Inquiry Units and Struggling Readers (D&Z Ch. 10-11)

            Chapter 10 gets into detail about Inquiry Units, and I really like the concept of them.  As I was reading the chapter, I was pondering different ways to implement Inquiry Units in my future ELA classroom.  Lets just say that a plethora of ideas came to mind but nothing that is fully developed.  In my opinion, the best thing about Inquiry Units is that the students get to fully immerse themselves in a topic that interests them.  As future educators, we have undergone enough educational psychology to know that one learns best by being intrinsically motivated to do so, and inquiry units lends itself nicely to this theory. 

            However, a teacher’s worst enemy is always time because there is just so much to get through and so many standards to meet that it makes incorporating inquiry units rather daunting.  In regards to the common core standards, Daniels and Zemelman, at the very beginning of the chapter, use an example of a teacher who does not begin a lesson plan by first choosing a standard.  Instead, this teacher designs a lesson plan, teaches the concepts, and then decides which Common Core State Standards were met (Daniels and Zemelman, 2014, p. 259).  Daniels and Zemelman (2014) call this concept “backmapping” (259).  I found this concept rather interesting because it kind of negates the premise of UbD where a teacher starts off with a standards and then works backwards in the lesson planning.  UbD urges for teachers to know where they are going, and I think that having this map is essential.  I like the idea of Inquiry Units, but this concept of “backmapping” seems to be a bit irresponsible. I do think that there absolutely needs to be a destination in view, if not then the lesson plan will result in chaos.  There needs to be some sort of idea of what the students should be learning. To invest a significant amount of class time on inquiry units, you need to make sure that you are meeting the standards you need to be meeting because the department of education is to really going to care whether or not the students investigated something that interested them; they will be looking for improved test scores and all that other good stuff.

            I really enjoyed Chapter 11 because it was very insightful, and I think that every teacher, no matter the content area, needs to bookmark this chapter. D&Z state in this chapter that every teacher is a teacher of reading, and I must admit that it takes some stress off of us ELA teachers. D&Z use the example, “I’m a physics teacher, not a reading teacher” (278). Daniels and Zemelman may sympathize with teachers who say things like this, but here is what I have to say to this physics teacher—do you not assign textbook reading? Yes? That is what I thought. How can you be a teacher in a content area that assigns textbook reading, and not feel as if you are not a teacher of reading? It is every teacher’s job to ensure that students comprehend any type of reading that they come into contact within a course. 

         

  A teacher can be so wrapped up in pushing the material that they may forget that not everybody reads and comprehends at the same level.  D&Z states that we, as educators, must build trust with students, especially those who feel like that they may not be strong readers.  This, to me, seems like common sense because not having a student’s trust is detrimental to their learning and to your teaching. A line that stuck out to me while reading was, “…people who have repeatedly failed at something usually cope by focusing their lives elsewhere to avoid still more failure” (Daniels and Zemelman, 2014, 280).  This statement coincides with building trust with our students.  I know that I don’t want my future students to give up on reading, so my job is to teach them how to improve, or find the enjoyment that can come from reading.  This chapter does an excellent job of providing examples of strategies to implement, but for me, the most effective strategy would be to model good reading habits. I think it is important to provide the necessary tools before expecting students to master something. I also think that is important to show them that sometimes I still have reread something, or that I still stumble upon words that I do not know. It’s teaching how to handle these bumps in the reading that matters the most.