Prompt: What are your initial thoughts and ideas about your inquiry topic? What are your beginning ideas about your contribution to the inquiry project? How are you now understanding reading in your discipline?
I am excited about my upcoming research into my inquiry topic. My inquiry group is hoping to take a detailed look into vocabulary as it relates to various content areas. We each plan to analyze the use of vocabulary in each of our respective content areas. My initial thoughts regarding this inquiry topic are that this is a very meaningful concept in the Math classroom. I have long felt that Math students need a strong understanding of vocabulary (especially that vocabulary that is Math specific) before they can fully understand what is happening in the class. Math not only requires that a student have a reasonable literacy in general, but also that they are able to learn a completely new set of vocabulary that seemingly (from their perspective) is not connected to the "real world". I am very excited to dive into this topic because I feel that it is one that I can truly use to improve my teaching methods.
So far, my understanding of the inquiry topic is that we all would like to learn how vocabulary can be implemented into our various content areas. We would all like to contribute to the literature review as a group while also using the various strategies Moje mentions in Chapter 4 of Improving Adolescent Literacy. We hope to each focus on our individual research to the effectiveness of each strategy inside of our own content areas. For instance, I will research various vocabulary strategies as they apply to the Math classroom. I believe that it will be interesting to see a comparison of the different strategies in various settings.
At this point, my understanding of reading in Math is that, as a Secondary Math teacher, I am not personally responsible for my student's understanding of Math and Literacy, but that the two can very easily go hand in hand. Before we started this class, I would have struggled to believe that Math students will really benefit from literacy strategies. Now, I am becoming very convinced that teaching literacy is bot absolutely necessary and beneficial in a Math classroom. I am hopeful that the strategies that we have begun to discuss will be very effective and that helping my future students with literacy concerns will serve as a positive influence in my classroom.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I agree with your assessment of the importance of our students understanding vocabulary in our various content settings. My inquiry project will be very similar in that I also want to be able to improve my teaching methods by adding a literacy focus to my classroom. I also would not have thought that teaching reading would have been my responsibility in a high school business education classroom, but I can absolutely see the need for it. If we want to help our students succeed in the future, one of the greatest gifts we could ever give them is to erase their fear and dislike of reading and instead be able to foster a true desire and love of reading. Teaching in our content will be so much easier and we will have greater success engaging all students if we can overcome this vocabulary hurdle. I know that Casie and I spent so much time on this last year in Early College, with very little success. This is the main reason why I am interested in pursuing this particular area of content literacy.
ReplyDeleteMath is a lot like science in that a large portion of it is vocabulary and without that basic understanding, you can't move on to more complex ideas. I feel like your thoughts are much more organized than mine (though I'm getting there). Like you I was hesitant about using content literacy in my classroom but now I'm hoping it will be a positive influence, like you said.
ReplyDelete