Learning Blog 3

I definitely enjoyed Chapter 4 of our book, Reading to Learn in the Content Areas, about the Assistance Phase of the PAR Lesson Framework. It made me see that having learned how to activate our students' prior knowledge to prepare them to learn during any lesson in our classroom and add more complex “files” to their schema, we must guide them reading in the beginning and assisting them as they move on.  Reading may look easy on the surface to a proficient reader, even second nature to them, but to a struggling reader it can seem complex and quickly frustrates them. As mentioned in the text that proficient readers “sample text, predict, confirm hypotheses, and self-correct quickly” (p. 81). We proficient readers do this with such ease that it seems second nature for us, but our students are not yet that point, so we as teachers need to make sure that we model many different effective reading strategies so they can from their mistakes and become better readers.  It is our job as teachers to give them the tools they need to succeed in reading and in any other subject or area of school for them to be successful overall.

One of the main theories the book talks about constructivism, I have heard about it in other education classes but am still not quite understanding it. It seems to me constructivism entails having students derive their own meaning from the text and therefore there are not any wrong interpretations of the students read and got out of the text. A teacher is merely a guide and not the giver of knowledge.  I liked how its seven goals were stated but did not feel that enough light was shed on them in terms of how you go about clearly implementing the goals. They are give students knowledge of the learning process, provide students with experience appreciating multiple perspectives, make learning realistic and relevant encourage ownership and voice in the learning process, provide a social context for learning, encourage use of multiple modes of representation, and encourage learners' self-awareness

All the different strategies in the chapter were ways to make students understand their learning process, acknowledge many different perspectives, and give them the tools for learning.  Our job as teachers is to assist students in reading and make them successful, but we may not always be there to make sure they notice important details in the text or look up new vocabulary that they are unsure of as they read.

Even though this chapter was at times challenging for me, I still was exposed to many different strategies that I would definitely use in my classroom and include in my PAR lesson plan assignment. My favorite strategy in this chapter was Question Answer Relationship or QAR because it’s a very straight-forward strategy that is easily implemented and beneficial to all students at any grade level.  I feel like the QAR strategy is very helpful for the students as they become their own thinkers and it allows them to be in control of what they learn and able to justify their reasoning in anything that they learn.