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?