Week 2 Review

Early in our discussion of the reading we found that the two chapters our group selected focused on different ideas of language literacy. My book, “"The New Science Literacy”, looked to define the two types of language that students use within the school, exploratory and presentational. The chapter also included several lists that were meant to help guide teachers in using these two types of speech in the classroom. Leslie, Melissa, and Catharine’s book, “Mathematical Literacy and Adolescents and Digital Literacies” did not focus so heavily on defining these differences. Instead their chapter provided several useful strategies that could be implemented in the classroom. One such strategy was called “the silent teacher,” where the teacher removes herself from the conversation and lets the students discuss the issue on their own We all agreed that both chapters seemed to focus more heavily on exploratory speech and that the book club is a prime example of exploratory speech in action.

Our group was able to make several connections to material that we have covered in. One of the main connections we made was to our discussions of metacognition. One of the key characteristics of exploratory speech is that students use it to question each other’s ideas as well as use their conversations to evaluate their own understandings. This is a good example of metacognition because students are thinking about their own thought processes. If we can get our students to do this on a regular basis then they will able to have more meaningful learning experiences. We were also able to make connections to the reading apprenticeship model. We found that this reading connected to the social (safe learning environment), cognitive (thinking about explaining the information to others), and knowledge building (being exposed to different ideas from other students) facets of the model. If used together, it could be possible to improve reading skills by having students connect their discussions to their readings