Notes from Book Club #2

1. Although all of these Reading and Writing Strategies are interesting and I'm sure effective, do you really think it is feasible for one teacher to utilize such a wide variety of strategies throughout a unit with information to get confusing?  

• We originally thought that if we did separate strategies for different lessons we could address that issue, but then we thought about how terrible that would be for our students. Then we discussed the idea of a structured class. On the one hand it is good to have an atmosphere where the students know what to expect and know how to complete the tasks at hand, but on the other hand we're not sure if we want our class to get too predictable.  

2. The quote on page 33 that reads, "writing floats on a sea of talk" brings up an interesting point. How do we as teachers accommodate students who sometimes speak better than they write? How do we assess that knowledge through summative and formative assessments? 

• For this questions we discussed a lot about my particular experience with my current mentor teacher. She had students answer the same questions for homework and then orally in class the next day. We thought that this could have been better assessed if she had students write down a revision or reflection after the class discussion since their thoughts seemed to be clearer after speaking them aloud. We also discussed Emily's experiences with an ELL student who is eloquent in class but can't seem to translate his thoughts into written English.

3. Besides practicing DBQ based questions, how can we help students better understand how to use context clues to assist them during class readings?

• On page 34 of this text, Janet Allen introduces something called the "Questions Game". We think that this is a great way to help students gather context clues and help them strengthen their ability to make connections.