm sometimes hesitant to let my daughter use my phone or ipad. I believe in teaching the parents how to monitor and use social media. The internet is a powerful tool, so we must be able to keep up with it and guide each student to use it responsibly. 

What Digital Literacy Looks Like in a Classroom

What Digital Literacy Looks Like in a Classroom

The Wonders of Technology

In the article, "What Digital Literacy Looks Like in a Classroom", author, Brianna Crowley, shares how she uses the technological advances of today into her classroom to make the connection between education and how to use technology in the classroom to further the education of our students. She addresses the question, "what does it mean to "digitally literate"?" and answers it with the definition of the New York Department of Education definition of, "having the knowledge and ability to use a range of technology tools for varied purposes". Because of the technological advances, everybody is familiar with the internet, smart phones, laptops, tablets, computers, etc, and in some way it is hard not to say that people today are not affected by technology in some way.

A great statement Crowley makes is when she says, "many of us wrestle with how technology is shifting they way kids learn" because it is true. The way younger generations learn has been affected by the way technology has advanced and their high amounts of usage with it. So why not create a classroom with digital literacy where we are using apps that many students are familiar with to relate to their learning in the classroom? In her article supporting digital literacy, Crowley goes on to talk about the various ways she incorporates apps such as Twitter, Google A Day, Instagram, etc into her classroom and the difference she has seen with her students' behaviors towards learning, and she highly encourages for all teachers to create digital literacy in their classroom.

However...

To be honest, I really disagreed with the article on numerous points made. Although I agree that teachers should use more technology in the classrooms, especially with younger generations growing up in a world of advanced technology, I don't think that teachers need to centralize their curriculum around the use of technology. There are many reasons why I believe this, but in short here are the three main reasons why teacher's shouldn't centralize their curriculum around technology:

1. Not all schools have the funding to support a technology-rich curriculum.
2. Not all students have the necessary technological tools to use in the classroom.
3. Creativity in the curriculum will begin to disappear.

As I was reading the article and came across my first reason and second for not liking it, I was pleased to read at the end that someone commented on the same concern I had. I don't know who Ford is or what their background in education might be, but I think they are absolutely right when they say, "Until we ensure that every student has equal access opportunities to technology, every day, digital literacy goals will not be realized by everyone". Even though it is hard to imagine someone without the daily access of a smart phone, laptop, computer, tablet, etc, There are still many students in low-income communities nation-wide that don't have easy access to the internet and their only way is to go to their local public library after school or on the weekends. Schools in low-income areas struggle with funding for basic materials like textbooks, and having to fund enough technological tools (i.e. computers, laptops, and/or tablets) for students is pretty much out of the question.

Another concern that entered my mind as I read the article came after Crowley was explaining how she brings digital literacy into the classroom by saying, "I've used Google A Day challenges to teach my students advanced search strategies". Although it seems that Google A Day is a great app to use, the statement made me think of what future lesson plans will look like. Using technology can be very creative in a curriculum, but after a certain point are teachers really going to be thinking of different apps to use for activities and projects or will everything be copy and paste from the internet? Will the actual lesson plans be individually created by the teacher, or will there be one app that teachers can go on and pick and choose what activities they want to use in their lessons and which outlines and/or presentations to use for their classrooms? The internet is great because so much information and ideas are accessed globally, but too much information can lead to mindless copying and pasting ideas, methods, strategies, etc into a lesson plan to the point where the teacher doesn't need to think of what they want in their curriculum.

I'm not saying that we, as teachers, shouldn't try to find ways of bringing technology into the classroom, but I don't believe that our entire lesson plans should be entirely centered around it. Along with that, a final question came to my mind after reading the article that really bothered me at the end when Crowley asks, "Are you preparing students to use devices and technology successfully?" My final question; Is it every teacher's responsibility to teach students how to use technological devices? Should it?

Matching the Author to the Reader

In this weeks reading, I really enjoyed learning about how we make connections to text. Buehl raises some interesting points about how much our prior knowledge and general interest on a topic affect our satisfaction in comprehension when reading texts. When students read a text, they might know the meaning of certain  vocabulary words, where some places are located, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll understand what the text is talking about. They can read and re-read a passage and still not comprehend it because they don't have any prior knowledge on the subject. According to Buehl, we bring three types of knowledge to a text:
Text to Self Knowlege- Direct knowledge occured from ones personal lives and experiences.
Text to Text knowledge- Indirect knowledge resulting from ones reading and study.
Text to world knowledge- Vicarious based on our impressions  of how things are, often obtain secondhand.

I think this is certainly true, if the author of a text doesn't necessarily speak to me I am so quick to blank out and my mind will start to wonder. However, if I identify with the authors stance and I have a good amount of prior knowledge on the topic, then I'm all in. To quote Buehl "When a reader is well matched with an author, it seems that the reader is exactly whom the author had in mind when writing the text." To add to that, when authors and readers are matched comprehensions seems like it occurs naturally. However, when we don't know much about the text, and were not interested in the topic, we're saying "BYE FELICIA"

For those of you who haven't seen Friday, "Bye Felicia" means I don't care about your existence or purpose.

Anyways, how do we apply this to our history students? Well Buehl has a few pointers. In order for our students to make sense of the text we give them, they need to have a general knowledge on the topic. We cant give them a text and expect them to make sense of it right away. We need to teach them what's going on, what time period we're talking about etc. After we spend some time talking about the context then, they can read the text with the knowledge they have built up and hopefully come to a better understating of the meaning of the text.

So much of what students know about history is through what they've seen in movies, and as teacher I think we need capitalize on that. We can use that to our advantage to build knowledge. However, we also need to let our students know and remind them that the representation of historical events that movies offer do not necessarily tell the whole story accurately (e.g dramatization, over-acting) 

Frontloading

When reading and learning from an academic text, it requires the reader to have a certain background knowledge. Every lesson plan will have the students to acquire an assumed knowledge or vocabulary. Such as learning geometry requires you to know the soh cah toa or what a trapezoid is. The revolution war would require students to know about colonies. As for physics, most students are expected to understand how to solve an algebraic equation.

The fact is, there will be students who lack the background knowledge for the lesson plan. Students that lack a background for a reading assignment will become much more difficult for them to understand the text.

Teachers will compensate for this in two way. The first is when student don't do the reading or don't understand it, teachers will then usually present the key material. The second is when teachers avoid readings all together and teach with what is on the board. These two methods will eventually teach students that careful listening will help them gather all the information that they need.

This brings on an evolution, lesson plans should revolve around building academic background so that when a student read an academic text that they will learn new information. This method is presumed to be Frontloading.

There are three situations when Frontloading and they are:

• With much knowledge
• With Diverse knowledge
• With insufficient knowledge 

Having much knowledge usually fall in the scenario of changing a lesson plan and students forgetting the previous material. Teacher will have to refresh the students memory with an activity that quickly helps students recall information such as a quick writing prompt or a knowledge latter.

Diverse knowledge is when students come with a partial knowledge on the subject that may or may not be correct. Providing key words or vocabulary and having them make a connection based of their knowledge is one method that help.

Students with insufficient knowledge will usually need frontloading in the form of relatable or simple text such as that of a video or sections in a book rather than a whole chapter.

Along with this you will need students to actively learn outside of academic texts,  one suggestion from the text book is that have your students write what the know and what they don't and have them look it up on google or however they wish to (Buehl 157). This can bring them into another discipline and have them learning more than the subject matter.

Writing Next

The Writing Next article basically addresses eleven elements that help adolescent students become better writers. These elements are:
1) Writing Strategies                7) Prewriting
2) Summarization                     8) Inquiry Activities
3)Collaborative Writing            9) Process Writing Approach
4)Specific Product goals         10) Study of Models
5) Word processing                11) Writing for Content Learning
6) Sentence Combining

Each element has a specific purpose and goal for aiding students in the writing process. It's important to remember that these elements are not in a particular order nor do they constitute a curriculum. Meaning that, students don't have to fallow every element one after the other. However, the more elements the student includes in their writing process the better the result will be. According Graham, "The elements should not be seen as isolated but rather as interlinked...A mixture of these elements is likely to generate the biggest return." This reiterates the idea that the elements correlate and intertwine with each other and the more elements students use the better their results will be.

 But what do these elements tell us? Franky, it tell us that our students need a lot of help when it comes to writing. According to Writing Next the percentages of students who need writing assistance are cause for concern. These are just some of the statistics.

Seventy percent of                                             

students in grades 4–12

are low-achieving writers

Every school day, more

than 7,000 students drop out

of high school

Only

70% of high school

students graduate on time

with a regular diploma,

and fewer than 60% of

African-American and

Latino students do so

The numbers don't lie, many students are low achieving writers. Many of the student who fall somewhere in these percentages enter college not writing at basic college level and therefore, have a difficult first year. As teachers we need to prepare our students as much as we can so that when they do enter college they wont fall behind or feel daunted by the work load.

I really liked Graham and Perin's strategies for supporting students in writing. For me personally, writing has always been an intimidating process. To this day, I sometimes still struggle to put my thought into a cohesive well-written essay however, I have used some of the elements mentions above and they actually do work.  The thing that I will mentions is that writing takes time, hard work, patience,  focus, and discipline, which adolescents sometimes don't care about. 

Along with that, it's important to remember not to procrastinate; I know I'm guilty of it a lot. The first thirty seconds of the video describe exactly how I feel when I'm writing a paper that I'm procrastinating on or that I'm just not that interested in doing. 

The lesson here is to plan your writing a head of time. Meaning that, students should write outlines and plan accordingly to avoiding cramming and  procrastination and meet deadline

Writing Next

Writing Next

In regards to education, all we hear today is how the education system in the United States is horrible and how education needs to be reformed, especially in regards to adolescent reading and writing skills. Yes, the education system in the United States is absolutely horrible with seventy percent of students in fourth through twelfth grade being labeled as low-achieving writers, with more than seven thousand students dropping out of high school, and with almost one-third of of high school graduates not being "ready" for college-level English composition. As statistics continue to show that low number of students rank on standardized exams as proficient, a question may arise to ask why. Why are reading and writing scores so low? Why in an information-rich world are the majority of students not scoring as "proficient"? And, what can be done to improve this?

In Writing Next, Steve Graham and Dolores Perin come up with eleven, researched strategies that fall under the theory of meta-analysis. Meta-analysis is defined as, "a particularly powerful way of synthesizing and permits the calculation of effect sizes", and these effect sizes help determine how much a strategy using meta-analysis has impacted someone or a group's learning. By using the meta-analysis, researchers developed the eleven elements of current writing instruction that help adolescents with learning and writing. The eleven elements include: 

 







After reading the research on these eleven elements, I realized that these eleven elements are just various strategies that one could use in the classroom to help students in being proficient writers. As stated multiple times in the research, these eleven elements are not a curriculum for teachers, but rather are different strategies teachers can incorporate in their classroom to help students that are not "proficient" in writing so that by the standardized exams' scores these students will show that they are "proficient" in writing. However, as I was reading about these wonderful eleven elements that have shown to help students improve on their writing skills, I could not help but notice how these elements (strategies) revolve around the idea of universal design in that they can help different learners with their writing abilities. Although it is impossible to include all these methods of writing in one writing assignment, it is possible to offer students all of these elements and having them maybe use a few as they are doing a writing assignment for class to help them meet the "proficiency" level.

Although the statistics show that the majority of students in the country are not proficient writers or even readers, that does not go to say that students today are not reading and writing. A statement that I had a problem with in the article was, "it is obvious that if today's youngsters cannot read with understanding, think about and analyze what they've read, and then write clearly and effectively about what they've learned and what they think, then they may never be able to do justice to their talents and their potential". Students today are reading and writing more than they have ever done in the past, but they are not (in this case writing) expressing their thoughts in an academic way because they are so use to writing non-academically, such as text messages and comments on Facebook. Nonetheless, the thoughts are there, and if teachers could focus on transitioning those thoughts from the non-academic writings to the academic writings, then perhaps the number of students that are "proficient" in writing will increase as well.

By using the eleven elements in the classroom, I think that the transition from writing non-academically to academically can be done with the various learners present in the classroom. Statistically speaking, these eleven elements are golden and have shown to help "non-proficient" students increase their writing skills. However, not all elements are going to relate to how a student learns best, and instead of trying to use all of these elements at once for all reading assignments, I think that they should be present for students to pick a couple to help guide them in their writing. Although I disagree with having to teach students specifically on how to pass standardized exams, I do agree that students should be able to be proficient in writing academically, and if students can feel more comfortable with knowing how to practice this in the classroom with being able to choose which strategy helps them the best, then perhaps our future students can help raise the "proficiency" numbers in writing.