Child Labor Unit Reflection

REFLECTION

Students should acquire skills leading them to fluency, comprehension and a critical eye towards reading. But they also should be engaged in reading assignments. Engagement is a critical factor when organizing lessons no matter the content-area. If the student is not motivated by the material taught, they will tune out and not obtain the necessary skills listed above. How do we engage students? It happens through choice, relevance and discovery.

This class has reinforced my views on these motivational criteria. When assigned compulsory text, motivation was low and little was gained from the corresponding assignments. The book groups in which we participated were hollow learning experiences with minimal production from group members. Why is this? Because we protested reading literature forced upon us. But, when we had a choice in what we read or during the author study, I felt myself and the class did our best work.

I learned that reading comprehension is basically an exercise in scaffolding. For a text to be understood, students must build off prior knowledge, make connections to the world around them, and the text must lie within the child’s readability zone. The resources on www.lexile.com are useful, but I must note that the Lexile numbers are merely a guide. Students span a wide-range of readability stages.

My views of literacy across the curriculum have also been reinforced. My general view of middle-level education is that it should be cross-curriculum and interdisciplinary – not structured into rigid content areas like senior and junior high school models. So, it makes sense to me that blending math, science, language arts, social science, art, reading, technology, music, etc., is important to the intellectual development of early adolescents.

I also believe that curricular content should be relevant to the physical, social and emotional development of early adolescents. This principle is why I chose to Child Labor and Youth Rights as my thematic unit. The topic is relevant to early adolescents because it directly addresses issues that children their age face currently or have faced throughout history. It also has them think critically about their rights and their current and future role in society. It also empowers them to view change as an active process, a concept that will undoubtedly be relevant throughout their life. This unit also connects them to the world at large, investigating issues from around the globe. And, it promotes an appreciation for their current station in life and democracy.

As for my future learning, I would like to study more on critical literacy and critical pedagogy. Overall, I gained valuable resources to take into my future classroom and have begun to build a literary library, both professional