Online Inquiry Reflection

During this course, the most surprising thing I learned about teaching new literacy skills was the amount of care needed when teaching lessons that use new literacy skills. It is not enough to give students a project where they look online and find answers to questions. The process is much more involved, starting with teaching students how to ask the right questions and productively search for the answers to those questions, and moving all the way to teaching students to take what they learned and communicate that information to others through several different mediums.


This is by no means an easy task. Because I am a subject area teacher at the high school level, I cannot take a long period of time to teach a lesson on new literacy skills. Instead, I now realize that I have to create ways to integrate new literacy skills into my lessons starting at the beginning of the year. As the year progresses, my lessons will add additional new literacy skills until my students can do an entire project from beginning to end using new literacy skills to teach themselves a mathematics topic.

The professional development goal that I will take away from this course will be to successfully integrate new literacy skills into my lessons so that by the end of the year my students will be able to showcase their own ability to use new literacy skills, and will be able to learn more independently with these skills. To reach this goal I need to break the new literacy skills that I want to teach my students into these smaller steps:

    1. Asking good questions
    2. Productive searching
    3. Finding information in different mediums (tutorials, videos,
        applets, etc.)
    4. Evaluating resources for correct information
    5. Viewing multiple resources to learn a new topic
    6. Communicating new information to others using multiple
        methods

I need to look at my current span of lessons and determine where I can add each new step until I get to a point where students can successfully complete all six steps. After that I can choose a few more topics on which students can utilize all of their new skills. To make sure this integration will be successful, I need to evaluate the time needed for each part of the integration and determine how much time I have to give to each step by substituting new literacy skills in place of previous methods of teaching.