Blog Post 4

What do you notice about either video? How do they each relate to the concepts of disciplinary literacy and/or content area reading? What are the affordances and limitations of each approach? 

The video on List-Group-Label relates to the concepts of disciplinary literacy in various ways. First, they start at a basic level, where the whole class says words that remind them of the topic or are related to the topic. This topic can be compared to the “content”. Then, the teacher groups the words into different categories within the main topic, which in a sense can be seen as the content area of that broad topic. Finally, they label the groups based on the reasonings of the words grouped together. This might be similar to disciplinary literacy because it is going deeper into the categories. There are affordances and limitations to this approach. In the video, the teacher was grouping the words based off of her opinions of what she thought. This allows for freedom and creativity, however, could lead to students grouping things very randomly with no reasoning. In the Tedd video, I found it very important that the teacher asked many different students which answer they got and did not tell them the right answer or if they were right or wrong, but instead had them explain why they did the math problem they way that they did. This made them think deeper about the problem.

For what purposes will you access the reading rockets website? And for what purposes will you access the Tedd website? 

The reading rockets and the Tedd website will be purposeful in my future because I can watch other teachers and their teaching styles/strategies. They can be beneficial for me, so I can see what I would like to use or try not to do when I am teaching. It was also interesting to see the different ages of the students and their reasonings as well as the different school subjects.

The required reading that I chose was focused on math. Different studies and experiments were set up to test the importance of reading and reading strategies in the math content area. One of the findings said that the different reading strategies that they implemented resulted in students’ sense-making and discussion skills to improve.

Borasi, R., Siegel, M., Fonzi, J., & Smith, C. F. (1998). Using transactional reading strategies to support sense-making and discussion in mathematics classrooms: An exploratory study.Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 29(3), 275-305.