Blog posting for Ch. 1 & 2 - Is learning automatic?

I found this first posting to be intimidating.  Please accept my apologies now for the rambling!  I have been thinking all week about what to post.  Chapter one was more interesting to me than chapter two.  I think child development and the psychology of it is very interesting.  I like to learn about how kids learn.  I'm such a teacher geek!

Anyway, a conversation I had with a colleague this week stuck with me, and I thought it might be appropriate to blog about.  My colleague is beginning her adventure as a full-time first grade teacher after teaching reading exclusively for many years.  She and I were commiserating over how overwhelming our jobs can be, and she mentioned something a veteran teacher friend had said to her.  It was something along the lines of, "well, children this age are going to learn no matter what, so don't worry so much about how you teach . . . "

I walked away and really started thinking . . .  The JHU program has always stressed child development, and how important it is to understand educational psychology in order to teach effectively.  The text in chapter one mentions the current development theories in terms of what effective teachers do.  I really relate to the scaffolding idea on p. 21.  I'm constantly doing that right now with my first graders.  From the text Educational Psychology (Woolfolk, 2010), I read about Vygotsky's sociocultural theory with interest.  Now I'm more aware of my students' proximal zone of development, and try to push them to it in my classroom.  In fact, I've always felt responsible for my students learning and accomplishments.  It can be overwhelming, but I look at it as an incredible opportunity to impact on the lives of my students.  So, I was surprised by the comment from my colleague's friend.

I went searching on the JHU database for some articles on child development and reading.  I could have spent hours reading abstracts and journal articles.  I found a few interesting things on development.  One article talked about Marie Clay and the development of her Reading Recovery Program that is now used in Montgomery County Public Schools to help economically disadvantaged, low-performing students (Clark, 1992).  The article confirmed what I have learned - that children will learn, but that some children use counterproductive ways to learn.  In the case of learning to read, some children acquire ineffective strategies for learning letter sounds and decoding words.  Marie Clay believes in eary intervention with these students to replace their counterproductive strategies with successful ones.  So, ultimately, the teacher is integral in helping students learn to read and write.

 For some teachers, it may be easy to become complacent when teaching children - treating them all the same, using only the teachinig strategies that we, the teachers want to use - I hope I'll always have the desire to use the strategies that work best for my particular students.  They are like "sponges" and I want to make sure they sponge-up the best ways for them to learn to read and write.

Sources

     Clark, Margaret M. "Sensitive observation and the development of literacy." Educational Psychology 12.3/4 (1992): 215. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 10 Sept. 2010.

     Tompkins, Gail E.(2010).  Literacy for the 21st Century A Balanced Approach (5th ed.). Boston, MA:Allyn & Bacon.

     Woolfolk, Anita (2010).  Educational Psychology (11th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ:Pearson Education.