Week of April 11

Tompkins chapter 10 focuses on approaches to teaching reading and writing. The chapter discusses that there is no one best way to teach reading and writing. Instead teachers create a balanced literacy program that best fits their students using two or more approaches. My CT uses reading and writing workshop in her kindergarten classroom. The students seem to respond well to it and she chooses a few students each say to work one on one with and discuss what they are writing about that day. My CT will also do small group literacy activities that will engage the students in reading and writing tasks. I think that writing workshop can be a great way to get students used to writing each day and reading workshop is also very important especially for students beginning to read, because it gets them used to and comfortable with books and texts.

The Ladson-Billings article was very interesting one thing that I want to point out from that article was the mention that the authors experience with white teachers both pre-service and veterans indicates that many are uncomfortable acknowledging any student differences and particularly racial differences. That some teachers “don’t see color, they just see children.” I guess I can see two different sides to that argument one being that if students don’t see student differences than how can students be culturally different and express themselves in a way that is different from the other students. And in a different argument it could be a positive thing that the teachers don’t focus on students skin color and they only see their students for who they are on the inside. I wonder if there is a happy medium between these two extremely different ways of viewing our students?