As the world is forever changing especially in technology, classroom instruction should also be changing. I'm not saying that we should totally get rid of textbooks, but we should give students a variety of ways to encounter text. Textbooks are important because they give some of the best concrete knowledge that students need to encounter throughout their school year. This chapter gives a lot of different interesting ways in which teachers can make reading meaningful to students through a various amount of text such as digital texts-photographs, media, movies, and the all-time favorite the Internet. Due to the large amounts of Internet that is available to students outside of school, teachers need to have a lot of opportunities for students to come into contact with all sorts of digital texts. Also teachers can use search engines such as google and yahoo to find out information on different kinds of texts.
Before choosing what the students will read, the teacher first need to ask themselves "what is it that I want my students to learn?" When this is established, they need to find text that will not be to hard nor to easy for their students. A way in which to ease the complexity of the text is by motivating the students and having them to build on their prior knowledge. When students can build things on prior knowledge, it makes learning easier and also meaningful. When students are not able to build on their prior knowledge it is up to the teacher to help them, especially special needs students and also English language learners.
From my experience with monitoring the students at South Forrest, I have found when teachers hand out numerous amounts of worksheets that students are not interested in and contain to much information, they tend not to work as hard or work at all. I feel that we should try to get away from worksheets and find other ways to create learning. As the book states in the summary, "Teachers can play a substantial role in guiding students in their work with texts by carefully assessing and selecting texts that reflect important Big Ideas and skills." If all educators did this in Mississippi, then all the schools could possibly become level 5's.
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From my experience, I have also observed that almost all students simply despise worksheets. When I gave my student his Reading Attitude survey, he circled the frowning face after the question: How do you feel about worksheets/workbooks in class? and he circled the smiley face under the question: How do you feel when you are able to choose the book you read? I feel like most students feel like this- they know that worksheets are usually just busy work given to pass the time. As teachers, we need to create more engaging, authentic, and exciting forms of assessment and avoid standard, textbook provided worksheets as much as possible!
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