In EDU303, Reading & Writing in the Content Area in this course it emphasized reading and writing in content areas, as well as instructional strategies to support students’ literacy development. It focuses on ways that reading, writing, speaking, and listening are developed and used in learning discipline-specific curriculum, including adaptations for culturally diverse and exceptional learners. This course was designed using the International Reading Associations (IRA) Standards for Reading Professionals as well as based on scientifically supported reading instruction and the increased demands of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). An integral part of this course is a targeted adolescence field study component. By combining course work with classroom observations, students will obtain practical applications that will deepen their knowledge of literacy pedagogy for this age level.
Lesson Plan
My reading reflection connects to Maine common core teaching standard Innovative applications of content. The application of content is important for future teachers to know because it allows for them to connect concepts while teaching and use different perspectives to engage students. By engaging students, they are having students learn by using critical thinking, creativity, and collaborative problem solving to learn a concept. My artifact connects to this learning standard because I took the concept and lessons of keystone species and found an engaging way through think, pair, shares, and readings to engage them and help them use critical thinking to create concept maps from the information students were reading. This artifact helped me grow and learn how to develop lesson plans that teach students how to critically think about a scientific article through a reading strategy such as concept maps, and teach it in an engaging way.
This project/artifact helped me grow as a teacher and prepare for teaching by helping me learn about disciplinary literacy and learn how to create lesson plans focused around disciplinary literacy while also keeping lessons engaging and modeling to students. By teaching students how to make connections and think critically to connect concepts and synthesize information they read in an article it is more useful to them than just telling them to read the text and know the information and is a skill they can use in other classes and throughout their lives to understanding information. This lesson plan helped me grow because it gave me more practice teaching disciplinary literacy in my content area and learning how to model the strategies when reading that I could one day teach to my future students, as well as practice creating lessons to engage students.
