What Is It?
Teachers continually make connections between the life experiences of students and texts, texts and films, texts and other texts, previous school experiences, and the topic at hand. The making and sharing of connections is an expectation in written and spoken communication. This expectation fosters an inclusive climate for literacy development and can make an important difference in educating diverse learners such as students with disabilities or special needs, English language learners, and gifted and talented students.
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Suggested Strategies and Resources
For a description of how motivation and engagement play an essential part in the reading process and strategies to increase both for unmotivated readers, see
http://www.readingonline.org/articles/handbook/guthrie/.
For a program that uses drama to engage students and to develop deep comprehension, see The Arts/Literacy Project at
http://www.artslit.org.
For ideas on how to make use of the arts to make connections between students' lives and literary classics, see http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/arts_lit/high-literatureworld.html
For an excellent discussion of the role of school leaders in fostering a school climate that students find motivating, see http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/files/schlmotv.html.
Good teacher resources to support this approach can be found at http://www.ashp.cuny.edu/mc.html.
Technology can help motivate adolescents as they collaborate with students around the world on content-area projects. Becoming involved in collaborative science inquiry projects, communicating with experts in various areas of social studies, publishing online, and developing collaborative Web sites about issues in their community enable students to make connections and strengthen their literacy skills. Visit the Education with New Technologies site, http://learnweb.harvard.edu/ent/gallery/index.cfm, for project ideas .
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Questions to Think About
Before you can implement this Key Component, your stakeholders will need to consider some or all of these questions. The questions could be used in group discussions, needs sensing activities, and informal small-group conversations.
- How does our current school culture explicitly and implicitly promote literacy development as a meaningful and worthwhile activity? How does our current school culture explicitly and implicitly undermine literacy development as a meaningful and worthwhile activity?
- What kinds of literacy identities do our students develop? What can we do to support more students in developing more positive
literacy identities? What kinds of attitude shifts on the part of students, teachers, administrators, and parents would that involve? What kinds of structural changes might that involve?
- How well do classrooms across the content areas meet the criteria for connections, interaction, and responsiveness--and, therefore, set the context for optimal literacy development for diverse learners?
- What are the challenges in creating more classroom experiences that meet the criteria of connections, interaction, and responsiveness? How can these challenges be met?
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