Monday, September 2, 2019

Help for Struggling Readers


The title of the chapter we were instructed to read was “How to Help Struggling Readers”. I was excited and intrigued when I read this title because that was what I had been asking myself so far in this course. I understood quickly with our first reading that students who struggle with reading have such a difficult time with most of other subjects because of how necessary it is for a student to be literate in all subjects taught to them. With this new knowledge, I was quick to desire to learn about strategies and solutions that would help students in my classroom as much as possible.

This chapter of the book lays out six helpful tools to use with students, and I can really see how they would each be helpful to students who are struggling with reading. The first strategy was titled “Create Supportive Relationships”. If I am honest, this is the strategy that I get most excited about utilizing in the classroom. We recently have read about the impact that teachers’ and students’ attitudes can have on students’ learning in our EMAT course. The article that we read talked about the overall idea that students develop and learn more when they believe they can improve. The contracting mindset is that students are incapable of being smarter or learning more. This mindset leaves students frustrated and stuck in a state of disobedience, indifference, and contempt for learning and fighting through educational struggles to gain a better understanding of the subject at hand. As both articles state, I believe that when a teacher comes into the classroom showing students that they believe they can succeed, real growth in attitude and learning can occur.
Another big thing that stuck out to me as I was reading this chapter was the fact that I am unsure of how to apply some of these principles practically in a math content area. The biggest question I had about this surrounded the strategy titled “promote self-monitoring”. My main questions would be: “What does self-monitoring look like in math?” and “How can you teach this to students as you present regularly planned material?”. Do you guys have any thoughts? (Word Count: 364)

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