Reflection 3: Reading Strategies and Textbooks, Oh My!

Chapter 5 of Daniels and Zemelman was chock full o' reading strategies. I myself really liked the fact that the strategies were grouped by time of deployment; not all struggling or reluctant readers have difficulty during the same part of the reading process. I know I could definitely use some of the 'before reading' strategies with my geometry class -- the students can read the passages competently and tell me what was in them, if they bother to read the passages. But they have no motivation to do so from the outset,and thus don't read; or, when they do, we haven't discussed any prior knowledge to which students can connect this new information. It seems like the students view texts in that course as disconnected and dull. I can pick and choose strategies according to the needs of my students. Chapter 6 talks about the dreaded textbook and how we as educators can compensate for its shortcomings. One of the strategies discussed is that of essentially writing your own textbook for your course. I've had some professors who've done this, with varying degrees of success. I know my mentor teacher is doing a version of this right now, also with mixed results. While it's good to pare down and dig deeper into more essential topics of a subject, you're relying on the judgement of one individual to make the distinction between these topics and those that are superfluous. Also, this instructor may not be a stellar instructional writer, or more likely, a great layout designer. My mentor is using bits and pieces of other texts to build his own Frankentext with which to teach; and while we cover everything we need to, the formatting is often wacky and it's difficult to determine which ideas are the most important. In short, we lack text features!