Something that stuck out to me in the reading from Subjects Matter is the concept of picking the big concepts out of a textbook, so that the students do not have to read the whole textbook (179). This concept is important me because it reinforce content literacy. It does this by allowing the students to read and learn just the main, big picture ideas instead of them reading the whole textbook and trying to decide what is important and needs to be well understood and what doesn’t, while also trying to wade through the large amount of vocabulary that is in most textbooks, most of which is super specific content-area vocabulary that the students do not understand or need to know at all (180). We as teachers help with this by using “filters” to find the core ideas of a certain chapter in the textbook (179).
This connects to an assignment that we are doing in ESCI 4440 right now, called Curriculum Triage. For this assignment, we must look through an on-level 8th grade physical science textbook and decide what concepts and vocabulary we would “keep or toss” for the Periodic Table section of the Chemistry unit. This allows us to decide what ibig ideas are important for our students to learn. This assignment connects to the idea proposed in the book because they both suggest not having the students read and attempt to learn everything that is in the book, instead, we, as teachers, pick the big ideas and those are what the students should learn. By us doing that, it allows the students to focus only on the concepts that they absolutely need to know in order to understand the material. This also gives them less reading which helps those students who struggle with reading, especially content-area literature.
(302)
Maegan
This connects to an assignment that we are doing in ESCI 4440 right now, called Curriculum Triage. For this assignment, we must look through an on-level 8th grade physical science textbook and decide what concepts and vocabulary we would “keep or toss” for the Periodic Table section of the Chemistry unit. This allows us to decide what ibig ideas are important for our students to learn. This assignment connects to the idea proposed in the book because they both suggest not having the students read and attempt to learn everything that is in the book, instead, we, as teachers, pick the big ideas and those are what the students should learn. By us doing that, it allows the students to focus only on the concepts that they absolutely need to know in order to understand the material. This also gives them less reading which helps those students who struggle with reading, especially content-area literature.
(302)
Maegan
Maegan, thank you for your thoughtful blog post. I agree that we as teachers need to do an efficient job of using filters to find the core ideas from textbooks. In my experience as a student, it is difficult and tedious to identify important information that is essential to know or not. As teachers, we should assist students by guiding them to the most important in the chapters, just like we did in ESCI 4440.
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