I never took a course in Pedagogy

Pedagogy  is the study of being a teacher or the process of teaching. 

I suppose that one of the 'benefits' of teaching at a Catholic high school is that I don't necessarily have to be certified like the teachers working in public schools.  During my trip to Barnes and Noble yesterday, I had a chance to take a peek into what it might mean to have gone to college for a degree in secondary education.  The reason I love going to that particular branch of B&N is that one gets to browse through textbooks.  I have not forgotten how expensive textbooks are, but yesterday's trip reminded me about the reality of buying books for school work.

In an expensive ($170) textbook about teaching routines, I encountered the terms that I've been reading about in the first (trade) book that I bought yesterday: Teaching Reading in Science.  In the college textbook, the discussion about these routines is much more involved than in the book I decided to buy, and I imagine that the coursework allows the prospective teacher a chance to fully examine and evaluate the routines being described, the routines that they are asked to learn while they are in 'teacher school.'

Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas

One of the most enlightening reports that I read recently was Literacy Instruction in the Content Areas: Getting to the Core of Middle and High School Improvement.  This report was published by the Alliance for Excellent Education in response to the crisis of adolescent literacy.  Their recommendation, which I believe is the direction that SBP should take, is to include literacy instruction in the content areas.  Simply speaking, teachers in content areas (whether it be History, Science, Math, English, and so on) should also be teachers of reading (and writing).  [Read my other blog about my anxiety about this.] 

The report makes reference to scientific evidence pointing to the effectiveness of certain teaching strategies.  As a scientist, this is the sort of data that I would be interested in reading before trying a strategy in the classroom.  But, who am I kidding?  I don't have a degree in teaching.  I never took classes in pedagogy.  Whenever I read about a teaching strategy, it's all new to me, albeit I may have tried some of these strategies (or a variant thereof) in class without specifically knowing (1) the evidence behind the strategy's effectiveness; (2) the actual steps of such a strategy; (3) the background knowledge about why such a strategy works; and (4) the name of such strategies.


Well, I may have heard some of these 'names' before: K-W-L, Reciprocal Teaching, RAFT Writing, Jigsaw.  We once had a brief in-service about some of these strategies as SBP prepared to move to block scheduling.  I didn't get an in-depth training about these strategies, much less understand the evidence behind their proven effectiveness.  So, I'm doing my own 'professional development.'  I'm doing this by reading, and during my next few blog entries, I'll explain some of the strategies I've learned from the books I've been reading.  And I will be sending the receipts to the Middle States Planning Team.


I haven't had this much fun from reading since med school.  I'm so thankful for the time to be able to do it.

My Summer Reading List, part 2

Don’t think that I stopped there.  Given my new Kindle (Thanks, mom!), I have become voracious again with my reading.  (Is there a adjective for reading that is stronger than ‘voracious’? I would use it).  It’s like I am on a reading binge.

Please don’t take this as a boast.  But here’s what I’ve consumed so far, and yes, I read each one of these reports, and this one book (which I had to buy as a paper copy at Barnes and Noble.  What’s the budget for Middle States goals?)

How many books for your summer reading?

And how can you avoid paying for them?  Since my mom gave me a Kindle as a birthday gift, I haven’t had to pay for books (well, I did buy a physical book last week).  There’s a good set of free books that deal with education on the Amazon site, and the ones I have loaded onto my Kindle have been very good reading.

The mother lode that I discovered recently is a set of reports commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation, which has a funded program for Urban and Higher Education.  The reports are available free (as pdf versions) and are located here.  Click to see the Carnegie Corporation publications.

It all started when I chanced upon a report called Reading Next, which was published by the Alliance for Excellent Education, which I suppose receives funding from the Carnegie Corporation.  The Reading Next report is one of the resources I listed in my previous post for the members of the Critical Reading committee.

It turns out that the Alliance for Excellent Education also published another report called Writing Next, and this is also listed in the resources I posted previously.  This document is a terrific read, and offers scholarly evidence for strategies that improve writing skills in secondary schools; it is also reported that writing improves reading skills (and this is welcome news for us involved with the Middle States performance objectives!)

Digging deeper into the trove of publications by Carnegie Corporation, I discovered a report that I wish (I wish!) we could have found earlier. 

Resources for our "Summer Reading"

During this time off from classroom teaching, we hope not to intrude too greatly into your chance to recharge and recover from a very busy school year. Perhaps when you have some time to read, please look over these resources that might assist us in learning more about what others have done to improve their students' reading skills.

Building Reading Proficiency

The first resource is located here:

Building Reading Proficiency

This is a pdf file, and if you right-click the link above, you can save the file onto your computer, so you can read it at your convenience. Here's my description, from an email sent in April when we first thought about looking at this document to help us with critical reading at SBP:

The original paper was published in 2000 by Southeast Developmental Laboratory, and here is a short description of their ‘mission’ as quoted from their website: “SEDL partners with educators, administrators, parents, and policymakers to conduct research and development projects that result in strategies and resources to improve teaching and learning.”

This paper describes reading PROGRAMS and reading STRATEGIES. I actually became more interested in the STRATEGIES that were described starting on page 74 of this pdf document. (The document is in the attachment on this email).
1. Background Knowledge Strategies
2. Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR)
3. Dictated Stories/ Language Experience Approach (LEA)
4. Fluency Strategies
5. Generative Vocabulary Strategies
6. Independent Reading Strategies
7. K-W-L-Plus Strategy
8. Literature-Based Reading Instruction