Synthesis Blog #3

I really enjoyed reading this chapter of the book and thought that the strategies were both useful and potentially fun for the students! Having to read the textbook for any of my classes is always a struggle because textbooks are never fun to read and it’s really hard to engage with the content and make connections with it. I remember in high school, I was taking AP World History and there were so much assigned textbooks readings for that class I gave up reading the textbooks and started watching crash course world history videos on YouTube. 

As an aspiring science teacher, I know that not all concepts are fun and interesting to read about so these strategies will be good use in the future. One strategy I really liked was Jigsawing, and I thought this will be very useful for science textbook readings. In 8^th grade physical science, the states of matter are a really big topic to cover so with Jigsawing, I can break students into groups and let them learn a section on their own and come back as a class to discuss. So, for states of matter, one group can read about solids and they can read and learn about their properties, another group for liquids, another for gases, and lastly one for plasma. Then the students talk with their “expert group” (so all of the students assigned to one state of matter) and figure out what the big concepts were and what they want to share with their classmates. Then each student from each group forms new groups with students from other groups and discuss what they learned about their respective state of matter. I really liked this strategy because it gives students the opportunity to learn in a low-risk setting with their classmates and giving them the ability to teach one another will push them to understand the concepts more themselves. (316)