John Popham - EDRD619: Disciplinary Literacy

  Making Content Connections (Strategy Application) Three ideas from reading ·             IAL, chapter 9:    Perspective writing through RAFT (Role, Audience, Format, and Topic)   Fang & Park:  Three roles that academic language plays in schooling Medium of knowledge transmission Tool for thinking and intellectual development A ticket and visiting card     Selected article (Wissinger and De La Paz):  Students with writing disabilities can achieve significant growth through discipline specific reading and writing intervention   Two strategies I will use           The Threaded discussion board (IAL, chapter 9), as it provides great flexibility in both time and subject matter and requires students to think on their own while writing to learn.           RAFT (IAL, chapter  9 and Power Tools, chapter 6), as it allows stu...

  Selected Text:       “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.      Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.      But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the liv...

  Talking to the Text Video is here:    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ysSVEKzH2nso1Vruc172blDzsZDrBLHu/view?usp=sharing

  Module 5 – Reflection      The texts, videos, and exercises within Module 5 required us to grapple with the practical challenge of identifying and specifically teaching to essential vocabulary.   While selecting essential vocabulary seems the first obvious step, actually, the first step is determining how to go about the process of selecting those words.   The six selection criteria provided in chapter 3 of Improving Adolescent Literacy provided a useful initial screen for identifying words that might be worthy of special attention, including starting with disciplinary word lists available online. The Effective Content concept of binning words into four categories of criticality was helpful in framing the work.         Throughout the readings and texts, the message was repeatedly stressed, explicitly and implicitly, that knowing a word is more complex than just learning the dictionary definition and that techniques to achieving ...

  The digital jumpstart (DJ) method of preparing students for challenging material offers great flexibility and available software tools make creation of DJs reasonably simple and swift.   Using easily accessible primary and secondary sources available via the web, the teacher’s main task is creating a script that addresses the three key features of a successful DJ:   “Providing background information, developing schema, and previewing vocabulary” (Rance-Rooney, 2010).   Going through the process of actually building a DJ forced me to try to put myself in the shoes of a student not very familiar with either the material or the historical context.   It made me think of the most vital terms and ideas that such a student might most benefit from understanding better before, or after, the class during which that material was covered.   My DJ was about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War 2 .   While a bit rough, it would provide students ...

Module 3:  Disciplinary Literacy Strategy Application   This week’s assignment involved applying features from Teaching Comprehension of Complex Texts (Buehl) and Going Beyond the Fab Five (Fang) to articles from two different disciplines.  My texts included:          (1) Modeling with Geometry:  Any Way You Slice It (mathematics)         (2) Communicating with Maps (social sciences)   The selected Modeling with Geometry section included at least two features described by Buehl, such as mathematics terminology (e.g., cross section) and multiple modes (cross section being described in the text and then later demonstrated with a three-dimensional drawing.  The same section included multiple examples of the conceptual vocabulary feature described by Fang (vertex, edge, focus, cross section).   The selected Communicating with Maps section included multiple examples of the Buehl feature of conceptual vocabul...