Accelerated Literacy Program : Concetta Gotlieb's blog

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Concetta Gotlieb's blog

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Tuesday Oct 28, 2008

How do we get students to write effectively?

We often find that students may become good at decoding text through guided reading but that this teaching may not equip them to apply this knowledge in different context such as understanding the meaning of the text or developing good writing skills.

Accelerated Literacy - using the one text to teach lots of different aspects of literacy

Literate discourse or orientation, giving them access to all the tricks that authors use to engage us as readers
Transformations - deeper understand of the text and why and how grammar is used
Spelling - writing the words from the text, spelling rules from the text
Writing - using the text to scaffold writing

The main things I took away from the session

Don't assume that your students will be able to understand all the visual and textual clues when they are reading
It's about explicitly teaching about everything within the text so that students have all the answers. Really providing carefully constructed scaffolds.
If you explain things really really explicitly with all the background everyone in your class has a chance to succeed
It does take time and effort to think about how you will teach in a lot of detail.

This got me thinking about using technology and project/enquiry based learning. I think it is probably really important to think about what kind of language and depth of explanations we will use when explaining technology use or engaging in project based learning. Particularly working with the kids that I do they are struggling to stay on task when I take them to websites because things take a minute to load or they don't understand all the icons. So I'll be taking a little step back and explicitly teaching some basics of how websites work, what is happening when the page isn't coming up etc. What is the value of the sites we are going to? Who are they designed for? Why do they use the designs they use? Not just from a 'who can you trust' perspective but from a more holistic perspective of using tools for learning. Giving alot more information up front.

This article from the Britannica blog says that teacher talk will remain more important than any Web2.0 tools. That may be partly true but more important perhaps it will just be that teacher talk becomes even more important and as we push our students to use increasingly sophisticated communication and learning tools.

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