Learning Blog 1

I definitely enjoyed reading Chapter 2 in our book, Reading to Learn in the Content Areas. The authors’ emphasis on the affective domain being a part of how we teach our students, calling attention to a child’s feelings and emotions and the impact that they have on a child’s learning was very insightful and I definitely agree. It was mentioned in the chapter that “We as teachers are unlikely to reach students cognitively if we do not reach them affectively” (30). I definitely agree that as teachers we need to reach our students cognitively and affectively because it is like a balancing act you need them both and when one part gets more attention than the other it can hinder student progress. I've learned about affective domain in many of my education classes at Longwood. For me when I was in school, I wasn’t able to pay attention unless I liked the content being taught or found the ways the teacher presented it fun. I really liked the GATOR strategy and definitely liked the components and how it was set up. I liked this method because it allows teachers to ask more reflective questions to their students that in turn can help them on the way to becoming more analytical and critical thinkers in term of what they read and how they read. The part of the chapter that showed examples of the PAR Framework, I have to say was the most useful for me, because I was still confused after class on Tuesday because it is a completely new lesson format for me to learn in such a short time.

Knowing that I have access to examples of how it’s done and what it looks like will make the lesson plan assignment much less stressful and also see it as something I might want to take with me into my future classroom. One of the biggest surprises of this chapter for was that there is kind of an “epidemic” among boys and literacy today because when I was in school I was an avid reader and as mentioned in the chapter that “Most boys still do not view reading as masculine” (41). As a future teacher I hope work to change that and show them that reading is for everyone. It would be very interesting to look into this as a possible I-Search paper topic. Overall I’ve found this chapter to be very helpful and insightful in terms of how it was presented and definitely learned a lot from the chapter that I can apply later to my future classroom.