Mod 11 Discussion: Teaching Critical Literacy

I would be remiss if I didn't go over the compare/contrast materials for my thoughts on critical literacy. For all the standards that compromise my 7th grade Life science curriculum, comparing and contrasting is the single most important skill that students are expected to utilize to demonstrate mastery of our content. We compare and contrast body systems. We compare and contrast types of cells, types of tissues, the different levels of taxonomy, the different groups in the levels of taxonomy (well, for domain and kingdoms at least). I remember planning with district content specialists and them laying out the EXACT comparisons and contractions students need to make for mitosis and meiosis. It's to demonstrate to the students how to navigate the myriad of sophisticated catagorization systems within the world. We can't know all of them, but we must be equipped to think through them so that we can decode any new system of complicated jargon that we will, almost inevitable, encounter in any path life takes us. The materials themselves give great methods to approach the decoding of these systems through compare/contrast excersizes using both quantitative and qualitative tools which can help focus student analysis. I imagine with these matrices coupled with the think-pair-share/sentence starter combo from the last module, my students could be lead to mastery while still giving them agency over their own learning experience.