This literacy class has not only taught me about literacy instruction, but exactly how to use and incorporate it into lesson plans. Out of all the things that we learned, I think that learning about the different strategies and activities to teach literacy helped me the most. For example, when I’m teaching vocabulary, I now have a variety of useful activities (semantic feature analysis, analogy charts, word webs, Frayer charter) and helpful guidelines (help students explicitly compare the meanings of the words, only choose 5-7 at a time, activate background knowledge about the words), which will help the students learn vocabulary at a much deeper level. Learning the effective principles of vocabulary, comprehension, writing, critical literacy, etc. gave me guidelines and helped me develop my own teaching pedagogy. For example, the principles of effective writing instruction (“Before, During, After”, building students’ metacognition, explicitly teaching specific comprehension strategies, etc.) will help me plan lessons and help me figure out how I can best teach comprehension. This class really helped me figure out what kind of teacher I want to become, and how I can achieve that. The activities that were demonstrated in this class also helped me see effective principles be put into action. I think a lot of times, in the classes of the Secondary Education Program, principles and theory are talked about, but the actual application is not taught. I feel like this class prepared me for student teaching the most because of this. For example, in another Secondary Education class, we talked extensively about critical literacy. I understood the concept well, but I had no idea exactly how to teach it to my students. The examples of lessons and activities in this class helped me understand the principles in more depth and made me realize just how important it is to teach critical literacy at all ages and in all content areas.
