Thursday, October 17, 2013

Week 7 PD

Chapter 11 – Summarizing and Synthesizing Information
            I would say the biggest take away from this chapter is the way in which we can allow students to display the most important information and merge it with their experiences. Students should be able to use brief retellings, can tell new information they have learned, and can ask good questions to help interpret new info.
            Summarizing and synthesizing can greatly benefit from using authentic learning opportunities. Students who can make connections from new material and explain how it relates to their lives provides a great opportunity to make learning a personal activity. Creating a close relationship between a new topic and a student opens new routes for them to develop a deeper understanding. Retelling a story can provide an authentic learning opportunity when the student reads a book of great interest and contains information they are familiar with. Having a student retell information about a passage they are uninterested in and unfamiliar with will result in a very poor retelling.

Chapter 14 – Reading to Understand Textbooks
            I think the biggest take away from reading this chapter is that we teachers have a large amount of knowledge and are familiar with many of the topics covered in a textbook. We also are very good readers and have used strategies for decoding the information that is conveyed through textbooks. The students we are teaching have no idea what they are doing. We need to keep this difference in mind as we work through a textbook with them.

            One of the best ways to help students learn the material from textbooks is to “front-load” the students with information about the text before beginning. Making connections from the lives of the students to the subject matter is critical in building their foundation to learn from. Whenever covering new material from a textbook, we must bring up the prior knowledge and background experience of the students to help them begin to make connections.

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