Monday, January 30, 2017

California State Universities Expository Reading and Writing

The “California State Universities Expository Reading and Writing Course Assignment Template” was a great source of strategies, assessments, and explanations on how to teach reading and writing to students. The first half suggested many different questions to be asking students for them to fully comprehend and engage in their reading and writing. There is little that could be added to further enhance how students could be learning. The second half of the template, the appendix, contained the many different examples of assignments to use in the class.
                 Formative assessment is a major part of a lesson plan, a teacher is always supposed to include one in their lesson every day. Appendix B lists numerous formative assessment options, one I found interesting was the one-sentence summery which is explained as “answer the following questions on a particular topic: Who? What? When? Where? Why? They then condense their response into a single sentence” (38).This strategy is a quick way for students to show they understand a topic, and a quick way for the rest of the class to hear and understand the main concept of a topic. Another strategy I liked was student generated test question, this has the students write questions over material they read and studied that they think would be on a test. It is a good way to see what student find important, and also shows if students or correctly focusing on the main points. While it is nit said in the article, it is also a good way to show that sometimes it’s not easy to think of good test questions to ask.

                In my placement classroom I have noticed that most students do not know how to cite sources. Appendix I is a fantastic section that illustrates the ways to avoid plagiarism, such ways are: quoting sources, paraphrasing sources, summarizing sources, framing and responding to quotations, documenting sources, and MLA format. The more strategies the students know, the easier they can avoid plagiarizing. 

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