INTASC Standards Reflection

(Reading)

The first principle in the INTASC standards states that beginning teachers should understand the central concepts, tools of inquiry, and structures of the discipline he or she teaches and can create learning experiences that make them meaningful to students. This standard applies to teachers in every subject. In a reading class, the teacher should understand the basic concepts of reading. For example, he or she should know the major components of the reading process. These are basic skills that a reading educator must know in order to teach reading.

Also, the reading educator must be able to apply what he or she teaches in a way that the students will understand. An effective way of doing this would simply be connecting what you teach to real life situations. By doing this, the students will have a better understanding of what is being taught to them.

            The eighth INTASC principle states that beginning teachers should understand and use formal and informal assessment strategies to evaluate and ensure the continuous intellectual, social, and physical development of the learner. My entire Diagnostic and Prescriptive Reading class was centered on this principle. In this class, I learned how to diagnose reading problems as well as how to prescribe “medicines” for those problems. For example, after researching studying an informal reading inventory (IRI), I diagnosed five students that may have had possible reading problems and administered the IRI to them.

To my surprise, I only had to prescribe “medicine” to one of those students. What I mean by this is that because this student had so many difficulties, I had to prescribe a lower level passage for this student to read that was easier for her. Also, I determined that students that need assistance with understanding context clues and comprehension could benefit from a cloze test. In our class we worked with a number of formal and informal assessments. As a student teacher, I was very knowledgeable about several types of assessments and was able to incorporate some of them into my lessons.