Secondary Education (SECE)

This course examines ways in which secondary teachers can support students' struggles with reading and writing in the disciplines, including Mathematics, History (Social Studies), the Sciences, Foreign Language, and English. How can we teach all students the concepts, facts, and skills that they need to do well in our discipline? What kinds of reading and writing issues can inhibit students' progress? How do we identify the kinds of difficulties that different text organizations may pose for students? What must a high school student learn to do to read and write appropriately in English, History, Science, and so on? How can we address these issues without taking time away from teaching our discipline? What kinds of reading and writing tasks can we use as resources for helping students to learn in our discipline? How do the current state and national emphases on standards and teacher accountability affect our responsibilities in the classroom? The answers to these questions have deep implications for the instructional activities that we will develop to enable all children to use reading and writing as tools for learning in our fields. This is also the Capstone Writing-Intensive Course in the Major. The course immerses you in the kinds of literate activities practiced in our profession. It examines the ways that reading and writing vary across the disciplines included in this course. NOTE: This course was previously called "Reading Problems in the Secondary School."

Involves a school placement where students demonstrate their knowledge of and competence in teaching. Students work with a certified cooperating teacher and are supervised by a Temple University faculty member. NOTE: All coursework must be completed before taking this course.

Students will be involved in experiences that prepare them for making the transition from college to the practice setting, and engage in activities that foster professionalism in school and community settings. The senior performance assessment, a requirement for teacher certification students, is also a part of the course. NOTE: This is a required course for all teacher certification candidates, which is taken during the student teaching semester.

This course examines ways in which secondary teachers can support all students' development of the complex literate knowledge, strategies, and practices required to achieve deep understandings of essential concepts and skills in an academic or vocational area. The course conceptualizes academic literacies broadly to include written, spoken, graphic, and visual "texts" used both as objects of instruction and supports for learning. Taking a "back-to-front" approach to curriculum design, students develop instructional activities to enable learning of specialized vocabularies, as well as reading and writing in various genres and modes. They learn to differentiate those activities so as to address differences in student backgrounds, interests, language use, learning preferences, and background knowledge.