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Teachers and Researchers Describe What Works in ClassroomsEdited by Jill Lewis

Essential Questions in Adolescent Literacybook talk by Tara Mouk and Debra Harte

Adolescent Literacy

1In Essential Questions in Adolescent Literacy, the author gives several strategies for helping students to understand and comprehend academic text. Understanding and applying concepts from core content classes is considered Academic Literacy. This book explains how students have different multiple literacies which are used in different communities. This book highlights the fact that there is evidence that middle grade and high school students are not as accomplished in terms of academic literacy, the kind of literacy needed for achievement on traditional school tasks and standardized assessments (Lewis, 2009).

How Can We Help Adolescent Readers Meet the Challenges of Academic Text? Chapter 5

Multiple LiteraciesTeachers often make use of supplemental materials, such as newspapers and encyclopedias. With these different types of texts, teachers need to be familiar with the thinking process students use to comprehend these texts. The book suggests that students should to be able to recognize patterns used to organize the information, such as sequential, cause and effect, or problem-solution patterns (Lewis, 2009). Social Studies, Science, and Math books are different types of books that require different strategies to comprehend the material.

Multiple Literacies continuedSometimes when students read academic text, they are simply seeing words on the page, much like a grocery list (Lewis, 2009)

Using prior knowledge is not an automatic process for students. Teachers need to find out if students possess any knowledge about new topics and activate this before introducing new material. Automaticity in the use of prior knowledge is an important goal for students to achieve.How Does Creative Content-Area Teaching Work with Adolescents?Chapter 9This chapter focuses on the importance of content-area teachers using multiple texts in the classroom.

Multiple texts and multiple literacies can include video games, computers, magazines, newspapers, cell phones, etc.

The use of these mediums can help in making the connection between new literacies and teacher creativity.

How Can we Help Adolescent Readers Meet the Challenges of Academic Text?Chapter 5Leu et al. (2005) identified the following three important points to ponder before bringing new literacies to classrooms:

Simply using software programs on computers does not prepare students for new literacies expectations.

New literacies are deictic in that they constantly change and require teachers to embrace these changes.

New literacies are essential in classrooms so that equal opportunities are offered to all students.

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Examples of Multiple Literacies used in the ClassroomA teacher of an online high school English class created blogs related to a short story unit, where students responded to specific topics.

A teacher of physics had her students design and build roller-coasters, write up lab reports, and use various forms of multimedia, such as PowerPoint or videos to represent their projects.

These are perfect examples of teachers combining content-area teaching with new literacies practices.7How Can We Help Adolescents Think About Content through Writing? Chapter 10Writing is a skill that must occur with scaffolding and be explicitly taught. In order to accomplish this task, we must encourage our students to begin to see writing as thinking, and to do this, teachers must teach writing as a process.

Students must demonstrate their thinking about a concept as opposed to teachers assessing their reading from a textbook on a given topic.

Students must understand that writing makes a point, and that each type of writing has a useful purpose.

While understanding the purpose, students must also work and understand the discipline of any content area, such as the conventions of writing.

Summarization and ArgumentationTeachers should scaffold the following skills:

Students must be taught how to pull information from their reading that is relevant and meaningful for the purpose of writing, and teachers should spend time in the classroom modeling and practicing the skill of summarization.

Argumentation calls for students to conceptualize and transform the knowledge they encounter, associating new ideas and reformulating their understanding by constructing new relations between and among concepts, and supporting underlying thinking (Lewis, 2009).

Elements of ArgumentationThere are four elements to argumentation:

Claim - the position

Clarification - qualifiers limiting the claim

Evidence - support for the claim

Warrant - reasoning that connects the evidence to the claim

FeedbackFeedback according to the reading should include information that answers the students questions:

How am I going in relation to the goal for this task? Where am I going? Whats next? Feedback should also include demonstrating and modeling prompts. Rubrics should be discussed for rubrics students to understand what and how their writing will be evaluated. Writings should be revised and rewritten as often as it takes for students to discontinue making the same mistakes over and over again.

Good writing, like good ideas, is the result of consideration,deep thought, and patience (Lewis, 2009).

How Can Content-Area Teachers Differentiate Instruction forTheir Students to Improve Student Learning?Chapter 11The focus of this chapter is the importance of differentiated instruction in order to facilitate metacognitive awareness and to assist students in taking charge of their learning, while enabling them to understand core content information.

The purpose of differentiated literacy instruction is to provide instruction that is aligned with the learning needs of individual students to maximize the potential for learning success (Lewis, 2009).

The author states that teachers are very good at differentiating at the elementary level, however, teachers at the high school level feel that their main purpose is to teach the content and not on teaching literacy strategies. Strategies

The following are strategies teachers could use at the high school level to assist their students in understanding content curriculum while increasing their comprehension:

Chunking, and simplifying text-based assignments were two areas that content teachers worked on.

Focused areas included pre-reading activities involving graphic organizers that on challenging vocabulary, and making predictions based on headings, photographs, charts and graphs

Asking questions before and during reading and modeling teacher thinking

How Can Assessment Evaluate Student Learning, Inform Instruction, and Promote Student Independence?Chapter 12This chapter focuses on teaching our students to be responsible for their learning through peer- and self-assessment and delineates the importance of assessment for and as learning; involving students in peer- and self-assessment, as well as co-creating rubrics for evaluating their work (Lewis, 2009).

Benefits for students include increased ownership of the learning process, resulting in increased understanding and improved metacognition skills

Benefits for teachers include increased student achievement, fewer conflicts over grades, and ultimately less time spent grading papers and projects (Lewis, 2009).

Steps to be TakenThe following steps reinforce students taking responsibility for their learning:

Setting expectations early in the class by sharing the project description and requirements along with the rubric.

Making everyone responsible to pay attention to the details, while creating a classroom of mutual respect.

Demonstrate and ask students to apply the use of the rubric to their work, and use it to make revisions before being asked to evaluate peer assignments.

Shifting part of the assessment responsibility to the students requires trust on the part of both teacher and students, but the rewards far outweigh the additional time required for peer assessment (Lewis, 2009).

Final ThoughtsEffective strategy instruction in promotes greater understanding and engagement and prepares students to be adaptive life-long learners.

Students who take more responsibility for assessment, become more actively engaged in their learning, and develop skills and strategies that serve them long after they leave our classroom (Lewis, 2009).

References:Lewis, J. (2009). Essential Questions in Adolescent Literacy, Teachers and Researchers Describe What Works in Classrooms. The Guilford Press, A Division of Guilford Publications, Inc., 72 Spring Street, New York, NY 10012

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