Online Teaching Reflections

Helping my Medical Biochemistry students develop their literacy skills is a huge priority for me. Comprised of primarily 10th graders, the class revolves around interacting with professional, peer reviewed medical journals, many of which are written with an MD or PhD in mind, not a sophomore in high school.

Keeping the above in mind, prior to this phase of online teaching, students were interacting with ~ 2 major journal articles/unit. The COVID-19 Pandemic has made available a tremendous amount of literature for my students. The current online version of the class is closely following the race towards the development of a vaccine, and as one would imagine, deep reading of these articles has become a huge priority. Thus, the literacy skills mentioned above are even more important during this phase.

To address this, I have been linking articles IN a Google Form, and using the "Get Pre-Filled Link" option to force students into a summary template scaffold that I will eventually begin to pull back. I wrote more about this feature here. See screenshot below.

The above format has been working great. Then I stumbled across a site called "Newsela" that provides curated articles that can be formatted for various reading levels and also embed quizzes and writing prompts to promote literacy. I actually learned about this through my 5th grade daughter who's teacher as leveraging Newsela beautifully.

Given the need for added literacy scaffolds, I found a Newsela article on vaccine development, adjusted the class reading level, and included it in the day's check-out sequence alongside this instructional video.

The class-level quiz results were much weaker than expected, and subsequent feedback indicated that the reading-level adjustment had removed some of the productive complexity without making the scientific reasoning clearer. That evidence forced me to reconsider what it means to scaffold disciplinary literacy. A platform can make text easier to access, but it cannot decide which struggle is essential to the learning goal. I may still use Newsela when it fits, but only after separating access support from intellectual demand.