Response to Ch. 10 " Teaching English Language Arts in a 'Flat' World" 

Jim Burke's chapter on teaching how to teach literacy skills to students in the twenty-first century focused on eight different workplace roles set forth by Tom Friedman. These different roles include: colaborators and orecestrators, sythesizers, explainers, leveragers, adapters, green people. personalizers, and localizers. In the chapter,  Burke took each of these different societal roles explained them and their importance in a couple brief paragraphs then listed several ideas for how to best nurture the growth of the role in the classroom. I particularly enjoyed these suggestions, as they were practical methods of teaching certain skills sets that could be easily implemented in the classroom. What really amazed me was how these simple changes in teaching methods could dramatically increase student's literacy in a flat world. 

Burke ended the chapter by illustrating the implications of these practices in the classroom through his own personal experiences as a teacher. By creating a group online discussion board for his class, Burke found that participation in his class soared while students learned valuable communication skills.  Upon reading this section of the chapter, I was a little skeptical about the effectiveness of this strategy for teaching high school students, thinking many would simply use the in class computer time to mess around. I was surprised to find that many students really connected with this method of group discussion. 

Overall, this chapter challenged me to consider implementing the different instructional method mentioned to better prepare adolescents for the new workforce.