Course Reflection

During this course, the two articles that had the greatest impact on my philosophy for teaching were, “Role of the Reader’s schema in comprehension, learning, and memory “and “Metacognition”. After reading both articles I realized the importance of both practices and the need to put more of an emphasis on them in my classroom. My reading program has many resources for building background that I was not utilizing. Now, I will make the time to activate schema so that my students are better able to comprehend, make connections, and retain what we are reading. If they have background knowledge on the topic it will also help them to ask their own questions and build metacognition. By using metacognitive practices in my classroom, it will increases my student’s ability to apply their knowledge and the strategies they are using to learn to other higher-level contexts. Metacognitive practices will also increase my student’s self-awareness of their strengths and weakness as a learning. I know see how important metacognition is to my student’s success and plan to be more mindful in explicitly teaching it.

Over the past eight weeks in taking this course, I have learned what a complex process reading is. It has so many different components that all work together to creative the magic of reading. What makes the process so challenging is that no student will learn to read exactly the same. As a teacher I need to take so many factors into consideration such as their prior background knowledge, culture, age, gender, family values, and academic ability. There are so many factors that can makes this even more challenging such as socioeconomic status and learning and mental disabilities. One concept that can make the reading process positive for all students is building their motivation. Loving to read can happen with any reading ability. To help build that love and motivation I will make sure to provide my students with texts that meet their individual interest and give them lots of opportunities for choice in their reading and related assignments.

Perhaps the most important realization I have made during this course was that in order to teach my students to love to read, I need to show and emphasis my love for reading. After reading about the Peter Effect, I realized that I am guilty in not reading as much as I should. I let the chaos of daily life get in the way and use it as an excuse not to read for enjoyment. Over the summer I had no excuse not to have read more. It is a goal of mine to “self-care” and take the time to fall in love with some new books. I also plan to keep building my read aloud collection with amazing mentor texts that my students can see me light up when I read.