AVReading Newsletter September-- Vocabulary of Empowerment

 

            For my Ice Breaker this fall, I have designed an activity around the vocabulary of empowerment.  It’s fairly simple.  I grabbed 50 words from the recommended SAT Word List that had connotations of positive outcomes (e.g.  aspirational, buoyant, cerebral, illustrious etc).  Students then look up their given word and have to look up its meaning and discuss with partners how the word might reflect a positive quality they could apply to their new school year.  After sharing out their findings, I then spotlight the word “agency”—the ability to take action, to have control over one’s direction in life.  I turn it into a lesson about how we don’t need to be defined by our environment or our past or the expectations of others, but by our own hopes and dreams.  Beginning high school is one of those transitional moments when students can have the agency or autonomy to re-define themselves.  I appreciate this lesson because it not only adds some new words to their vocabulary, but also new concepts and ideas they might not have been able to put voice to in the past.  Our ability to have words to describe our world, our options, our situations can help us to manifest the future that we are capable of attaining.  My hope for this year is to help students build their agency and autonomy by building their vocabulary and along with it, their understanding of the world and how to survive and thrive within it. 

            Welcome to a new year!  For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Scott Voss, and among other things, I am the school’s reading coordinator.  This means that I am here to help you with reading / literacy instruction in your classes.  There are a number of different resources I provide:

-Publishing a monthly AVReading newsletters

- Providing staff development (where you can get your one hour of literacy instruction)

- Gathering the reading scores of your students and identifying young people who might struggle

- Developing lessons / readings / assessments / activities that improve student reading and engagement.

- Visiting classrooms to model literacy / reading activities

- Modeling activities / lessons in my own classroom for those who would like to see what a given activity looks like in practice.

-Assessing students who are either new to our school or who might be in need of additional reading help

-Preparing 10th graders for MCA Reading test.

Please feel free to let me know how I might be of assistance to you and your classes.

            This year, the focus of our monthly newsletters will be on the psychological elements of literacy.  I’ll examine constructs like engagement, efficacy and motivation.  Additionally, the newsletters will provide three strategies, questions, or action steps that you can put into practice.  Each newsletter will also include a couple of good recommended reads for you and some reading tips for students.

            It probably goes without saying that we are seeing an acceleration in the rate of technological change.  Societal trends that used to happen over the course of decades and years now happen within a matter of months or weeks.  Recent advances in AI have only increased that rate of change.  Tasks, jobs, careers, and even industries are being changed or even erased.  Additionally, it impacts our relationship to language, writing, and reading as well.  Producing and writing text has become like computer coding—a skill that feels a little more archaic when that task could be done faster and better by a machine.  Reading is also changing, as people dump journal articles or even entire books into AI so that they can get the watered down, condensed versions.  And yet these literacy skills still matter, not only in terms of retaining our own autonomy and agency, but in terms of our emotional, mental, cognitive, and even physical health (strong literacy skills correlate to longer life spans).  Convincing our children to pick up a book and read can feel like a losing battle, but it is one that continues to grow in importance and relevance.  More than just improving the reading scores and the life circumstances of our students, fostering readers means we are fostering leaders, thinkers, and scholars.  I wish you the best in your new school year!  Please let me know how I might be of service. 

    Read the entire newsletter here.   

 

 

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