Safe Classrooms

Last week, I heard the student sitting next to me say under his breath, “That’s not right!” He was talking about a reference to homosexuality that one of his classmates made, during class discussion. Even before the boy’s indignant mutter, I was struck by the inappropriateness of the comment, so I interrupted the snickers and hoots. I explained that, while I understood the macho attitude, our class was not a place where we made fun of other people and the things that made people different. I referred to their health class and some of the things they’re covering in that curriculum. I used words and phrases such as sexuality, and human development to focus their attention. They were dumbfounded. I felt as if they had never been told by any adult that making fun of people’s sexuality was inappropriate.

Culturally Relevant Teaching

If a deliberate effort to reduce the disparities between diverse races, religions, genders and gender groups, socio-economic groups, and ethnicities is not continuously pursued, the knowledge which we have, and will attain, will not enable us to achieve humanity. We will not build a great civilization. We will not be free.

SQ3R and Text Mapping

The teacher who turned me on to text mapping suggested that I use text mapping in conjunction with the SQ3R method. I took her advice and recieved positive responses from many students. Students with SQ3R experience had "ahaa" moments. That was very cool for me. They definitely made the conections I was hoping for. One student response truly helped me understand where she is at with her reading. I will continue to implement SQ3R and text mapping together.

Text Mapping

The purpose of text mapping is to help students identify important facts within the text. Before using any text book, teachers must teach students appropriate use of the text book including the use of the table of contents, glossary, maps, and any other reference material within the text. This knowledge will help students prepare to read the text, and know where to find valuable reference material such as vocabualry definitions, geographic maps, portraits, and pictures of artifacts.

While enabling students with the ability to identify important infrormation, text mapping also helps students learn to identify information that is relevant to the unit of study or lesson of the day. Additionally, students learn to identify text structure and organization. Students also develop active reading skills.

Text maps are graphic organizers. The maps are copies of the text book units, which are stapled or taped together from the first page of the unit through the last page of the unit. The unit has essentially become a scroll. This scroll is unrolled and hung on a classroom wall. Students are encouraged to move around the scroll and mark or highlight it's text. This active "scrolling" helps students develop "active" reading skills.

Books are portable but can only be viewed as a two page graphic spread. Scrolls offer students the ability to view the full text in singular. This is very important because scrolls enable the reader to make connections within the text without the distraction of turning pages (back and forth). Scrolls are a single visual entity which may be viewed at one time. In other words, the logic and structure of the information within the text is apparent to the reader on the same page in the same instance.

Along with other benefits, these scrolls (text maps) help students; improve comprehension, extract important information from the text, and learn or refine very important note taking skills.