I have always had a passion for teaching literacy, but I had never quite explored the world outside of my primary level comfort zone. I spend my days teaching readers' and writers' workshop and conferencing with my students in order to build their love for reading. This class completely opened my eyes to the world beyond my classroom walls and into the world of secondary literacy. Through Randy Bomer's book, Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's English Classrooms, reading and exploring young adult novels like Wonder and Speak, and getting to research and learn about effective reading and writing strategies, I have an entirely new perspective about teaching literacy at the secondary level.
Through our textbook, articles, and our class discussions, a major theme has been to allow students the freedom to find their own reading and writing life. I believe this class has helped me find my reading life again. It is our job as educators to help our students build this life, as it doesn't always happen naturally for them. This is actually something that helped me greatly this semester. Once I started to carve out more time for daily reading, I started to get my reading groove back. I learned that if I don't make a conscious effort to do so, reading for pleasure just simply won't happen. I also discovered that audiobooks are a great way to enjoy reading. If I want to foster an environment of reading for my students, the good habits have to start with me.
When we were given the choice to pick a book, I was so glad to be a part of the Wonder book club. It had been a long time since I had found a book that I wanted to finish in a day. It was even better to get to discuss and share with my colleagues. If this is the kind of reading experience we want for our secondary students, I love that we got to experience book clubs ourselves. Exploring the multigenre research paper also allowed for endless creativity and an experience to delve deeper into the text. Both of these experiences I look forward to bringing back to my students.
I have just begun my graduate degree work and I am so thankful that this was my first course. I leave feeling excited to work with older students and continue the work I am most passionate about which is molding lifelong readers and writers.
