This portfolio is a representation of the observations completed for the class M464 – Methods of Teaching Reading taught by Dr. Hope Smith Davis. These observations have been conducted and recorded by Joshua Lindsey, a teacher candidate at Indiana University South Bend during the spring semester of 2017. These observations give prospective teachers a chance to be immersed in a content-area classroom and to witness day-to-day operations within the secondary classroom as they occur. While these observations were sparse (one class period a week), teacher candidates were able to observe the same classroom and the same group of students which gave a sense of fluidity when it came to viewing the evolution of a particular classroom during a seven-week
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Overall, the course content of M464 was all designed to aid prospective educators in learning about how, when, and why specific methods word the way they do. Students enrolled in M464 were urged to look for specific strategies within their field placements. If these strategies were not observed or new strategies were not discovered, candidates were suggested to critically think about what other strategies could be put in place to access higher-level reading comprehension of whatever activities were going on in the classroom. Furthermore, teacher candidates were urged throughout the semester to connect these different strategies to the various levels of questioning and student needs involved in Bloom’s Taxonomy (Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating), the “Five Pillars” of reading instruction (Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension), as well as the course text: Content Area Reading: Teaching and Learning for College and Career Readiness by Maureen McLaughlin through weekly strategy write-ups in order to garner a better understanding of these strategies. A few specific strategies that teacher candidates worked with during the semester were: SQ3R, Learning Logs, Cornell Notes, Sketch …show more content…
According to the session 3 module in M464, “content area teachers must work within the students’ Zones of Proximal Development (ZPD) and scaffold instruction by using the Before-During-After (BDA) Framework.” Following the BDA Framework ensures that teachers set a purpose for reading by making use of strategies that come before, during, and after reading. M464 exposed teacher candidates to various strategies that fit into this framework. Examples of where specific strategies fit include: Sketch & Label (before), text coding (during), and Cornell Notes (after). While these strategies fit into these specific categories, all of them have merit in other the other categories as well. As mentioned previously, an effective strategy helps students reach different levels of questioning, and being tied to one category of the BDA Framework would likely limit this
Overall, the course content of M464 was all designed to aid prospective educators in learning about how, when, and why specific methods word the way they do. Students enrolled in M464 were urged to look for specific strategies within their field placements. If these strategies were not observed or new strategies were not discovered, candidates were suggested to critically think about what other strategies could be put in place to access higher-level reading comprehension of whatever activities were going on in the classroom. Furthermore, teacher candidates were urged throughout the semester to connect these different strategies to the various levels of questioning and student needs involved in Bloom’s Taxonomy (Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, and Creating), the “Five Pillars” of reading instruction (Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension), as well as the course text: Content Area Reading: Teaching and Learning for College and Career Readiness by Maureen McLaughlin through weekly strategy write-ups in order to garner a better understanding of these strategies. A few specific strategies that teacher candidates worked with during the semester were: SQ3R, Learning Logs, Cornell Notes, Sketch …show more content…
According to the session 3 module in M464, “content area teachers must work within the students’ Zones of Proximal Development (ZPD) and scaffold instruction by using the Before-During-After (BDA) Framework.” Following the BDA Framework ensures that teachers set a purpose for reading by making use of strategies that come before, during, and after reading. M464 exposed teacher candidates to various strategies that fit into this framework. Examples of where specific strategies fit include: Sketch & Label (before), text coding (during), and Cornell Notes (after). While these strategies fit into these specific categories, all of them have merit in other the other categories as well. As mentioned previously, an effective strategy helps students reach different levels of questioning, and being tied to one category of the BDA Framework would likely limit this