I hope you have all been enjoying learning the ropes of being a literacy instructor with me! Today’s blog post is showing how to use videos to help plan a professional development training. I love videos because it’s a great way to actually see the different strategies in action. However, I also like my videos to be short and sweet because my attention tends to wander if the video gets too long. Does that ever happen to you? I know it happens with my students!
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y00Oe-cODw
This video is called Best Practices: High School Reading Strategies by Fairfax Network: Fairfax County Public Schools. This short video shows how a high school Social Studies teacher embeds literacy strategies within her content lessons. I chose this video because I work primarily with secondary teachers, and sometimes there is a little bit of a struggle with teacher buy-in. Content teachers don’t always see how a literacy teacher can help them with their content. However, literacy is everywhere! This video shows how content teachers can improve their teaching by adding in literacy strategies.
The video doesn’t do a great job of going in depth on the different strategies being applied in the classroom. I think this video would be great to introduce different ways content teachers can incorporate reading strategies. After watching the video, we could list the different strategies being incorporated. I would then provide additional information on each strategy and allow time for teachers to discuss how they could use each strategy within their own content. One example would be a lesson on word walls. Teachers could finish up the training by finding a spot in their classroom where they want to start their own word wall. Hopefully, by seeing how simple the word wall in the video was, they’ll be inspired to start their own.
Thanks for watching and learning along with me!
References
Fairfax Network: Fairfax County Public Schools. (2013, December 11). Best practices: high school reading strategies [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y00Oe-cODw
Ms. Carlson for EDU 6380 
I like the video you selected! It gets right to the point. I appreciate the way they embedded the reading strategies into the rest of the class activities and how the teachers build some background thinking about the word, discuss that with the class, come up with definitions with students that are in the students’ own words, and have them discussing and using examples. Those steps do seem to lead to their goal of having the words stick with students from unit to unit or into other classes as they are getting so many exposures to each word. I appreciate that the narration addresses the differences in complexity and styles in different content areas, and the necessity of students knowing how to navigate those differences.
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Ali,
Excellent video allowing the viewers to see the teaching practice in action. I appreciated that this teacher is still teaching reading strategies at the high school level. As noted in the video, readings get harder as students progress toward college and without continued reading support in the upper grades the comprehension gap can grow. I love a good word wall and I am impressed that this teacher is still using it in high school. One other great strategy was the paired reading. This allowed teachers to hear who is struggling, created more focus and simply collaborating with peers adds to engagement and motivation.
Nice find!
Jodi
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This video fits in perfectly with out topics for Lesson 7! Teach buy-in is so important.
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