Rationale:

Reflecting on your reading is a sound way to help you both remember what you’ve read and to help you construct meaning from it.  Posting the responses will give me and others a chance to see what the general feelings are about an assignment before we come to class and will therefore promote lively class discussion on it. 

Procedure: 

Whenever you read something for class (or for your personal enjoyment, too), take about 10-15 minutes and write about what you’ve read (notice it’s a time limit and not a word limit).  Please don’t be concerned with grammatical correctness or formality.  I want this to be a relaxed type of response, one you might write in a teaching journal.  I’m most concerned that you just get your thoughts down first and foremost, and then that you get them posted so that we all have the opportunity take a look at them before class.  Here are some suggestions for what to write about although feel free to take off on other thoughts, too.

1)  How do your own past experiences in classrooms confirm or challenge the theories and practices suggested in the reading?

2)  Connect the reading to other articles, books, and authors.  How do the ideas in the text(s) contribute to the scholarship or cross-talk in the discipline?  How does this text inform others' writing, or spring from it?

3)  How do you envision these theories and practices working in your classroom?  Play "the believing game"; that is, discuss how your mindset might need to change in order for you to believe that these theories would work.  Could you do it?  What specific practices can you generate from the theories in the reading?

You will post for every reading assignment (or call my office and leave me a message if you prefer to talk it out), and you should also respond several times during the semester to other class members.  I'll leave those times up to you, but I do expect you to be responsible for varying the times and the people you respond to.  You will be saving and printing these responses as evidence of your engagement with class material, so save them in more than one space.

Questions?  Please raise them in class so that everyone may benefit from the clarification.