Response #5

Activating Prior Knowledge and Interest.

“That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life, but in a new way” quote by Doris Lessing (Vacca, 2011, pg. 166).  This is what I refer as “Education as an aid to life”. “Learning is rooted in what we already know”; how do we get the students from what they already know to what they need to know and learn?  How do we as educators keep students motivated and engage in the learning process? How do we guide them to keep that passion for learning as they travel through middle and high school? How do we get them to be the point of self-efficacy?

As student reach the levels of middle and high school their reading skills have to be to that level of where they can address the demand posed by the challenge of academia. At these levels students need to work with text that are dense, contain descriptive and full of new and difficult vocabulary, primarily in the areas of science and social studies. In most cases the students don’t have the ability to translate what they have read, due to the fact that this is not directly taught.  Educators play a large role in that they can either support or impair students in developing positive literacy identities (McCombs & Barton, 1998). We as educators need to be aware as well as sensitive of the social and cultural elements of literacy. We need to be aware that social persuasion and anxiety can hamper self-efficacy.

In this chapter, six we are giving strategies to use in assisting the students who come into our world to stay engage in learning as well as to keep them motivated in purposeful learning. We as educators need to have the ability to create a perspective for students to get into reading. We need to select text that would be of interest to the students as well as to reflect students’ interest. We need to engage the students in making connections that wouldn’t be able to make through just reading the text or listening to class lectures.  We need to make the readings valuable and real to the students. Once we as educators have implemented motivation and purpose we can put strategies into place for the students to read with purpose and anticipation.

The engagement of content literacy activities and the activation of our students’ prior knowledge will be both beneficial to their success in content-area reading and give rise to a meaningful and successful experience.

I look forward to using the PreP Procedure strategy in my work with struggling readers.