The future

This semester has been a series of revelations and awesome learning experiences in all of my classes. One of the coolest things I've noticed since I started taking education classes is that once I had a decent grounding in educational theory and practice, I couldn't help but notice the strategies of the teachers around me and how their students (including myself) reacted to those strategies. The cool thing about studying education is that it gets super meta--I'm a teacher and a student at once, and I can look through either or both lenses. One of my hopes for the future is that I don't lose that perspective. I was talking to my mother, who is also a teacher at a technical college in my hometown--at the moment, she's working on her Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration, which would make her rather overqualified for the job she has right now. I asked her why she keeps taking classes--she's been steadily working through her Masters and Ph.D, once class at a time, since I can remember--and she said something potent: "if I stop taking classes I stop remembering what it's like to be one of my students." Mostly, I always want to be learning from my students. Many of my favorite teachers have mentioned that they learn from their students, always going into a class period hoping to meet a new idea. I want to do that.

My stance as a professional educator

I was thinking about being a teacher a while back, just musing as many of us probably do. I don't remember much of what I was thinking except that it was about how I wanted to relate to my students, and what my conclusion was. I feel like as a teacher, my job is to help my students figure things out. I don't want to direct, to lecture, to present some artificial learning experience that feels as contrived to my students as it does to me. I want to be there to help students where they're at, to nudge them towards those a-ha moments they need to understand what they need to learn.

You guys have probably heard me babble about the Writing Center before, but I'm going to do it one more time so bear with me. Working there has really been my first and most influential experience in the field of education, and the way I was trained and learned to work with students was to to figure out exactly where they were and what I needed to do to help them get where they need to be. Everyone who comes in, even if they're from the same class, have been learning the same curriculum, and are working on the same assignment have different things that they need to figure out, and my goal is to get them to a realization of what needs to be happening in their writing. One person may just need the difference between summary and analysis explained. Another may just need my cheesy simile that using quotes in a paper is like a sandwich where the meat is the quote, but it's not a sandwich until you have your own ideas as the bread. Some of them just need me to point out all the great things they're doing because all they're lacking is self-confidence. I know that my students are all at different points, and I can't ignore that in the classroom even though I don't have the luxury of working with them one-on-one for thirty minutes like I can in the Writing Center.

Over the course of the semester and our inquiry in what exactly a significant learning experience entails, there are a few principles that really stand out and that have directed my thinking in creating our unit plan.

There needs to be a relationship between the teacher and the students. This was the principle I had articulated before this class for reasons I've already discussed. I think the key to this is conferencing, or if that's not practical, well-thought out written feedback.

• Significant learning experiences are genuine learning experiences. In planning my unit, I really tried to make it follow a logical thought process of inquiry, and I think that's really important to do in all learning experiences. It's incredibly important for making sure the students are buying into and interested in what they're learning, if it follows the progression of what they're curious about and what they think they need to understand. 
• Learning experiences should be relevant to the students. This is related to the previous principle, but also expands on it. The idea is that students should be able to relate the content to something that is important to them--their problems, their hobbies, their intellectual interests, their goals. 
• Students should have the freedom to have their own ideas. I'm sure all or many of us have had an experience where they didn't feel like their ideas were respected. I don't want that to happen in my classroom. This one is especially important to me because I've had such an experience more than most--I went to school in a community where I didn't agree with the majority opinions, and this came through in school too, and I often felt like if I asserted myself I had to be immediately ready for an argument that I probably wouldn't win. There were a few classrooms this didn't happen, and those classes were a haven for me. I want my classroom to be one of those havens--I do not want to be part of that problem for my students. 

I think that about covers my stance and my priorities. There's a lot of other issues to explore, but we just spent a whole class talking about those. These principles are the core.

Assessment

I've been thinking a lot about formative assessment.  Specifically, I'm thinking of how/if it should be graded.  As someone who has, more than once, had a learning curve that was slightly slower than or different from the one the teacher expected of me, I'm annoyed that formative assessment is often graded on how well a student meets the learning target. That seems to kind of miss the point, assuming that the point of formative assessment is to see how well the student is meeting the learning target, with the probable result being that they're not quite there yet.  I've been trying to figure out how to work this, with the formative assessment I'm thinking of being things like exit tickets and journal entries.  Do they get full credit if they do it?  Should I attempt to make some sort of objective judgement of how hard they're trying? Do I just weight it pretty low so that it's low stakes if they're not quite where I want or expect them to be?

Right now, I'm tied to the way the school I'm interning at does it. They grade everything on a 5-point scale and differentiate between formative and summative assessment, weighting summative assessment more heavily (I think.)  The numbers correspond to a set amount of improvement:

0: no evidence of learning
1: needs improvement
2: is improving
3: meets expectations
4/5: exceeds expectations

So, I have to give a number grade on formative assessment, and since most of their grades fall under this category it can affect their grade pretty significantly.   How do I fit my ideas about formative assessment into this system, friends?

Instructional Sequence/Stream of Consciousness regarding the CCSS, Standard American English, and respect for diversity

The entire process of creating an instructional sequence has been an....interesting experiment. It's hard for me.  I've mentioned before that I tend to look at things globally and then have a hard time with details, and that is definitely showing up right now.

The biggest challenge at the moment is, when I go through all of the lesson plans I've created so far and try to match them up with the standards I picked out and the learning targets I wrote forever ago at the beginning of this unit-planning process, it isn't really working.  When I started, I had a vision of all these standards that worked wonderfully together and I was a bit short-sighted about the details of what the lesson plans teaching to those standards would look like.  And now, I have all these lesson plans that I really like that don't particularly fit with that global idea I started out with, but I think they're good and create a good core for my instructional sequence.  So I'm torn between going back to revise my short-sighted but idealistic group of standards and learning targets I started out with to fit my new lesson plans, or if that violates that idea of backwards-lesson-planning that I really do think is important.

In other news, I see interesting things happening between my principles and practices when it comes to the language standards.  Here's a fact: I really hate teaching grammar.  It's not that I don't know it, because I do.  I just think it's over-emphasized and I really dislike how much our culture values Standard American English over any other dialect a student might speak, like African-American Vernacular English or Hawaiian Pidgin, both of which I think are awesome.  Language is a huge part of culture and ultimately identity, and this may just be my former Linguistics Emphasis (and present Descriptivist) talking, but I think this is especially important in showing respect for diversity and the individual identities of my students. If someone can communicate effectively, I don't really care if they can speak Standard American English, but the standards tell me I have to care.  Unfortunately, academia and the workforce usually do care very much, so I need to teach my students to function in Standard American, but I'd really like to show them that their own way of speaking is valuable too.  At the moment, my lesson plans are skirting the issue and focusing on writing style.  Any thoughts on this, classmates?

Musings on teaching writing via authentic tasks

I've learned a lot in two years of working at the Writing Center, but one of the things that is a constant presence is that writing is hard.  Even after years and years of school, writing is hard. It's supposed to be hard.  The other day, I walked in on my boss, the assistant director of the Writing Center who has a master's degree in Rhetoric and Composition, with her computer screen showing a half-finished outline, her office floor covered in annotated hard-copies of research, and her highlighter gripped like a weapon.  She saw my concerned look and said, "Dory, writing is HARD."

My point here is that writing is a continual learning process and few of us can hope to be masters at that craft.  There are a few things I can pinpoint that are essential skills, though, that might pose an especial challenge to students.

• Writing is a form of communication--a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.  A lot of students (including myself, sometimes) think of an essay as a thing they have to turn in for a grade, rather than a way of expressing and explaining their ideas to another person.  How can we help students realize the real purpose of writing, and how can we make sure we're using writing for that purpose?
• Good writing requires certain instincts: an ability to realize what the reader will be thinking while they're reading, a way with words that communicates ideas clearly, and an ability to logically lay out an argument that may or may not follow our own thought process.  How do we teach skills like this, that seem to be pretty instinctive? Can we teach them?

I'm sure there are more, but that seems to be enough to be going on with, and seems to get at the core of why it's difficult to teach writing.  Our whole system of writing a paper, turning it in to the teacher who reads it for the sole purpose of giving a grade, then getting it back, seems to go against the entire purpose of writing serving as a form of communication and a way of entering the "Great Conversation" about our topic.  I'm not entirely sure I have any ideas on how to address this issue fully, but it seems to have something to do with the  "authentic tasks" idea that gets thrown around a lot.  We should be setting up situations where students' writing is authentic, where it is being used as a genuine form of communication.

Thinking Routines

My feelings about the thinking and note-taking routines we’ve been looking at and using are…mixed. I feel like they’re useful for students who need reminding and encouragement to do the kinds of thinking many of these routines include—the parts about questioning the author, challenging his ideas, or even, for some students, making connections to their own lives. A lot of students need that kind of structure. On the other hand, though, going through these routines myself has been a triumph of will: my natural aversion to fitting my thoughts into someone else’s structure and my dislike of having to prove that I’ve thought about something compete against the legitimate good such thinking routines have done for my own critical reading skills.

That said, in going through the various routines we have looked at, one stood out to me more than the others, and that I would be more likely to assign to students. My favorite has probably been the 4 C’s (Connections, Challenges, Concepts, and Changes). I feel like this one has all the components I’d like my students to think about when reading or reacting to something. I especially like the Concepts and Changes sections. Concepts allows students to just write down the important ideas in what they’ve read, which will feel like normal note-taking to them. Changes is a place to help them look at the implications of the ideas they’ve been learning about and what the author’s intent might be. As much as I like that this strategy asks students to challenge and ask questions about the text, I especially love that it asks them to think about the ideas holistically. I can see using this routine in reading a story, to help them delve deeper into the ideas presented, or an informational (especially argumentative) text to help them consider what the ideas presented actually entail.

Parts of a Whole

One of the things I've been wrestling with ever since I started thinking about lesson plans way back in the beginning of my education classes is getting my mind around the scope of an entire unit, or semester, or year.  Every lesson I've planned so far has been in the context of an education class--an isolated thing.  I've rarely had to think about things like what I would teach the next day, or the day after that, or how this lesson would fit into something larger.  So, in planning out this unit one of my (many) challenges has been figuring out how to build lessons on each other to reach a bigger whole.

Being in a classroom so much this semester has been a big help on that front, as I can see for myself how those individual lessons add up to a whole.  Still, it's hard because there are days at a time where I don't see what's going on.  I also look for examples in my own life, with mixed results. High school was too long ago for my memories to be very detailed, and most of my college classes are structured very differently than how we've been talking about structuring a class. The best example I have for reference in trying to put together individual lessons into a whole is probably our very own English 381.  Looking back on this class, I can see how what we do every day builds on what happened the days before.  In reflecting on how that works and in getting more experience myself I hope to get a better grasp on making my lessons parts of a larger whole.

Significant Reading Experiences

It's always interesting when principles (like our dear Principles of Significant Learning Experiences) come into contact with practical details.  I'm an idealist, myself, so it annoys me when the real world gets in the way of the way I feel like it should work.  This is becoming more and more apparent in my internship as I get further and further into planning this unit.  I keep thinking of ways to teach reading--not only the skill of reading but also, just maybe, the appreciation of reading.  This is coming into conflict with the annoying detail that we only have enough copies of most books for one class full of students--they can't take them home. Even if I did have enough copies to send home with them, though, the sad reality is that a lot of them probably wouldn't read by themselves.  So, the vast majority of my class time is taken up by actually reading the text, so I'm mostly limited to teaching strategies that include actual reading.

From what I've seen, many of the students really don't appreciate being babysat while they read--it only annoys them, and then they get annoyed by reading, and then they hate reading.  I don't like that, but I can't really think of any other way.  So, most of my mentor teacher's class time is taken up by her reading out loud, or the students popcorn reading, or on rare occasions the students read silently or with a partner.  There's not much independence involved, and I think that's where it makes my principles twinge.  As much as I feel like reading should be social, I think that's more in the aspect of discussing the text and the ideas in it with other people.  The act of reading itself has always been individual in all of my most significant reading experiences.

Does anyone else have any ideas about this?  Am I being too much of an idealist?

Inquiry

Every public school teacher I've seen seems to agree that the school year needs to be split up into manageable, themed chunks: units.  What they don't seem to agree on is how these units should be organized and what kind of themes they should have.  English classrooms often have a poetry unit, a Shakespeare unit, an argument writing unit.  A language class might follow a textbook with themed chapters: food, travel, politics, history.  More recently, though, I've heard a lot of talk about organizing a unit around inquiry: an "essential question."

I had never been a student in a class organized around inquiry until I got to college, and I do like the experience. It's been much more intellectually stimulating for me, and it helps students realize why they're learning something, which is a question student are always asking themselves.  Thinking about this reminds me of the way one of my other classes is structured this semester.  I'm taking Physics 105: Stars and Cosmology.  This class is incredibly interesting to me, but I'm such a conceptual person that the nitty-gritty part of physics (equations, calculations, etc.) is really hard.  Something cool is happening, though: my professor is organizing the class around conceptual things, and then teaching us the messy details when we realize we need to know them to fully understand the bigger concepts.  Here's an example:  It's organized around a question: if the only data we can get from astronomical objects is the light they put out, how can we figure out things like what temperature a star is, or what it's made out of?  At the moment we're learning about spectroscopy, which is a way that scientists can figure out what elements stars, nebulas, and other astronomical objects contain. To do this it's necessary to get into things as detailed as atomic structure and how electrons behave.  If my professor had started out the class with atomic structure, I would have had no idea why we were learning it, because at first glance it has nothing to do with astronomy.  But, because she presented a problem to figure out and atomic structure as the solution, we students have bought into knowing those complicated details. Details are hard for students to process if they don't know why they have to learn them, but if we can present them as the products of inquiry, the students will feel much better about them and learn more.  The other thing I like about this way of teaching is that it mimics the thought processes of professionals in the field.  Astrophysicists don't sit down and say, "I wonder, if I start studying atoms, what they can tell me about quasars?"  Instead, they ask, "How can I figure out the things I want to know about quasars with the information I can get?" They find out through some creativity and a process of inquiry that knowing about atoms will help them achieve their goal.  This way of thinking is genuine, and students will feel that.

That was a long explanation about an astronomy class, but that process of inquiry can work for any subject.  I think it also works really well with the Common Core State Standards, especially the way we've been talking about them in class, with designing instruction around multiple areas within language arts.  It would be easy to look at the common core and say, "oh good, I can have a Writing unit, and a Speaking/Listening Unit, and a Informational Text unit...", but if we organize a unit instead around an essential question, we can pull in standards from all these different areas, students will use different thought processes and media to explore their ideas and answer that question, and the learning experience will be much more holistic and useful.

Significant Learning Experiences

In reflecting on the idea of creating significant learning experiences, I feel like it's an idea so big I can barely begin to grasp it.  So, we shall start with the basics. What do we mean by "significant"?

Merriam Webster says,

1: having meaning ( "a significant glance" )
2: having or likely to have influence or effect
3: probably caused by something other than chance (in statistics)

I like those first two, especially the second one.  I like the idea of the education the students in our classroom get having a lasting effect on them, that it means something to them, that it's useful to them.  More than that, it's important that while they're in my class they know that what they're learning is important and useful, that its relevance is made clear to them.

My mentor teacher has been working on integrating informational texts into her class.  She's doing a unit about Alaska right now, and they just started a novel called "Days of Gold" that's about the Alaska gold rush.  But before that, they read some nonfiction (informational) stuff about the Alaska gold rush.  This was crafty of her for a couple reasons that relates to our idea of significant learning experiences.  First, their understanding of the ins and outs of the Alaska gold rush means that they'll be understanding things about the people and places mentioned in "Days of Gold" and the students will understand how they can learn from nonfiction texts and that will help them find relevance. Secondly, teaching informational text is new to my mentor teacher (because of Common Core), and she told me "I never realized how much help my students needed with reading nonfiction texts!" She felt like it was one of the most important (read: significant) elements of her class.  The ability to read informational texts is arguably just as or more valuable than being able to read creative writing. Textbooks, for one.  Technical writing if the student ends up going into any STEM-related field. Research. Informational texts are everywhere, and students need to know how to read them.

That's a significant learning experience. That's applicable to the students' experiences outside of the classroom.

Creating a Learning Community/Musings on helping students enjoy reading

The learning autobiographies we did in class this week were awesome for a couple of reasons.  One, I learned a lot about how other people think about their educations: whether learning is a means to an end (adding tools to our toolbox, as it were) or a exploration that is exciting in its own right (like a snowball!), or somewhere in between.  I find that I'm more drawn to the snowball way of thinking, but I definitely identify with sometimes being forced to learn "tools" that I never felt like I had a use for (please tell me, Geology 100, when I will ever need to identify shale on sight).   This reminder of different ways of viewing the purpose of education was a good reminder to me that my students may be seeing things much differently than I am.  This was illustrated today in my internship, which is a 7th grade reading class.  I was trying to talk a student into reading his book and found myself at odds with his point of view.

Me: "Since you're finished with your assignment early, can you read silently until the bell rings?"
Him: "I don't like reading."
Me: "Is it your book you don't like, or just reading in general?"
Him: "Just reading in general."
Me: "Why don't you try out a different book and see if it's more interesting?  Go check out the bookshelf."

A few minutes later, I saw him diving into a special edition Guinness Book of World Records, and we had a wow moment together about a guy that had collected over 100,000 matchboxes.

The learning autobiographies were also great in letting us get to know each other a little better and helped us start our own learning community.  For an excellent example of this, I shall ask you all for advice.  How would a reading teacher go about getting this kid from reading (and enjoying) the mostly picture-based Book of World Records to reading (and at least not absolutely hating) a novel?  I'm not reaching for the stars here and wanting him to read Hemingway, but a nice YA fiction book wouldn't go amiss.

Becoming an English Teacher

I come from a family of teachers--my mother is a teacher, and 3 of her 4 sisters are as well.  A few of them also married teachers, and now a good part of their children are also becoming teachers.  I once figured out that one could conceivably go from kindergarten to an associate's degree being taught by at least one member of my family at all times.  It's a bit ridiculous, and growing up I had no intention of following the family tradition.

When first came to college, I was an English major with a linguistics emphasis, and I loved it.  I soon found myself falling into a familiar thought pattern, though--I kept learning all these cool things and I couldn't keep them to myself.  I found myself figuring out how to explain things to other people, and it wasn't much of a jump to explaining them to a hypothetical class.  I gave in and switched my emphasis from linguistics to teaching and I love that too.

It's really important to me to remember that every student in a classroom is different: they have varied interests, goals, and skills, and it's not my job to convert them to liking English as much as I do.  It's my job to cater to them and their needs and give them the tools they need to succeed.

I was having a discussion with a few people the other day about a dichotomy we see in teaching English, specifically literature. We read three articles that touch on this: "Reader-Response Theory and the English Curriculum," by Robert E. Probst, "Literature and Literacy: Rethinking English as a School Subject," by Robert P. Yagelski and "Toward Thoughtful Curriculum: Fostering Discipline-Base Conversation," by Arthur N. Applebee. These articles talked a lot about using literature as a means to learning something else, like critical thinking, reading comprehension, and exposure to other cultures and points of view. This set my group thinking about why we chose to study literature in college. The truth is, I don't love literature because it teaches me critical thinking skills, although that is a perk. I love it because I love the stories and the characters.

This leads me to wonder, what is the purpose of teaching literature? Should we teach Shakespeare because Shakespeare is awesome, as Probst suggests in asking, "How do we teach so that the experience with literature is its own justification?" Or, should we teach Shakespeare because through it, students can learn about history, can be exposed to interesting thoughts and ideas, and can learn how to interpret unfamiliar words and phrases? Should we be doing some mixture of both?

The quandary comes because how we present literature to our students can greatly affect whether they approach it from an efferent or aesthetic stance. How possible is it to teach students that they can choose to read from either stance, and would it be a good idea to do so?  How does this fit in with what our job is as English teachers?