Saturday, March 24, 2012

An Urban Teacher's Education: Teaching Humanity

An Urban Teacher's Education: Teaching Humanity:
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