Chapter Two Reflections

What jumped right out at me with this chapter is that LEP students don't need their material "dumbed down", which has been a problem. It is the lack of experience with the English words, and the background, that makes the material different. It requires more background teaching, true, but eventually enough background will be laid that at some point my students will be able to learn how to scaffold for themselves... at least that is my hope. Just as we learned in grade school to use a dictionary and an encyclopedia to expand our knowledge, I hope that eventually my students will internalize questioning for themselves and be able to reach out to books and the internet to find out more information. However, as long as language remains a barrier for them, this will not happen (or at least not very successfully).

I thought the examples given in the text for supplementary materials to use were great. Many of these things I use or have used, but not to the extent I think I should be using them. It is a wake up call for me: I need to work harder at reaching my students on their level, and through their learning style, instead of just through my own. I do use graphic organizers quite often, and I was pleased that outlining and highlighting were recommended. Since reading this chapter, I have spent more time adapting text, which I have done occasionally, and the results have been good. While I have a very content-rich book for 8th grade science - too rich, I feel, for the grade level, my students struggle with it. By re-writing it in a way that gives them the information I really feel they need to know, and focusing on that, I feel that I am helping them to understand it much better than just letting them loose with the text and some vocabulary work, since much of what is in the text is more than they need to know at this point, anyway.

I found that the teaching scenarios were very enlightening, and I really liked what Ms. Chen did with her students, it would take awhile for me to get to a point where I could do all of the activities she did with her students in one lesson. For my students at this point, it would take at least two lessons to cover all that she did. Perhaps by the time the current third graders reach the 7th or 8th grade, they will have been trained enough in all of the activities and transitions that less time would be spent teaching the procedures as well as the material itself.