Notes from Appian Way: Big Kids Like Arts and Crafts, Too

Joshua Jenkins is an master’s of education candidate in the Language and Literacy Program, pursuing licensure as a reading specialist. He was a special educator and reading interventionist in New Orleans and is interested in the research on reading disabilities and what all grown-ups can do to help bolster reading development for all children.

A few weeks into the semester of a class on reading development and instruction, our professor assigned groups to read a dense article about different theoretical models of reading development. Talk about irony –- I was reading about how readers make mistakes and slow down when text is complex and understanding breaks down.

As I was reading this, I was also experiencing it! I walked into class thinking, “Am I the only one who struggled reading this beast of an article?!” And, I had to laugh at myself for experiencing the very thing I was reading about as I was reading about it!

Luckily, I was not alone. And luckily, the professor did this quite purposefully. We spent the class discussing these jam-packed, dense readings in our groups, ultimately making visual representations of the articles to share with our class. ...

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Read more blog posts by master's students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education at Notes from Appian Way.