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I found this podcast to be very beneficial because reading is one of the most important things taught in school.  Reading is so valuable to me and I am anxious to learn ways to help students become successful readers. I consider reading to be a privilege and I can’t wait to use the techniques taught in this podcast to help my future students.

One of the speakers talked a lot about the importance of self-correction and I think this is one of the most important things that I have learned about teaching reading. We have to provide students with strategies that allow them to solve problems on their own. If students get stuck on a word and we always just provide them with the words, this isn’t beneficial. Teaching them strategies to figure out words and problems on their own is the key to successful reading. It is our job to help them build a reading process system and teach them how to monitor their own reading and understanding. Learning how to read isn’t about memorizing certain words and how to pronounce them, this is setting your students up for failure.

In the podcast they also focused on the importance of knowing your students. How can you possibly help them if you don’t know what they need? Teachers have to pay attention and monitor their students so they are aware of their strengths and weaknesses. It’s important to assess their work, progress and help them come up with short and long term goals. We need to know our students passions and interests to get them excited about learning. I know a special education teacher and she was having a lot of difficultly with one of her students. She knew that he loved a specific character on a show so she printed out a picture of that character and told her student that if he cooperated then he could keep the picture. She said he hadn’t seen him behave that well the whole year. This just shows the power behind knowing what your students are interested in, especially when it comes to books.

 We have to understand reading is a hard process. I always try to go back to the day where we read an article that was way over our heads, we never want our students to feel like that. Reading comes easily to me now and I would like to think of myself as a fast reader, however, I can’t assume that just because reading comes easy to me it is easy for everyone. Reading isn’t simply about knowing how to pronounce all the words on a page, it’s about meaning and comprehension. It’s a long and hard process and it is our responsibility to teach students no matter what level they are on when they enter our classroom.