Instructional Tool

Among the most useful tools I have acquired from my teacher’s training are the learning strategies. Middle-school students may still not know how to read and write properly. They need to be taught with reading and writing strategies. In addition, I have learned that the metacognitive process plays an important role in learning. In other words, we have to teach students to be aware how they think when they learn, and understand why their brains work that way they do.

Combining the above thoughts, I have designed two instructional tools: one for reading, and one for writing, both of which are partnership workshops. I picked the partnership work model because I have greatly benefited from it during my course study.

The Reader’s Workshop is designed for a middle-school literacy reading class. It also can be used in a content reading class. There are four stages in the tool:
-- first, prepare and engage students to read the article.
-- Second, give specific directions about how to read – know what information to look for during the process of the reading. For the first reading, let students look for only lower-level comprehension questions.
-- Third, reread. In the second reading, look for the higher-level comprehension questions.
-- Finally, students should raise questions about the reading, and explore the best answers in class. The limitation of the tool is that I do not know whether the steps I listed are complete. I will need to revise the questions over time to better serve my classroom teaching.

I function much better as a reader when I read with clear reading instructions and procedures, and a partner to work with. I believe this reader’s workshop will work very efficiently with my secondary school students’ English art reading, or foreign language (Chinese) reading.

The Writer’s Workshop focuses on brainstorming and gets students to start the writing. The most difficult part for writing is to get started. From what I have observed, students’ writing difficulties often occur because the teacher did not brainstorm the students well enough or did not break the brainstorming questions into smaller units. For example, the teacher should ask, “What information is needed to do this piece of writing?” “What do you know about the topic?” “What do you not know about the topic?” “How can you get the unknown information?”

There are five steps in the Writer’s Workshop:
--brainstorming,
--information collecting,
--writing,
--analyzing,
--revising.
Except for the actual writing, each student will work with their partner to complete all other steps. This way the students will have valuable input a peer, and will have chances to do self-evaluation and self-correction. The limitation is that a content teacher or reading teacher has to accommodate the writing topics based on needs of class.