Goals…
Posted by dmlagrone on January 20, 2009
So glad to be back for this Spring ‘09 semester! I have a new class of pre-service teachers and it’s such a joy to begin their journey into “reading.” The wonderful part of my job is that most of my students already ARE readers…makes sense as they are going to be teachers! The more difficult part of my job is to convince them that they will have students of multiple-infinity-squared reading levels!
For those of you who teach high school kids and have suspected that they might not be at grade level, let me reassure you that you are absolutely right! Most high school kids, outside the GT/AP group, will be at least 2 years below and often 4 or 5. So what do we do?
First of all, we have to move beyond the idea that we can teach all kids the same way. Most teachers get that but unfortunately not all have any training in HOW to differentiate. I also see too many teachers using one piece of text in isolation. Even if teachers use more that one piece of text, they often do so piece by piece. Think about how you investigate things that interest you…you probably begin with an internet search of some kind and immediately start moving in and out of multiple sources, often examining those with images and video.
Let me offer this post as an example. I’m already thinking that there is so much text here and NOTHING to supplement it!
Let’s try this. Look at the above section of this posting. Now let’s try something different…
“First of all, we have to move beyond the idea that we can teach all kids the same way. Most teachers get that but unfortunately not all have any training in HOW to differentiate. I also see too many teachers using one piece of text in isolation. Even if teachers use more that one piece of text, they often do so piece by piece. Think about how you investigate things that interest you…you probably begin with an internet search of some kind and immediately start moving in and out of multiple sources, often examining those with images and video.”
Can you see the difference in adding just that one link? Of course, some pieces of text, this one for example, may not need lots of stuff connected to it but our eyes and brains need some variety.
