CI 414/504 Fall 2024 Coppola

       I read the article Apprenticing Adolescents to Reading in Subject-Area Classrooms and I found it to be very insightful. Although I’d never read about it prior to this article, the Reading Apprenticeship framework sounds like a relevant solution for a generation of students who are becoming increasingly disinterested in reading and who are having to do less of it in general. The program focuses on building connections between the students’ prior knowledge and text across all subjects. The key to unlocking proficiency in students is not to give them hours and hours of assigned reading from a textbook, but instead to let them use literature to allow them to realize the uniqueness of their own thought process and make the subject relevant to them.            The focus group of instructors who employ the program in their curriculum allow their students to feel a sense of autonomy over the text they’re assigned to read and analyze...

For the sake of simplicity I will be referring to the assigned texts, " Apprenticing Adolescents To Reading in Subject Area Classrooms" and " Reimagining Our Inexperienced Adolescent Readers: From Struggling, Striving, Marginalized, and Reluctant to Thriving" as the following acronyms: AATRISAC, ROIARFSSMARTT. Considering this collection of content as a whole it seems like the primary motivator of this weeks focus is the issue of literacy, or lack thereof. ROIARFSSMARTT first segment references that 26% of eighth graders who took the NAEP did not reach basic levels of literacy. It should also be known that 21% of US adults are illiterate and 54% of US adults read at or below a sixth grade reading level (that is a lot of people). ROIARFSSMARTT then makes the point that " Most middle and  high school students engage very little with sustained reading." and that teachers are incentivized through our testing//funding cycle to avoid slower methods of content d...

  I listned to the NPR podcast.   The podcast’s main idea was that our students struggle with fitting in. I myself struggled to fit in, but we live in today’s world, and our students struggle with plenty of issues that don’t make it easier to fit in. Topics of gender, sex, class,   documentation status, and neurodivergent are real, and these are things that we can not change.   Identity is something everyone struggles with on a day-to-day basis. As children, we’re extremely impressionable, and I think becoming a resource for students and allowing them to express and explore their identities can help nurture a better learning environment.   The podcast mentions menstruation and the current struggles young students and some adults go through. Educational lectures, despite students’ backgrounds, as mentioned in the podcasts, are crucial to breaking the social barrier. As a sixth grader, I remember being separated based on sex and learning about male puberty changes...

I have been teaching at Oak Park & River Forest High School (OPRF) going on five years. It used to be this mythic place in my mind. I always wanted to attend it When I was working with Julie Peters, my program chair, to complete my student teaching placement, she advised me not  to put OPRF as one of my choices as they rarely ever took student teachers. Only adding to the mystique, and wonder, of the school in my eyes. Then I graduated! As many people know finding a job as an educator, especially at a good school, is extremely hard. Few positions open and there are many applicants. I applied to many, many, many schools and only received two interviews. The school I student taught at, and OPRF. To make a long story short, the school I student taught at did not hire me, and OPRF did. Huzzah! Slowly but surely the mystique and wonder were worn away, kind of like knowing how a hot dog is made. I gave you this context to tell you that I chose this week because I work in this school ...

  As a teacher of the English Language Arts, I am constantly struck by the tone, or the author’s attitude toward the subject matter they are presenting. I make a concerted effort to assist my students in developing and strengthening their awareness of the author’s tone, as a means to interrogate texts critically, to ride the ‘unspoken’ current of meaning that exists beyond words. After reading, “What is Metacognition?” by Dr. Michael Martinez, I am struck by his tone regarding teachers. On one hand, he acknowledges teachers intuitively recognize the importance of metacognition, but in the very next breath, he also suggests teachers’ understanding may be surface-level, lacking dimension. With that, there’s so many places I could go… I could present a compelling argument as to how the perpetuation of this deficit view of teachers’ professional knowledge continues to undermine our professionalism, but I will abstain. I could argue that we could source teachers’ struggle to understand ...