My Reading Reflection project connects to the main common core teaching standard of instructional strategies. Instructional strategies are important for a future teacher to learn because they encourage students to develop deeper understandings of content areas and connections to build skills to access and apply information. By understanding the cognitive process with various kinds of learning and engaging learners in higher-order questioning skills and meta-cognitive processes it allows for teachers to teach more effectively and difference more for students to create a better learning environment. In the artifact, I chose I was comparing two different readers, a college professor, and a sophomore college student, I took notes and observations about how they were reading and what they were thinking about while they were reading to figure out what skills and strategies they were using and compared it to see how a college professor read vs a student. I then connected what I learned back to class and made connections about how discipline-specific reading is important and made reflections about how doing this study will impact my views and teaching as an educator.I think this study connected to the Maine common core teaching standard of instructional strategies because it helped me to develop a deeper understanding of what a specific reader in my content area thinks when they read and the strategies they use to be able to read an article in a perspective of a scientist. This study helped me to understand the cognitive process of reading a more scientific text and showed me that everyone processes texts in different ways and while It’s important to teach strategies, everyone’s brain is slightly different and what works for one student may not work for another.
This artifact contributes to my expanding knowledge because it helped me understand more of the strategies I should be teaching my students in order for them to be prepared for their discipline. In this case, I want to teach science and science texts to have a very unique language that can be intimidating if you are not taught how to read and understand it. It’s important that I remember that my students will not have the same exposure to science texts that I have had, and need to be taught the stratagies I use and other scientists use to read it before having them read it on their own. Like I stated before everyone’s brain works in a different way and what works for one student may not work for another. Such as the professor in my study liked to paraphrase with more scientific terms she was familiar with but the student paraphrased in simpler terms he understood, each one was correct in how they read and understood the text they just understood it in different ways. I think it also reminded me how important group work is because everyone has their own perspective of a text and not every student will have background knowledge of a topic and it’s important to be mindful of that and by placing students in groups it allows for some of those possible gaps to be filled, and for students to share their different perspectives and backgrounds in order to get a wider understanding of a text.
