Case Study/ Reflection Paper 1

Meghan Schmitt- EDUC 340

Initially, I did not really believe that all teachers are teachers of reading. It seemed to me
that most reading instruction occurred in early elementary school, and that the reading skills
learned beyond that time came from practice reading books or more specialized reading
instruction in English class. I had certainly never thought of reading instruction as something
that I should provide as a science teacher. However, the written word is one of the modern
worlds primary means of conveying information on every subject, so helping students develop
the skills to obtain, interpret, and apply that information is one of the most valuable things we
can do to give them lifelong knowledge in any content area.
Content area teachers can teach important reading skills without giving up time needed
for content area instruction. When units are planned around texts, and appropriate instructional
activities are planned for before, during, and after reading, analysis of text with reading strategies
supports content area learning (Vacca, Vacca, & Mraz, 2010). Teachers can apply a variety of
reading strategies to help students get the most out of the texts they are reading in class and all
future texts they read.
The first thing teachers need to do is to activate students background knowledge and to
provide any necessary knowledge that is missing. Teachers must read over the text and
determine what background knowledge the author assumes the reader has and whether the
students already have that knowledge. If the students already know what they need to, the key is
to activate that knowledge through a review or an activity that makes the students recall the
knowledge. If some important knowledge is missing the teacher must help the students fill in the
gap (McKenna, 2009). Students from a different culture, ethnicity, or social class than the author
assumes are especially at risk for this because of the different set of background knowledge each
group brings (Vacca, Vacca, & Mraz, 2010). Without these considerations many students will
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Meghan Schmitt- EDUC 340
not be prepared to get much content area information out of the text because they will be too
confused by vocabulary and concepts that they know very little about.
In addition to making sure that students have the necessary background knowledge
available to understand what they read, teachers also have to get them interested enough in the
text to actually take in the information. Neurological studies have shown that students pay more
attention and take more information into their memory when they are interested in the material.
Teachers can facilitate this by either helping students connect the reading to their own interests
and experiences or having them asks questions whose answers they can search for in the reading.
They can also get students attention by doing something surprising and taking advantage of the
brain being in that interested state to get some more information into it (Willis, 2006). This is
another point where it is important to consider the culture and background of the students. A lot
of the curriculum in the United States has a very American and Western European middle class
point of view. Teachers can help draw in students from other cultures by including texts from
other cultures and by analyzing how what they read applies to things they have experienced
(Vacca, Vacca, & Mraz, 2010). If students care about what they are learning they will pay
attention and get more out of it, but they often need teachers to help them do that.
Once students have enough background knowledge and interest to understand the text,
they must read the text in a way that lets them constantly monitor whether they are actually
learning anything from it. To do this, teachers must teach them self-questioning, monitoring, and
visualizing strategies to use as they are reading (McLaughlin, 2010). Getting information out of
the text is the whole reason they are reading it, after all, so it is essential to teach them how to
make sure they are doing that. Reading without understanding is just busywork, and busywork is
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Meghan Schmitt- EDUC 340
a bigger waste of valuable teaching time than teaching a few reading strategies that at least some
students will find useful.
To reinforce, synthesize, and expand on content gained in the reading, teachers need to
help students develop after-reading strategies too. After reading strategies help students
summarize, pick out key points, synthesize information and form connections, and includes
many strategies that appeal to a variety of learning styles ( (McLaughlin, 2010). Making
connections to previous knowledge is especially important because those connections are how
information gets stored in long term memory. The more connections a student can form the
more effectively it will be stored and the easier it will be to access. These connections are also
strengthened by learning and processing the information in a variety of ways (Willis, 2006). By
teaching students a variety of after reading activities teachers can improve students memory of
content area knowledge, and they can also deepen their understanding of the concepts.
In addition to teaching students strategies for reading traditional texts it is also important
to teach students how to effectively get information from the internet or other electronic sources.
Most research todays students will do in their lives will involve the internet so it is very
important for students to know how to use it. Most students now use the internet in their daily
lives but that does not mean they know how to use it to find relevant and reliable information.
Content area teachers need to teach students how to search for relevant information, process
information presented in a nonlinear fashion, and evaluate sources to find information they can
trust to be correct (McLaughlin, 2010). There are plenty of untrue or partially true things on the
internet that claim to be scientifically supported and get away with it because most of the general
population does not know how to evaluate the use of scientific data. It is therefore an essential
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Meghan Schmitt- EDUC 340
role of the science teacher to give students the skills find the truth in the internets mass of
questionable information and ideas.
I saw a few examples of teachers incorporating practice with reading skills into content
area instruction while observing classes at the T. R. Paul Academy of Arts and knowledge. The
first was a second grade social studies lesson that was based around information written on a
smart board presentation. Instead of reading straight through the lesson the teacher often stopped
to ask the students questions, analyze accompanying charts and pictures, and let the students
predict what the reading would tell them next. The strategy was successful because the students
not only paid attention to the lesson but remembered what they learned when they needed to
apply it to later activities.
I also saw vocabulary lessons embedded in reading for entertainment. The teacher read a
book to the class and would stop whenever she reached a word she thought the class might not
know to ask them what it meant. Several students would try to answer and would sometimes get
close to the right answer. After giving them a chance to answer she told them what it meant and
what it meant in that context and then moved on with the story. It might have been disruptive to
keep stopping the story like that but the students did not seem to mind. If they were reading an
academic text it might have been better for the teacher to check for vocabulary to teach them
before reading to them.
In math, the second grade students used word problems to verbally communicate
mathematical problems and concepts. The students were given a picture and each told to write a
word problem based on the picture. They then solved each others word problems and explained
how they solved them. Overall, I saw literacy being used in a variety of content areas and it
helped students understanding of the subjects.
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Meghan Schmitt- EDUC 340
In addition to seeing literacy instruction in content areas at the T. R Paul Academy of
Arts and Knowledge, I have also seen the need for reading strategies in my own education,
although I do not use such structured strategies as we might teach the students. Left to just read
straight through the text I often find myself reaching the end with absolutely no idea what I just
read. This is especially true with difficult text at the limits of my current knowledge, which is
what most of the texts my students will read will be for many of them. Realizing the value of
knowing what I am looking for and constantly checking my understanding was one of the best
things that ever happened to my education. My job as a teacher of content area reading will be to
help my students come to that realization sooner rather that later in their education and to give
them to skills with which to apply it.
There are many reading and writing strategies that can be incorporated usefully into
content area instruction, some of which will be useful to me as a science teacher. The first is
using a KWL, in which students write down what they know and want to know before reading
and write what they have learned after reading. I might use this when students are reading a
biological or molecular explanation for something they are already familiar with on the
macroscopic scale. When learning about photosynthesis they might already know that plants are
usually green, that they need the sun to grow, and that they take in carbon dioxide and release
oxygen. What they want to know would probably have to do with why those things happen.
After the reading they could explain what they learned about how the process works on a
biological and chemical level.
Another strategy I would like to use is the visual-verbal for learning new vocabulary.
Students usually have to learn a lot of new vocabulary when reading a science text. Some of that
vocabulary is difficult to understand even when they know the definition. In a visual-verbal they
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would define the word, but they would also clarify and reinforce the meaning by drawing it,
listing its important characteristics, and connecting it to their lives or other knowledge. This
would make both their texts and the rest of the class much easier to understand.
A Venn Diagram can be an important tool for understanding the relationships between
various scientific concepts and processes. The Venn Diagram will help students not only pick
out the important information to include but also to consider how it compares to something else
they are learning about. For example, I could have them compare ionic and covalent bonds,
which share many characteristics due to both being intramolecular bonds but also have key
differences that students often have trouble keeping track of.
A RAFT is a writing exercise that requires students to adopt different points of view and
write for different audiences by specifying their role, audience, form of communication, and
topic. I could use it to let students creatively summarize and display their knowledge of a topic,
like taking on the role of a cation that has had its electron stolen and is explaining to the anion
that stole it why it keeps following it around. I could also use it to get students to explain things
more thoroughly by pretending their audience is less knowledgeable than them. This might fix
the common problem of students leaving out important parts of the explanation because they
already know it and they know the teacher already knows it.
For analyzing more controversial texts I can have students use the Four As text protocol.
This will make the student evaluate what assumptions the author makes, determine which they
agree or would like to argue with, and decide that they aspire to do with the information. The
students could either pick a current controversy involving science or I could assign them one.
Their assignment would then be to analyze a reasonably well-written argument from each side
using the Four As protocol. If I wanted to give more time to this assignment I could turn it into
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a larger project in which the students analyze all arguments on both sides of the controversy and
come to their own well-supported conclusions.
Most of the information a student might need or want to know on a subject is available
somewhere for them to read. Despite this fact, we still have schools and expect students to spend
at least thirteen years learning in them. This is because even after learning the alphabet, phonics,
and grammar required to read a language students still have a lot to learn about finding good
sources of information and then processing, analyzing, and extending that information, as well as
deciding what information to look for in the first place. This is where teachers come in. While
the English teachers focus on improving students ability to understand various texts, other
content area teachers can help them develop strategies for learning new content area information
without having to spoon feed them everything we want them to learn in lecture. This not only
gives students the skills to succeed in class, but opens up the possibility of lifelong learning.











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References
McKenna, M. C. (2009). Teaching Through Text: Reading and Writing in the Content Areas. Boston:
Pearson Allyn & Bacon.
McLaughlin, M. (2010). Content Area Reading: Teaching and Learning in an Age of Multiple
Literacies. Boston: Pearson Education.
Vacca, R. T., Vacca, J. A., & Mraz, M. E. (2010). Content Area Reading: Literacy and Learning Across
the Curriculum. Boston: Pearson Learning Solutions.
Willis, J. (2006). Research-Based Strategies to Ignite Student Learning. Alexandria VA: Association for
Supervision and Curriculum Development.