Reading, writing, and research: Integrating literacy across the curriculum

"Reading, Writing and Research: Integrating Literacy across the Curriculum" helps participants develop skills for implementing oral and written communication instruction in their professions.

Course description

Explore reading and writing skills instruction and information literacy concepts, and learn to effectively integrate these skills into the teaching of other subjects.

Teachers will identify appropriate reading-comprehension and writing-skills goals for their students. Teachers will explore simple strategies for skills instruction and apply these strategies within the content area they teach. In addition, teachers will explore information skills, learning to identify, search for and evaluate information — particularly web-based information.

Teachers will use these new instructional strategies to enhance their own teaching and learn to assess student growth in reading, writing and research skills.

In this course, teachers will cultivate an understanding the importance of developing students’ critical-thinking and problem solving skills. By recognizing the need to improve student learning in the classroom, teachers will learn to consistently incorporate different points of view in instruction, acknowledging the influence of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, socioeconomics, and culture on a student’s development and attitudes.

Prerequisites

Students enrolled in this course should have an interest in reading, writing and research and a desire to apply current trends in their own classroom. As this course is taught and taken completely online, reliable online access and a working email address are necessary. Students can expect to spend between 2 and 5 hours per week on coursework which includes required reading material, responding to forum posts and the contribution of professional dialog within the online classroom.

Course objectives

• Identify appropriate reading-comprehension and writing-skills goals
• Explore simple strategies for reading and writing instruction
• Apply these reading and writing strategies within the content area
• Identify correct information sources for specific information needs
• Effectively choose and use search tools and evaluate information on the internet
• Assess student growth in reading, writing and research skills

Purpose and rationale

This online course is designed to help those enrolled develop an awareness of current and effective teaching practices with the goal of implementing such practices into their own craft. Attention is focused on the roles of listening and speaking as they influence the process of teaching reading and writing. This course is designed to assist current or renewing educators as they design language rich classrooms and strive to model effective use of language. Through the dialog within an active online forum, emphasis is placed on exploring our own oral and written communication as we work to deliver a language arts curriculum that is meaningful to our students.

Course information

Audience

This course is appropriate for teachers of all subjects and grade levels.

Time commitment

Each week, students will be expected to spend approximately 4-5 hours per week.

Duration

Reading, Writing, and Research: Integrating Literacy Across the Curriculum runs for five weeks. Our weeks begin midnight on Wednesday and end on midnight Tuesday.

Credits and fee

The course costs $150.00 and upon successful completion the student will receive 2.0 CEUs.

Evaluation

No formal test is used as a method of evaluation in this course. Successful participation in and completion of this course is measured by a student’s contributions within the online forums and timely completion and submission of the online exercises. Students should plan to post and respond to the posts of others in order to be considered an active member of the class. It can be expected that an average of 2 to 4 hours per week will be spent reading, contributing to the online forums, and responding to assignments.