Afrodita Fuentes SED 600 05/09/07 Conference - Review #4 (Instructions from syllabus: Examination of information in reference to my own research and how will my research is influenced by this information in this conference?) I attended the Secondary Literacy Summit VII on March 26th and 27th. I listened to various presentations and all had the same purpose, that being increasing literacy in the grades K-12. All the presenters suggested a number of different strategies. At the end of the two days, I was overwhelmed with so many strategies. I came to the realization that no matter how many of them I use, if not used correctly reading and learning will not occur or will be frustrating for my students. The presenter who impressed me the most was Dr. Janet Allen because she was engaging and she had a wealth of knowledge about reading and children literature. She was a high school English teacher for 20 years, taught English at the University of Central Florida for 9 years, andfor the past six years she has been researching, writing, speaking, and conducting seminars and content literacy institutes across the country. She has written a number of books, including Tools for Teaching Content Literacy, Yellow Brick Roads: Guided Path to Independent Reading, and It’s Never Too Late: Leading Adolescents to Lifelong Literacy. Dr. Allen’s website is www.janetallen.org, but it is mostly useful to contract her for professional development and order her books. Her website has a handoutslink with a few useful ready to use literacy activities. Dr. Allen has also written a number of journal articles, one of them is Eliminating a “Yes, But”Curriculum in the journal of Principal Leadership. This particular article identifies several impediments to achieving reading literacy for many city high school students in California, including lack of interest and motivation, inappropriate resources and absence of support, and insufficient reading experiences and background knowledge. These are exactly the barriers I faced and many of my students face emigrating from Latin American countries and attending an inner-city high school. I did not own a book until I was in college! That still angers me because I could be a so much better teacher, if I only had developed the habit of reading when I was a child. Dr. Allen recommends ways to remove those barriers through the useof strategic reading and supporting and celebrating success. Dr. Allen was the keynote speaker the first day of the conference I attended. Her speech was magnificent, inspiring, and enriched with a number of excerpts from many books of different subject areas. She mentioned a number of authors she calls “giants” because they have “challenged our thinking, informed our practice and changed our student’s literate lives.” She called these writers “giants.” She spoke so fast that I missed so many names, but what she had to say about them was very engaging. The main idea I took from her speech was that a teacher needs to have a rich collection of readings, reading strategies, and motivation to read strategies for students to learn how to read and enjoy reading. She emphasized that students need to have a reason to want to read and an ultimate condition to read, a student-centered environment where teachingand learning is joyful and productive. I was thrilled when she mentioned student-centered environment because this is what I am trying to create for my students. A student-centered environment is one of the key topics in How Students Learn and it is one of the major approaches I will be studyingin my action research. I also found it interesting when she said “to increasereading we need to make our students read. If they do not want to read, then we need to read to them and eventually the will follow along.” In high school, I am not sure they “will follow along.” Students have so many distractions and no matter how engaging some activities are, not all of themwill participate altogether. Two ready to use ideas I got from Dr. Allen’s speech were the admit slips and exit slips. In the admit slips, a teacher can use pictures, lyrics, words, etc., anything that will engage the student to think and write in response to a question/s about the prompt. This is completed as the students enter the classroom. The exit slip contains a few questions that students respond as a reflection to the day’s learning, difficulties, and wonderings. Students turned this in as they leave the classroom. I guess I like this because of the catchy titles, but I see not much difference between the daily warm-ups and journal entries that take place in my classroom. I guess it can be better with the creativity and academic thoughtfulness invested in these activities. Tools for Teaching Content Literacy was the title of a workshop also presented by Dr. Allen at the Literacy Summit. She started the workshop byreading, making honor to her passion for reading. She explained that“reading is decoding and encoding meaning.” Decoding is breaking down to make sense of word problems, music, and paragraphs. Encoding is putting information back together to show understanding and learning through writing, talking, drawing, and explaining. Here, Dr. Allen pointed out that our teaching practice must help learners become confident, competent, and joyful readers in all content areas. She used with us a number of strategies for reading, most were scaffolding strategies to help struggling readers. I liked how she tried to include all subject areas such asmath, social studies, and science. She provided some examples of admit and exit slips which are also found in her website, and which I will be using in my classroom. Some activities are also useful to get students acquainted with and comfortable with using science textbooks. One of the strategies I liked in this workshop is the “5 finger rule to reading a textbook” is (1) readthe title, (2) look at every picture, (3) write all italic/bold/highlighted words and think about what they have to do with the title, (4) write down heading and subheadings, and (5) read two paragraphs, the introduction and summary. She asked us to trace our hand and write each thing on each finger. That was fun and memorable! I use a couple of these steps, but I like the “5 finger rule” name. Now, I have modified these 5 steps to accommodate my textbook and students and shared it