Week #4

9-24-13

In your learning journal state how that text - the ideas, organization, and
presentation of ideas - reflects the thinking of a particular discipline. This is your
starting point. I will ask you to go back and develop this statement further after
reading the article.

I selected to review Imogene's Antlers. The ideas of this text can lend well to a lesson in
social studies for early elementary that focuses on how we are all different in our own
way. The text organizes the idea of how she wakes up and just goes about her morning
dealing with the antlers like it is just any ordinary day. She finds way to overcome the
doorway and the staircase. Her parent's and principal don't know what to do and later
her mother tries to cover up the antlers by having a hat made. But the lesson to be
learned comes from the cook and the maid. They just make the best of the situation as
Imogene did in the beginning of the story by having her help by feeding the birds and
drying the towels with her antlers.

How has your thinking about the text that you picked developed with respect to
how the text expresses what experts value, how they build knowledge, and how
they communicate their thinking to other experts? Provide some very specific
examples. Not sure I have a clear understanding of how this works with readers in the
basic Literacy Level.

After reading the article, I think I would still use the text in the same way. Although the
text lends itself to a social studies topic the article points out that you would need to
ensure that the reader has enough background knowledge to insure that they can read
the story successfully. I might look for a different approach to help the reader track the
problems that Imogene encounters in her day and list ways she was able to cope with
them. You could also talk about other ways she might have chosen to deal with her
problems and what was the better choice. This story could also be compared with
another text and have the students make comparison to each story as they talked about
in the article with high school students.

Assure your understanding the nuances of each category by constructing your
own very specific example of each. I am not sure if this is what you mean by this.

Basic Literacy- Learning to read (K-2 learner)
Intermediate Literacy- Building step that bridges basic literacy to disciplinary literacy (3-
6 learner)
Disciplinary Literacy-Reading to learn (7-12 learners)


In addition, the authors note that they feel that disciplinary literacy is rarely
taught. Review Table 1 of factors that contribute to the relatively greater
emphasis on elementary over secondary reading instruction. Develop your own
factor/contrast that you would add to this table.

I don't know how you would add it to the table, but I think it has been the practice for so
long that students learn to read in the early years of elementary school and the middle
and high school teachers do not have to spend time teaching students to read because
they already know how. Although this is not true for some students, some just fall
between the cracks and never get the support that they need to learn to be a successful
reader.

Elementary Teachers:
School improvement goals are tied to literary.

Teacher Evaluations are tied to reading Assessments like DIBELS.

Middle/High School:

School improvement goals are not literacy based.

Teacher Evaluations are not tied directly to reading assessments.


Addressing the Need
Now the authors describe their plan, called a research design, for addressing
their research question. State the details of the Year 1 and Year 2 steps of that
plan, so that your reading of the results from each year (below) will make sense.

Year 1- They developed an understanding of the special literacy demands presented by
each subject by interviewing, discussing, conducting analytical tasks and informal
conversations with each subject area expert. Then they reflected on the different
approaches that evolved from this and evaluated it.

Year 2- They learned that the disciplinary teams took on strategies that worked best
with the kind of thinking for their discipline.




Note that in their explanation of the research design the authors show how they
deliberately took on a limitation that they had as researchers (see bottom of p.
46). Attend to how they did this. I think it lends much to the credibility of their
findings. They took on a limitation by using the insights of the content specialist
without the support of a literacy expert.

Lessons Learned in the Second Year & Conclusions

Also in your learning journal: What do you see as the implications of this work,
generally and personally?

The implications that I see from the study is the fact that because they allowed content
experts to develop strategies that were created for the specific subject area they could
create a tool that would facilitate that learning. If they would have used literacy experts
they may not have achieved the same result because the literacy expert would not have
approached the subject the same way as the content expert did. In my personal opinion
this seems to the proper way of approaching this, I did not think about it in these terms
prior to reading this, but having read this paper it seems like the most logical approach
to learning in the content area.