Melissa's Response

Chapter 11 starts by explaining that teachers want their students to make sense of math and to develop their abilities to learn on their own. It is important for students to be able to read a math text and interact with it properly in order to apply their knowledge to solving problems. The chapter goes on to explain the three phases in the reading process which include prereading, during reading, and post reading which will help students improve their abilities to read math texts. The vignette that helps us to see these phases in practice depicts a teacher, Mr. Howard, talking with his students about the lesson they will be learning. I thought it was interesting that Mr. Howard asking students to come up with questions about the section prior to reading it in order for them to have a reason to read. I liked how they were talking about the different steps and he said he wanted someone to explain what they were supposed to do in their own words and not just recite what was written. Looking back at my middle school career I think I relied too much on the knowledge of the teacher and did not try to build my own knowledge. I think this was because my teachers would always give us a topic, give us the procedure to solve the problems on the given topic, and told us to find the solution. I was never given the option to think a different way and to find my own procedure to solve a problem which ultimately hindered my ability to develop my ideas regarding math concepts. To relate this vignette to the social dimension of the Reading Apprenticeship Model, the atmosphere of the classroom was comfortable and students were able to express their opinions about what they did not understand without any worry. I liked how Mr. Howard did not just answer the questions that students had but instead asked the question to the class so that another student could answer it. He also made sure that the students were aware of the vocabulary list and told them that those are the words that they should be able to describe in their own words.
After the vignette the chapter explains practices that we can use in our classroom during each phase of the reading process. The practices for prereading include using textbook signals to generate questions for reading, brainstorming, PreP, K-W-L Prompts, anticipation guides, and prereading graphs and displays. I have heard of most of these prereading practices but it was great to have examples of when they should be used and how they could be applied to our classroom. One prereading strategy that I did not know of is PreP. It is a prereading plan that is designed to stimulate students' interest in the topic and also use their background knowledge of a subject in order to increase their comprehension of the topic. PreP is another way for students to brainstorm what they already know about a topic, generate ideas, and see how concepts relate to one another. If I were the teacher I would put my students in groups, allow them to discuss the topic and then give them some time to write about it. I would want them to write about it because Zinsser has explained that writing improves comprehension of a topic.
Two of the during reading practices that I liked were Question-Answer-Relationship and Sketch the Text. I like the QAR strategy because it helps students enhance their metacoginitive skills which does not typically happen in a math class. In this strategy students answer questions directly from the text, make linkers between related ideas in the text, use their prior knowledge to interpret the text in their own way. Sketch the text is similar to the Visualizing strategy that Alex and I used for our strategy study. Math is an extremely visual subject and "many students have strong visual literacy skills" (p. 145) therefore I think it is important to incorporate sketch the text to help students understand the concepts they are reading about. I think that sketch the text will not only help visual learners but also engage all students in the class. I remember when we performed our strategy student everyone was more excited about reading the text when we told them they would be doing a drawing activity as well. Overall, this chapter was extremely helpful because it gave many examples and descriptions of strategies we can use as teacher to help our students to understand what they are reading.