This week I chose to read the article, “Collaborative Preteaching of Students at Risk for Academic Failure”. I wanted to read this article simply because ‘academic failure’ is not something we talked about much this fall. I feel like we discussed students with disabilities and ELL students in depth, but not students who just simply are not doing well academically and need help. This article gave some really great ideas for how to help these students.
The article focused on preteaching, which is teaching some of the material from a unit before a unit is started. The authors suggest teaching key vocabulary and key concepts to students who struggle a week or so before the material is discussed in class. That way, they are preexposed to it. The authors are specifically targeting students with learning disabilities, however I can see this being very helpful for students who simply struggle academically, without any diagnosed disability. The article suggests a method in which the students who really need the extra teaching are sent out of the classroom to work with a specialist on the preteaching. However, I think that a teacher could easily spend 15 minutes in class doing the preteaching. Either the teacher could pull students in small groups during Independent Reading time, or she could do the preteaching to the whole class. I think that every student could benefit from it. The article also suggests having an image to accompany each key word and concept. Perhaps a teacher could keep a ‘key ideas’ area on the board where she displays the images/words after they have been discussed and keeps them up throughout the unit. I wish I had thought of this a month ago when I was teaching rocks and minerals…I have no doubt it would have helped all of my students remember and better understand the key ideas. I will definitely try it in my class next year!
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