Writing Partnerships

      In the article Writing Partnerships, the author mentioned that writing partnerships effect two key changes in the writers’ workshop. First, it changes the student’s orientation from focusing on the teacher and waiting for the teacher to get a chance to get some help to focusing on each other and support one another in their writing partnership. The figure 1 in the article visually supported this affect and I can see the students will be more engaged and both learning and teaching could be more effective and active. Second, it fosters frequent student-to-student conferencing; students’ critiquing writing will be practiced and they could learn how to respond and communicate to give feedbacks to each other. It's a great way to make sure the students are all well participating and help students to get more chances to experience and think actively before they get help from the teacher.

      I really like the sample one-week implementation table that has been given in this article. It gives teachers an idea of how to plan writing partnerships and the aspects that a teacher should think of before teaching the lesson. It also provides the purpose behind the aspects and the details of how would students be involved in the lesson and what should the teacher do to instruct and engage the students.

      Matching writers is also mentioned as an important part in the article. When I was observing during my placement and planning my lesson, I have also been noticed and told by my MT that pairing students is a very important part of the lesson preparation. When pairing, avoiding social combinations and try to pair by mixed-gender partnerships are good ideas. The author groups her students according to ability and pairs with similar ability usually will be paired together. Matching should always be a rough draft while preparing a lesson and it also should be adjustable. Teacher should be able to make changes and tweak the pairs based on different situations such as missing students on the day of the lesson.

      The article also provided a menu of actions during independent writing table that listed the things that what students can do and what teachers can do during independent writing groups. However, since I have been observing a kindergarten class for my placement, I feel it is hard for lower grade levels’ students to apply this approach. My MT did something similar to this strategy is that she lets students to get into pairs to talk about their stories that they are going to write about later. But students will be working individually and I think it is really hard for them to help each other with their writing since they can’t really spell well. So the last part that the author has mentioned that partners should get a chance to assess writing together will be a better approach to higher-grade levels’ writers than lower-grade levels’ writers.

New Literacy Reflection

      When I was working on my New Literacy project, I had some difficulty to put present lots of information in a simple way. I ended up put too much words in my website so it may be harder for students to pay attention for a long time.
      My project is easy to navigate, and when I am teaching, it will be very easy to present. Just by clicking the tabs on the left, the information I want to present to the students will be shown on each page. I tried to make the page title match the content so that the students will have an idea of the main topic of a page. It’s also make it easier for me to navigate the website and to teach in class.
      I think the hardest part for me to teach the lesson will be the issue that I have lots of information in one page. The large amount of text on each page may cause the lesson be very traditional and boring. I think I need to work on that and try to minimize the number of the words and make my pages simpler to help the viewer to get the information as quickly as possible by reading as little as possible. I may break my information up into different sections so that I still have the whole information that I want to present, and it is clearer and easier for the readers to understand.
      My lesson will involve a lot of Chinese and Japanese pronunciations so I planted audio clips in my webpage to help viewers to get a better understanding of what I am trying to present. The topic I am trying to present is the differences between Chinese and Japanese Language, it is a big topic and it contents lots of information, so plant audio clips in the pages where readers can listen to the different pronunciations can definitely help them to have a better understanding of the differences between the two languages. It not only used a new technology that I haven’t tried before, but also may help my lesson to become more interesting.  I have some specific examples on the web pages; so during the class, I may focus on analyze the examples. 
I will teach my lesson by clicking each tabs listed on my website and explain the content on the website. Students will be able to get a quick idea of what is cultural literacy. I will then give specific examples and let students to get involved with pronouncing the examples that I have listed. I will show them the pronunciations with the audio clips and students will follow the audio to experience the differences between the two languages.
      At the end of the lesson, I will have students to ask questions about this two languages and homework could be to let the students come up with other two different languages but has similarities between them and give a easy comparison.

Jia Zhang's New Literacies Project

For this New Literacies Project, I chose to do cultural literacy. It is a very broad topic so I narrowed it down into introducing two languages from two cultures and how they related to each other. My objective is culture is the full range of learned human behavior patterns, but some culture has a lot in common. So by analyzing these two languages about their histories, reading and writing systems, and usages, my students will not only understand that cultural literacy various, but also they will come to the realization of literacy of different cultures could also related to each other. I have the words that I want to distribute on the power point wrote on a Word document, I will add pictures to enhance the words to make it more visualized for students to understand and makes the lecture more fun and interesting. I would want to make an iMovie because I want to make this as a small documentary movie, which has pictures, speaking explanations, and maybe plant in some clips of Japanese and Chinese culture that relate to their languages. I haven’t put the whole thing together yet but I feel the content is the most important part so I am focused to finishing up the content of this iMovie. While doing this New Literacies Project, I have to do a lot of researches of Chinese and Japanese, and I realized that I have learned a lot of my own culture’s literacy. I am minoring Japanese but while I was doing the research, I realize that even though I have learned the language for two years, but I have never been introduced to it’s history and why and how did it relate to Chinese. It is a very interesting research for me to do and because lots of people have the wonder of why Chinese and Japanese are similar sometimes, so I really want to try to give some explanations by this chance of New Literacies Project.

Week 9 Reading 2/27

After reading the article of Comprehension Strategies for Early Readers, I think I really didn’t give enough credit for the kindergarteners that I have been observing. When I am preparing my lesson, I do feel as the article has mentioned that it is difficult to know where to begin when teaching for comprehension. When choosing the materials for teaching, it is really hard to know which might be too hard for the students to understand, especially for kindergarteners, it is really hard to plan activities of comprehension for them because they just started to learn alphabets and spelling. Based on my observation of the class, another thing that related the most to the article is that they have been working on several literary tasks that the teacher has created for them to do in their literature centers. As the article has mentioned, it is surprising that when young students interact with texts in any literary task, they bring the ability to construct meaning. My mentor teacher always does read aloud to the kids while they are sitting on the mat. After read aloud, each of them will be asked to tell their own stories with a partner, then they will go to the centers with assigned groups to draw and write down what has happened in their stories as much as they can. It is a great way to engage students to comprehend on the content of the stories and get them to practice their writing. However, after reading the article, I think it would be better to get the kids more involved like in Mrs. Hope’s class. I think my mentor teacher can also give her student more credit to let them get more involved while the read aloud section. Actually all of the strategies that has mentioned in the article, such as using gestures or poses to making connections to the text, and visualization the illustrations in the book, and questioning can help the students to get more engaged in learning. I understand teachers might be worried about they will lose their students’ attention if they give students the chance to interact with the teacher and to get active in the read aloud section, but I also can imagine if my mentor teacher uses these strategies, the students could be more involved in a good way and I think teachers can figure out a way to let the students be under controlled. Again, I think teachers should give their students more credit, and I think I would try some of her strategies to my future students too.

Reflection 1/30/2012

The article “Instructional conversations: Promoting comprehension through discussion” portrayed a picture of an active and productive classroom with students learning while thinking and discussing effectively. When I was reading the article, what related to me the most is the fact that our TE400 classes are full of these instructional conversations. Instructional conversations encourages teachers to engage students in interactions to promote analysis, reflection, and critical thinking to provide “true education”, which reflects to the article about “real teaching involves helping students think, reason, comprehend and understand important ideas”. This has been proved by us that when we were thinking and trying to answer the teacher’s open-ended questions by relating to the articles we read or our experiences of teaching, we have been given the opportunities to interact with each other and learning through inquiry and exploring from ourselves and the people we were discussing with. It is very important to promote this in elementary classrooms because that is the crucial stage when the kids first learn how to communicate with others in an effective discussion and get something important out of it. Teachers play a very important role in the instructional conversations because not only do they need to raise the appropriate open-ended questions, but only they need to make sure the students have time to think through and prepare for the discussion, and then make sure to lead the discussion and sum up the discussion appropriately too. Teachers need to make sure the discussion is proceeding at an appropriate pace and they also need to pay attention to what the students are discussing and pull out important ideas while summing up the discussion. IC promotes learning, but requires a deliberate and self-controlled agenda in the mind of the teacher. In this case, students can be most productive and learn the most when the teacher’s leading and taking a good control of the discussion. While reading the article, it came to my mind that IC could not only be promoted in regular classrooms, but also could be promoted in ESL classrooms. I remember I had one of the LLT classes which was talking about the strategies of teaching ESL students, there’s a strategy called meaning based conversation, which means when ESL students are learning English through a conversation, the teacher should convey the meaning of the objects which the students are about to learn in the target language by discussion and gesture without telling the students what it is directly. I agree it would make a deeper impression to the students and while discussing and explaining, the students can learn the target language more effective and naturally. Of course promoting a strategy like IC is controversial and its effectiveness could depend on various situations such as the ways that the teacher leads the discussion, or how preparative the students are. So to implicate an instructional conversation class needs a lot of planning and controlling, but I think it is a good way to teach and for the students to learn.