Week 4: Shocker! We Should Be Preparing Our Students

So disciplinary literacy should be incorporated earlier than previously thought?!

Wild!

In all seriousness, it makes sense. Why should we be waiting until they absolutely need to use the skills to teach them to our students? If there is anything that I know about children, it is that they are full of surprises. Why should we be dictating what our students are capable of? The least we owe them is to offer the opportunity for them to engage in activities and lessons that encompass more than just the absolute basics. What are we saying to our students when all we ask of them is the bare minimum? At least personally, it suggests that we don't believe our students capable of engaging with challenging tasks.

The idea of disciplinary literacy is to incorporate skills and thinking strategies that are specific to the subject area into the classroom as early as possible. The teacher should aim to teach the students not only the content within the subject area, but also how to think and act like a professional in the content area.

For students to be introduced simply to the material of a subject is to put them in a position of looking at information without knowing how to interpret it. This leads to rote memorization or the need to look to the teacher for a lot of support. If instead the students are taught the skills which are helpful in providing meaningful context to the content, they will be better equipped to make independent and meaningful learning out of their studies.

Given these potential benefits, why are we asking our students to go through the majority of the schooling not knowing those skills are available to them? Why would we wait until the student is having to make a decision about what they want to do with the rest of their lives to pull back the curtain to reveal skills and ways of thinking which might have, if they had known about them earlier, have influenced them to make a different choice about their future profession.

Of course, professionals have more robust skill sets than any that could be taught during the first 12 grades of schooling, but there can hardly be anyone who believes that teaching students even just some of those strategies is a bad thing, especially when those strategies could be used to the child's benefit even throughout middle and high school regardless of whether they ultimately choose to go into that profession or not.

It has been found through studies conducted that young children are better able to learn a new language than older people; that it only gets harder to learn as one gets older. Children are able to learn so much very quickly - they are in fact sponges in that respect. Keeping that in mind, it seems very much possible that it is only for the best to introduce these skills and strategies in the classroom and for everyone's benefit, to do it sooner rather than later.