Teaching Humanity
by
This is the first year of my career I've been tasked with teaching literacy directly. I have two groups of 9th-grade students whose literacy I'm responsible for improving in a detectable way.
Prior to this year, I'd never really thought about literacy all that deeply. Literacy - the ability to read, right? As someone trained in language arts, I know how to engage students with reading: engage and build background knowledge, make predictions, employ guiding questions, provide high-interest materials, reflect on and discuss reading after it's been done.
But I've never been formally trained in how to teach students to read - i.e. the processes around transforming words and syntax into meaning. The notion of fluency, while I've been passively familiar with it, has never playe
Prior to this year, I'd never really thought about literacy all that deeply. Literacy - the ability to read, right? As someone trained in language arts, I know how to engage students with reading: engage and build background knowledge, make predictions, employ guiding questions, provide high-interest materials, reflect on and discuss reading after it's been done.
But I've never been formally trained in how to teach students to read - i.e. the processes around transforming words and syntax into meaning. The notion of fluency, while I've been passively familiar with it, has never playe