Article: https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1254&context=colleagues
This article highlights why disciplinary literacy is vital to education. Obviously, we have discussed this over the past six weeks, so there needs to be an emphasis on it in the classroom. The skills taught in content areas is vital for the dissection of the content they are being taught. In my own academic experience, I believe my teachers did a good job of breaking down the content and giving me the tools to go about the information I was being taught in order for succeed. When is it bad to tell too much or too little? When you load students with big words, theories, and higher cognitive methods, then they become overwhelmed and lose interest in what they are doing. There needs to be a gradual increase in the cognitive level of content that a teacher teaches students. A foundation needs to be built in order for any student to succeed. When a foundation is built, then start giving them the “tools” so they can properly engage in the content. It is amazing when teachers think they are doing the students a justice by giving them higher cognitive information, but the students have no idea how to do it.
Dennison77's Blog 
You’re right about knowing how to meet students where they are– how when teachers overshoot the “cognitive level” of students, the only result is frustration or complete disengagement. I think there are some obstacles on the way to designing lessons that neatly scaffold students to the interesting content– the fact is that, like in any group of people, your students will be all over the place. Neatly scaffolding material according to broad categories of cognitive readiness don’t always work the way we want them to with diverse groups. However, throwing students into the deep end also tends to get a lot of students to jump ship. How do we (1) meet the needs of diverse learners, (2) scaffold and engineer learning that responds to the “cognitive level” of each individual student, and (3) provide real keys to real disciplines so that students have access to real power as opposed to learning something just for the sake of a test?
LikeLike
Scaffolding your lessons based on your student’s knowledge and skill level is a crucial aspect to helping your students succeed. If teachers can build on top of what the students already know and what they can already do, the teacher will be able to make greater strides forward in terms of the students’ academic progress.
Teachers can assess what their students know before starting a new lesson with a preliminary assessment. This could be a warmup activity at the start of class, a group discussion, or a pre-test. Each of these forms of assessment will allow the teacher to build a strong lesson because he/she can work with her student’s knowledge and ability to strengthen their skills and understanding of the topic that is being taught.
I had not thought about building off of the skills and knowledge that students already have, but now I realize how important that is. Students and teachers will experience much more success if they take this into account when creating lessons because it will allow them to provide students with new disciplinary literacy skills and strengthen their old skills.
LikeLike
You are right in saying that disciplinary literacy is extremely important for us teachers to implement in our teaching. I find it very important that we, as teachers, reflect on our own experiences as students so that we can implement any techniques that we experienced from our own teachers into our future classroom. I also think that this can go either way. When looking back at our teachers, we may remember a certain technique or strategy that the teacher use that we absolutely loved and benefited from. Therefore, we most definitely would want to incorporate it in our own classroom. Then, on the other side, we may remember very ineffective teaching strategies that we would want to avoid completely in our classroom. Either way, I think this reflection is very important for a teacher at any stage of his or her career. I think that it is awesome that you had good experiences with your teachers, and you felt that they did a great job teaching you. However, I would love to know what exactly made those teachers so memorable and what strategies and techniques they used to “break down the content and give you the tools to go about the information.” Perhaps these are techniques you can use in your own classroom. I also appreciate your question regarding when is too much information too much information. As you say, “When you load students with big words, theories, and higher cognitive methods, then they become overwhelmed and lose interest in what they are doing. There needs to be a gradual increase in the cognitive level of content that a teacher teaches students.” When I read this, I immediately thought of the strategy of student inquiry. In other words, maybe a good way to avoid students getting overwhelmed could be to practice student inquiry, let the students grapple with the content in their own way, and then eventually lead them to specifics of the content. You came up with some really great ideas and questions that help to stimulate a teacher’s thinking.
LikeLike
I also think my teachers gave me the tools necessary to succeed in school, but In the first few weeks, I hadn’t reflected enough to know which strategies I remembered that could fit into this definition is disciplinary literacy. It is interesting and I also wonder if verbalizing it for us would have made a difference in our learning, or in our interest for the content. Also, for another point you made of learning foundations first, I agree and I think this is something that has really been stressed to us in our ed psych courses. children need us as teachers to scaffold information for them. I think this includes our own strategies. You have to know how to bait a hook before you can become a fisherman.
LikeLike
This unique outlook on how to include disciplinary literacy into the classroom is an important conversation us educators need to have. Sometimes I believe as teachers we get too caught up in a good idea, but do not take time to break it down and make sure that it is appropriate for our students. I believe that we have concluded in previous blogs that disciplinary literacy can be in the younger grades, however, it just might be a difference process. This difference process might be scaffolding, as you mention. I think that is a great plan to tackle disciplinary literacy in the classroom. It gives the students a chance to learn at their own pace and really get a good grasp on what it entails. You are right, we cannot just throw big fancy words at children and tell them to act like an expert to figure it out. We must model for them what that looks like so they can do that on their own. However, some students might do this at different speeds and that is why we must scaffold the learning. I challenge you to think about effective strategies for scaffolding. What would you to do scaffold disciplinary literacy? When are you as the teacher getting too involved? When are you not getting involved enough?
LikeLike