Daniels and Zemelman Chapters 3 and 4

        Chapters 3 and 4 offered a perspective on reading and textbooks that is distinctive to my own experience in high school and middle school. In high school, my classes either didn’t use a textbook, or used it all the time. Until college, this was all I knew. College professors tend to use themselves as the main resource, and the book as a supplement to them. I don’t think this works too well either, especially when the students are asked to buy books that are sometimes hundreds of dollars.

            In my classroom, I would like textbooks to be used as a reference. I have found that textbooks are great for double checking my knowledge, but not so great at engaging me. To assist any students who are similar, I will use secondary sources to help students familiarize themselves with the topic. I won’t be using extra sources for every topic, but I will be using it to help hammer home the main ideas and enduring understandings of the unit. For example, in a unit on ecosystems, I may choose to bring in a National Geographic magazine with a story on the Rhinoceros in Kruger National Park and how they are struggling due to poachers. This will emphasize the idea that ecosystems exit in a balance of a variety of factors.

            Giving students many  resources outside of their textbook will help engage them, but they need the time and environment to do it. I wanted Daniels and Zemelman to talk more about how to structure the classroom for it. I imagine having some time on Fridays for students to explore the various resources in groups so they can be social and discuss what they’ve read. In the beginning of the year, this will be somewhat formal so students can learn what they should be doing. After some time of modeling and scaffolding, they will be on their own to have their conversations and explore what they want to. Resrouces will include approved things that they bring from home, as well as the resources I bring in from wherever I find them. Discussing readings helps them understand it better and develop a stronger sense of the topic. After reading these chapters, I believe I can definitely use outside sources in my classroom.

Understanding by Design

            Understanding by Design is a concept that I had heard before, but didn’t really understand. Now, I appreciate it more because it makes much more sense to teach with this method. Here’s an example: Sometimes my professors will give an exam that is not temporally representative of what we learned. We might spend two weeks on plant cell types, and only have two out of 100 questions on it. If that professor had used this method of teaching, the exam would have been made before completing the lecturing on the topic. He would have been able to better stay on track with what he wanted us to know, and we would have gotten much higher grades. The process of going backwards in planning how I teach will help my students learn and it will help me plan. Using the filters will allow me to notice if a topic might be more dense than I imagined, or if students will want to be an active part of it.

            When I teach, I want my students to be learning in a very low stress environment. Telling students why we are doing something, what the goals are, and what they should get out of it are all conducive to a low stress environment. Asking essential questions will be difficult for me in the beginning because I’m used to have a straightforward answer. I don’t feel like I learned what I was supposed to learn if there isn’t a straightforward answer.

                         I want to learn more about what a UbD units looks like and how to phrase questions that don’t have an answer. I would also like to see how teachers grade student works that are abstract and difficult to hold to traditional grading systems. I think that practice will help my best but I’ll need feedback as well.

Daniels and Zemelman Chapters 1 and 2

Reading is a metacognitive activity. When somebody reads something, they have thoughts or ideas that stem from what they have read. If you are one of these readers, you probably remember what you read more easily than somebody who says they just read the words. The concept of reading being metacognitive may also be subconscious to people, and only becoming conscious of upon hearing these words from another person. As somebody studying to become a science teacher, I see the value in helping students realize that reading is a metacognitive process. Once this is done, it will be easier for students to build upon reading skills, and give meaning to what they have read, allowing them to recall that information more easily in the future. One such strategy is to connect what you’re reading to something that you are familiar with, such as connecting people sitting on a bus to Octet Rule in chemistry. Steve Cosgrove’s biology class outlines this idea. The students were only reading the words, and as a result, they were unable to recall the information well enough to meet Steve’s

expectations for them (Daniels and Zelman 6). This worries me, especially because I am a future science teacher. I wonder if Steve took a class to go over reading strategies for biology. In my experience, reading a biology textbook is usually harder than a novel because it is so densely packed with complicated information and long chapters, none of which have information you are familiar with or know how to categorize most effectively yet. Having gone through my biology classes, I have found strategies that help me read and understand the text easier and I am certain that there are strategies out there for all students. If somebody were to have shown me how to read and study for biology during my first class, the next three years wouldn’t have been so difficult, and I would have gotten a lot more out of it. I plan to spend some time in the beginning of the school year going over some successful reading strategies, so my students will be more capable of understanding and feeling comfortable with the material we will cover that year.