Goals for TE 401

I have been looking forward to this course because college has made an increasingly passionate advocate for literacy in all settings. I want to help my students grow in their understanding of all types of texts as well as in their ability to articulate this growing understanding. I feel that this course will definitely help me in achieving this vision, as there is much that I need to learn. As we have all stated, this course allows us to gain further field experience and hands-on skills such as lesson planning. I am hoping to gain greater familiarity with some of the course objectives; for instance, I am particularly excited to explore technology with the New Literacies project, as I am very unfamiliar with new technologies that can be used in elementary classrooms. Volunteering in resource rooms has shown me the multiple benefits of using tecnology in special education, as working with students on digital material often produced writing and reading comprehension at a much higher level as opposed to working with the same students on non-digital material.

In terms of 401's reading material, I am very excited to learn more about English Language Learners-for instance, I would like to learn more about ELL's respective learning styles and how a teacher can be most useful in a classroom that is mixed with ELL children as well as non ELL children. I would also like to learn more about the benefits of different reading perspectives, as I am biased to the social action perspective. I want to be as unbiased as possible and attempt to equally utilize the reader response perspective, criticial perspective, and interactive perspective in my lessons on literacy. Lastly, I would love to learn more about different reading strategies; the literary diagnostic that we took reinforced how important this knowledge will be for me, as I truly want to provide invidualized learning for each student on a daily basis in order to facilitate each student's maxium success.