Final Post

There were a few trends that I noticed while re-reading our blog posts. One of them is that we all mentioned the importance of allowing our students to speak in the classroom. There was a lot of emphasis on having the students explain their ideas, connections, reasoning and thinking. I think that this trend connections to other trends that weren’t necessarily spoken, but more so alluded to. These are what Dominic called “the cultural significance that needs to be taking into consideration with not only the literacy in the classroom, but the way in which literacy is addressed according to the individual students,” or the importance of getting to know our students, and also the importance of teaching our students how to think, think actively and think critically. I thought it was interesting that throughout our blogs, none of us ever really discussed specific content. There was a discussion about bringing “controversial issues” into the classroom, but this would be done to push the students’ thinking further and to understand our students better. While the 3 of us don’t always agree, we do seem to have very similar pedagogies, and our ideas complement each other’s very well.

I have learned a lot from my blog group members. While we didn’t disagree, they helped to open my eyes and make me think deeper into my own reflections and beliefs. For example, I really liked the post the Dom wrote about supporting the literacy development of children who live in homeless shelters. Unfortunately, I never even thought about how those children are in need of learning just as students in school are. He really helped me understand the importance of literacy teaching on a broader, more global scale, not just within the school that I will be working. I liked what Kelly said about not just asking the students to identify the beginning, middle and endings of stories. While that is important for students to be able to do, teachers need to widen the spectrum and step outside the text to have the students make the connections and think about different topics and issues.

Overall, I think the Noteblog Assignment was beneficial because it gave us a forum to expand and reflect on our thoughts and ideas as professionals. Together we shared many of our insights and brought up new ideas to consider. Just as I want to push our students’ thinking forward, this assignment helped pushed my thinking forward. For that reason, I believe a 10 out of 10 for a grade on this assignment would be fair for the second half of the semester.