Text Complexity

What is text complexity? Why does it matter?

Great questions. I had the same ones as I sat in a professional development training session a week ago. Here's the gist of it. Text complexity refers to the difficulty of a piece of writing. There are varying levels of text complexity. For example, a children's book would have a low level of text complexity. The Federalist papers written by our founding fathers would have a high level of text complexity. The goal is keep students moving up this ladder. Too many times we offer them only reading materials that are at their current level. Sometimes, that's okay. But it's important to also give them reading materials that are just out of their current text complexity level in order to help them grow and achieve new levels of reading comprehension. The goal is not only college preparation, but workplace preparation. Someone who goes to college and takes a sociology course will need to be able to read at a high level just as much as someone turning wrenches and reading a technical manual. For heaven's sake, trying to program your DVD player using the manual can sometimes feel like an honors level course. We need to create readers who don't need everything brought down to their level. Instead, the goal is to create readers who have the ability to climb to whatever level is put in front of them using decoding skills, context clues, and reference skills for the words or phrases they can't figure out on their own. Raising text complexity for students, one of the goals of educators here at Newell-Fonda.

So far, So good

We are a few weeks into the school year and my blogging experiment with U.S. History is going pretty good. I really enjoy reading the students' blogs and seeing the personal touch they put into their designs. My favorite part is when they comment on each other's blogs and ask each other questions about their posts. I'm trying to get them to read their comments and respond when someone asks them a question. I want them participating in online dialogues about their own thoughts on history. As I type this, the students are working on a blog post about one culture significantly altering another. They are currently studying the interactions of American settlers and Native Americans in the mid to late 1800's.

Lower the Voting Age?

A colleague of mine recently e-mailed me a link to an interesting website where David Holford made an excellent argument for lowering the voting age. It got me thinking, "Should the voting age requirement be lowered?"

At first I thought it was a nice thought, but after reflecting on my own high school experience and political apathy, I figured it wasn't a battle worth fighting. But then it dawned on me. I didn't care about government or politics in high school because I COULDN'T VOTE ANYWAY!

I would have cared about politics and what was happening in Washington if my voice could have been thrown into the mix. Here at Newell-Fonda, U.S. Government is a class for mostly seniors and some juniors. How much more would they be involved in government and politics if they were learning about it at the same time they were being given the right to vote? Holford makes the case that we could be developing highly active citizens by pairing their education about government with their passage into voting eligibility.

In my own experience, I took government class in high school and then went off to college where I voted for the first time in a presidential election 3 years after I took the class in high school. My parents did not push me to become politically active beyond asking me, "Are you going to vote in the election?" As Holford explains, young people get out in the world and they are trying to figure out so many things about being an adult and voting just isn't high on the priority list. If it was a privilege they took on while still "in the nest" with mom and dad, they could get some guidance on the procedure and have a trusting environment to talk about politics in. It makes as much sense to me as a kid learning to drive while still under mom and dad's roof.

I encourage you read the website I linked to above and see what you think about lowering the voting age.

Blog it Up!

This year in United States history class, the students are going to be blogging throughout the year. I've always wanted to try having the students blog their thoughts. I'm a really big fan of having my students write about history. Blogs give them an opportunity to be creative in their design and learn a cool modern skill. Many people have blogs nowadays. In fact, many people are making money off of writing a very interesting and well designed blog. Of course, my students will not be putting advertising on their blogs to make money, but some of them might find blogging to be fun and may start a blog on a personal interest of theirs. This will be a fun year trying out the blogging format for class and I'm sure I'll find some hiccups along the way, but it will be worth it.

Renewal

This summer I started working on my Master's Degree from Morningside College. One of my first classes has been Instructional Technology. I have learned a lot in this class and one of my main projects has been improving my class websites and making them more integral to my classes, as well as user friendly for my students.

I use Google Sites to host my class websites and I have been doing quite a bit of research on their tutorial and help pages to try and improve my knowledge of their systems. I do learn a lot just by playing around and trying new things in the site management area. I have also been reading various blog posts about best practices for site design.

I am really excited to start the new school year and use all these changes I've made to my sites to give my students a better experience in class.