Learning Letter

The projects were a challenge to me because I have not worked on anything like that in quite some time. That being said, I cannot explain how much it helped me in my learning enough. I should have allocated a lot more time to doing the projects, and there were times when I worked at my job, went home, immediately started working on assignments, and it was all worth it. The 20 minute lesson was great for me because I used to be a terrible public speaker, and even today this still shows. That assignment provided me with a comfortable way to gain feedback, and it was my favorite project.

I am used to teaching pedagogies that are directed at ESL students, so I was nervous about anything that was directed towards adolescent learners with English as a first language. One thing that I had trouble wrapping my head around was in Discussion as a Way of Teaching, where the author claims that there is no such thing as a guided discussion. I felt that my definition of guided discussion was different, and I think that it can be good when it is intended to guide students to develop their own thoughts on the text.

Being a teacher is a lot of work. I say it this way because not only is the act of teaching a lot of work, but everything that goes into the preparation is so much work, and it is this work that goes unseen by so many people. My dad is a mailman and told me that he sees teachers on their porches writing their lesson plans all summer long while he is delivering mail to them. That is a good indicator of how much work a teacher does. Teachers do not stop their job when they exit the classroom, exit the school, or even when school is out. Teachers need to constantly work in order to be up to date and properly prepared, and that is the most important thing I got from this class.

Thanks to everyone for being a great class!

-Michael Cook

Lesson Plan

1. Teacher Candidate: Michael Cook                                       2. Date: December 1^st 2014

3. Grade/Subject: 9^th Grade English

4. Subject: Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese

5. Lesson Length: 20 Minutes

6. Academic Content:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.5

Analyze how an author's choices concerning how to structure a text, order events within it (e.g., parallel plots), and manipulate time (e.g., pacing, flashbacks) create such effects as mystery, tension, or surprise.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.9-10.3.B

Use narrative techniques, such as dialogue, pacing, description, reflection, and multiple plot lines, to develop experiences, events, and/or characters.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.9-10.2

Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing.

7. Lesson Objectives:

Students should be able to come up with a working definition of “identity.” (i.e. personal, cultural, national etc.)

“What is an identity and how does it affect our lives?”  “Can an identity be forced on you? How?”

“In what way do we see identity in American Born Chinese?”

Draw a comic depicting how you see yourself, and how you feel other people see you.

8. Academic Language:

Students need to be able to know what an identity is. Students will define this term in a whole class discussion. We have already discussed identity in previous classes. 

9. Assessment:

Students will make a comic about two things: what they see themselves as, or want to be, and what another person sees them as. (i.e, society, their parents, their friends.) The comic will not be graded on artistic ability, but rather on if they clearly depict an identity and use standard English as defined by CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.L.9-10.2.

Rubric: (10 points)

__5/ Comic has multiple panels (at least 2) that clearly define how they identify with themselves and how others see them.

__5/ Students use standard English with very few or no errors. 

10. Connections:

In A case for interruption in the virtual English classroom with the graphic novel American Born Chinese (2011), Melissa Schieble reports that “the high school students’ adept familiarity with using computers and the internet led to an intertextual connection to American Born Chinese that the EED students had overlooked in their reading and preparation.” YouTube can be a valuable source of informational text that I want to use for intertextuality, therefore I chose an interview with the author and cartoonist, Gene Luen Yang.

11. Instructional Strategies:

Sequence:

Begin the class by writing the objectives on the board and ask the class to define the term identity (5 mins).

Watch the YouTube Video of Yang, focus on identity. (5 mins).

Ask the students if they could connect what Yang said to the text itself.

Pass around computer paper and explain the activity. (3 mins).

For the remaining time students will work on the comic and I will move about the room answering any questions and checking up on the students. (5 mins).

12. Differentiated Instruction:

I want to engage many ways of understanding the text by offering videos and personal expression activities. Students may talk to each other and share their work with one another, or they may work silently if they wish. Students do not have to share their work if they feel uncomfortable with it, and can choose to express their identity in any way.

13. Materials:

Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese

White board/Markers

Blank Computer Paper

Extra pens/markers/crayons etc.

Computer/YouTube

14. Safety/Management:

I will move about the room during paired discussion to ensure that everyone remains on task. I will provide confirmation checks whenever giving instructions and will ensure that the conversations comply with the rules of the school.

Response to Readicide

First, I realize that I have not been posting in my blog during the dates I was supposed to. I apologize to my classmates and teacher for this.

     The initial reaction I had on Readicide was fear. I loved to read as a kid, and it was because I was able to choose the books I was interested in. I don't really remember much about the "reader level" system when I was a kid, but during elementary school I read all that was interesting to me, and tended to cut out what was not. I was home-schooled for middle and high school, so throughout my teens I was able to continue this trend. College was the first place where I received assigned readings for literature, and I was not as prepared for it. I had to eventually see the point in reading things that did not particularly interest me. The information contained in each piece of literature brings out thoughts and ideas from myself and my peers that are open for discussion. Despite my initial struggle, reading was not dead to me. I feel that this is because I have never had a "fact based" multiple choice test, or anything similar, for a piece of literature in my life. In college, the task has always been to read and discuss and write about the literature; facts were a support, but not the focus of the lesson.  I focused on the idea of reading from multiple sources. The analysis and comparison between different texts, be it literature or informational texts, helps students to look at what they read critically, which helps build understanding. It was the idea of creating "Topic Floods" on page 81 that made me think about this concept. This is the sort of thing that I have done in my college literature classes, so it seems ludicrous to me for a middle or high school to do otherwise.
     The common core lists skills that the students are supposed to be able to do at their grade level, so the best way to assess this would be to have them use these skills in some way. Also, a multiple choice test gives the teacher no information on where the student may be struggling, so it makes it near impossible to evaluate a student's true skill from such a test. Students should be assessed on whether or not they are able to compare, relate, and use, the information within each text. Simple writing tasks are not always enough, though they can act as a great standard assessment. Other assessments, such as self evaluation, are more useful for the teacher because it reveals what a student feels the he/she can or cannot do. It is time we treat or middle and high schoolers like we treat many college students; we need to revive reading.

Response to the Lesson Plan

I think the lesson plan is intended to organize the lesson in such a way that someone else could pick it up and potentially use it. This specific one is split into three main parts, the outline of the lesson, including its contents, assessments, etc., the implication of the lesson, such as what strategies will be used and how the teacher is taking the students into consideration, and thirdly, the materials management and parent activities. What seems to be missing is the reasoning behind why the teacher is doing what he/she is doing. I feel that this is an important step that should be added throughout the lesson plan. There were many things in the lesson plan that I liked, but I felt that some things needed to be specified more.
This lesson plan is easily editable, so a beginning teacher can mold it to their, or more importantly, their student's needs. It specifies the length of time, which I feel is a good idea for a beginning teacher because it is another way to organize the lesson by prioritizing based on time constraints. Comparing the learning objectives to state standards is good because it is a way to be confident in the goals set in the classroom. Also, if another faculty member were to ask the teacher about the lesson plan, these comparisons could be used as reasoning for the goals. I liked how connections to studies and evidence is used to back up the lesson plan, however I feel that the student's connections need to be taken into consideration by specifying the need to make connections to background knowledge. This can be done in numerous informal ways. It should be noted that the implication of the academic language must be specified because there are many ways that this can be done either explicitly or implicitly. The biggest question I have about this lesson plan (or any lesson plan) is it easily accessible to other people, and are my assessments really assessing what I think they are (something I think needs to be specified and questioned further in a reflection).

Response to "I read it but I don't get it"

     I suppose that it is because of its age, but I think that I have previously read many of the ideas that this book is talking about. The concepts of teaching reading strategies and the intricate system of reading different genres are no strangers to me. At first glance, it was another book about the life of a teacher who guided kids whom felt they had no hope. So instead of focusing on that stuff in particular, I decided to focus on the reaction Tovani was given. Both students and teachers were, and some still are, skeptical of her methods and ideas. Some teachers scoffed at the idea that they would have to teach reading. After all, these history and science teachers expect the students to be able to read already. I can understand them to an extent because it is very likely that they do not have enough time to explicitly teach reading in their field of study. However, I personally feel that it is a great disservice to students if teachers are not teaching them the appropriate literacy required in order to comprehend these texts. It is not the job of a teacher to fill the heads of children with facts that they could simply use Google to find. Instead, a teacher's job is to help students understand whatever it is they are trying to do; for example, how the information in a text is applied to the world outside the text.
     A key step to teaching kids to understand is teaching kids how to read different texts, however, I also feel that it is also important to teach the reasons for being able to read multiple texts. Literacy brings the power of information that students need in this age where information spreads rapidly. More often than not, the information is not essential but has many interpretations or implications that add to it. Reading strategies equip the students with the ability to determine the different ways a text is interpreted and what those interpretations might imply. In the book, many students did not know how to read; they were reading the phonetic sounds of the words and perhaps individual words or sentences but not the semantics. The students were using one ability to read, but not the abilities to decipher the meaning which is crucial for interpretation and implication. Because of the wide range of text that the students will encounter in their lives, I would argue that multiple texts should be used in a literature classroom besides literary texts. These other texts could be supplementary to the literature focused on in the class.

A Response to Taking Risks with Literature: An Exploration into the Resilience of Pupil Response to the Study of a Challenging Text at GCSE, by Katherine Erricker

     In this article, Katherine Erricker poses the problem that many students with learning disabilities face when analyzing English literature.  The GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) is for a certain subject, in this case English, for students 14-16 years of age. The article is a study done on grade 10 students, with one class consisting of 15 students, 12 of which with learning disabilities, and the second class consisting of 30 "higher-achieving" students. The study is qualitative, and uses a series of classroom recordings and surveys for evidence. According to the article, learning disabled persons have much less resilience when faced with the stress of either failure or potential failure. This means that they have a harder time regaining confidence and learning from mistakes. When faced with failure students with learning disabilities would respond with feeling "dumb," "annoyed," and "frustrated," contrasting some of the higher achieving students whose response to the survey was to "try harder next time" (90). The main idea behind the article was to use the evidence to argue that students with learning disabilities needed more care and attention from the teacher, which is opposed to the idea that teachers should not guide these students and allow them to work among their peers.

     The problem with these students working with their peers is that they have not learned the necessary ability to communicate their analysis in both a casual and academic way. Because of this trouble in communication, many students become uncomfortable with challenging texts, such as Shakespearean plays. The higher achieving students could pepper their academic analysis with slang and informal language and the students with learning difficulties could not. "This kind of linguistics manipulation is sophisticated and not only requires a skilful use of language but also an awareness of the expectation of one's audience"(92). This statement means that the students with learning disabilities require the teacher to guide the conversation and to be present to help them build this ability if possible. Ultimately Erricker concludes by claiming that these student's voices are not sufficiently heard, as they have a difficult time speaking their views; thus, teachers must help them develop not only the ability to analyse the text, but also the ability to use academic discourse among their peers.

Response to Critical Pedagogy and Popular Culture in an Urban Secondary English Classroom, by Jeff Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell

Critical Pedagogy and Popular Culture in an Urban Secondary English Classroom makes a distinction between what could be considered Culture with a capital and culture in lower case. The Culture is what school systems focused on in an attempt to become more multicultural; however, they failed the take into account the more specific cultures of the students within the classroom. Although the interest in rap music correlated with the youth studying in poorer schools, it is not correct to state that a teacher should use hip hop music to teach in urban environments because the youth likes it. Because of this distinction, the section on hip hop music should not be read as a simple way to get young students interested in poetry; rather, it is an observation made by the teacher in order to better understand the students. The teacher should attempt to get to know and understand their students both on a class and individual level. This is a crucial first step to created what is defined as a classroom culture.
Instead of attempting to appeal to everyone in the classroom, it is better to observe what the common features are, or if any common features can be built upon. In this way, teachers can create a classroom culture where students feel welcomed despite any differences. This kind of classroom is the ideal and takes a lot of teacher observation before it is successfully created. It may be hard for teachers to instruct students on materials that would seem unfitting for the classroom culture but required for the curriculum, and there is always the risk that the classroom culture itself could collapse. However, as seen in earlier articles, creative teachers are able to follow the curriculum with material tailored for their students, such as how the added focus on post-colonial literature was integrated in this article.