Rats and LAS

Well the first week of the Spring quarter is ending today and my new students are the latest qroup in our ATD focus group. Each student is encouraged to register on the LAS learning survey site and Jimmy from the student success center works with me to focus on any special needs. Now that I am "ratified" I conducted the reading survey among this group (thanks for the tip Jenna) and it really helped Jimmy and I see a bigger picture in terms of learning needs (or lack of) in regards to ensuring success!
Paul B.
MART

Students make an impression on the author

At the last RATS meeting we discussed things that students could look for as they preview a book. One thing that was mentioned concerned figures and such. I noted that my students had commented on the fact that it is very confusing when an explanation to a figure, or other illustration, reads on a different page than the illustration. Finding these and many other discrepancies, small and not so small, has been a project in our program for some time and recently went to a new level that my students were part of.

When students get familiar with their text and become efficient at applying the content, they pick up on errors in the technical aspects. This started me on a path of encouraging the students to watch for errors and typos a few years back. It has become a positive challenge to some of them and they really get into it. We have noticed that some of the corrections I have submitted to the publishers, starting from Ed. 2 through the current Ed. 4 , have been acted upon. My new group has found additional errors which prompted me to send another letter off to our new publisher's rep. prompting him to relay that communication to his superiors. I was very surprised and delighted to recieve an email directly from the author thanking both myself and my students for their efforts and promising to include all our corrections in Ed 5. He also sent me his newly created powerpoint on the text and gave his permission to use it, copy it and distribute it in any way that I felt was beneficial.

Paul Baeder (ratified)
MART Program

Old Ideas, New Excitement

Don't you just love when you find out you like something that you thought you didn't? Like when you never liked Nutella before, but you go to someone's house and you eat it just to be polite and you find out it is the most delicious thing ever invented and so you go buy a tub and you eat the whole thing in a week? Not that I've ever done that. ;)

The RAT Pack was recently in San Fransisco for some additonal training from WestEd. One of the sessions I attended was about "Reciprocal Teaching". The idea is that students can improve their reading comrehension through interactive dialogue with their peers. That much I like. But when they went on to discuss role-assignment, I started to roll my eyes a little. One student was assigned to help the group summarize, another student prompted the group to make predictions, etc. I've never had much success with formalizing roles in groupwork. I started to wish I had joined a different session. I had tried this before and I didn't like it. However, I kept an open mind, and it actually paid off.

As they went into more detail on how to make this type of role assignment work well, I started to realize why it had failed me in the past. I also started to see the benefits of the role-assignment - in addition to helping students with the task at hand (in this case, reading), it also helps scaffold students to know how a quality group discussion works. That's not something we're born knowing. We have to learn how to generate useful group discussions.

I won't go into the details of the workshop (although if you're interested in Reciprocal Teaching, I'm happy to discuss it). And I'm still not 100% sold on the details of this activity. I think I would still want to tweak it to fit our students and classes better. I just wanted to share that lovely moment when I realized that I was actually interested in something I had already written off.

And now I'm going to find some Nutella.

Space to Think

I provide a lot of reading passages to students. In making the invisible visible, I realized that perhaps my presentation of material may be interfering with the student's ability to begin a megacognitive conversation about these passages. In reviewing my reading lessons, I have decided that the "checks" or "questions" about the passages need to be more separate from the passage itself. To accomplish this, I am placing the passages on one side of the paper and the "questions" on the backside. I know that many students have been taught to read the questions first; I want to retrain these readers to see the invisible and begin to rely on the text more than the clues presented in the questions. Does anyone have any thoughts on this matter?

Welcome!

Welcome to the new blog for RTC faculty - also known as RTC-RATs (Reading Apprenticeship Teachers). Please share your questions and comments about using WestEd's Reading Apprenticeship program!! We want to hear from you!