Final Synthesis

 

Alex Stolz

Final Synthesis 

LLED 3530 with Nick Thompson taught me many valuable resources, tricks, and strategies that I will take with me and expand on as I enter the teaching world. From the book club, think alouds, strategy lesson assignment, and the text set assignment, I gained new skills to use in my future classrooms.

    The strategy lesson assignment was effective in improving my planning skills. Knowing that I had to create a mini-lesson assignment to present college students studying in my field racked my nerves a bit but it was good to have great group members. The assignment also helped me in mastering the ‘clustering and mapping’ strategy. It was good to group the small, significant strategies and to organize them to match the learning outcomes of the state standard that we used for our lesson plan. It was smart for Nick to give us a time limit because it allowed us to become aware of time constraints, and to plan the phases of the assignment carefully. 

    I genuinely enjoyed the new knowledge I gained after completing our second Think Aloud assignment. I chose an intellectual passage from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in which I honestly could not fully understand the passage prior to the Think Aloud.  I was able to dissect and as a result, make sense of the passage through the following strategies: predictions, prior knowledge connection, inferring knowledge from context, pointing out significant parts, asking questions as I read, and what I learned. These were only some of the strategies that I used in the assignment, but I was able to piece the passage together using these tools. It was good to be in groups of three as well so that I could practice the read aloud, and so that I could take information from my partners to implement in my toolbox. 

    I’m in favor of how the book club was set up. We read The Abundance of Katherines by John Greene. Have reading roles was significant in a sense that not only did I need to comprehend what I was reading, but I also needed to question worthwhile paragraphs or lines in order to connect it to the central idea of the book. Sure, it was hard work but with sticky notes or just simply writing on the pages made it easier. The only issue I had (which was minor) was that as I questioned the book, my questions were answered fairly easily just by reading the book. However, the strategy is still effective because when I questioned everything I found to be significant, I searched for the answers more vigorously. 

     The text set was effective in which I could discern between different strategies depending on the type of text that I used. I used two videos, an image, and a website for the text set assignment I appreciate the diversity of the texts that we needed to use for the assignment because it’s very applicable for modern classrooms. By using multiple sources of variety, students can become engaged and not stagnant through the same type of texts. This assignment also helped me learn of the many different reading strategies presented through our classroom book, Harvey Daniels’ Subjects Matter. I was surprised to see many reading strategies in the book when I went to start this assignment. I was under the impression that there might be the same number of think aloud strategies as reading strategies but there were a plethora of them in the book. 

    Prior to taking LLED 3530, I wasn’t sure what I was going to take from the class. Every 

assignment, discussion, and lesson plan were of significant value. However, the best tool I took from 

the class was the knowledge and ability to understand the importance of reading strategies and skills 

for students. At the core, it seems silly for that to be the biggest take away from the class because 

reading sounds so simple. Nick, however, helped me to realize that not just comprehending reading, 

but dissecting it, connecting it, questioning it, and soaking it in could be the most important skills that 

a student can grasp onto during their school days. WC: 692