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.

             The hegemony within the education system allows for teachers to maintain biases that may go unrecognized. In Pedagogy: A look at the Modern Concepts, Peter Mclaren cites research directed toward teachers' different reactions to female and male students. On pages 75 through 76, in a section titled "Hidden Curriculum", the results show that girls and boys are treated differently, and in the case of the observation cited in the third paragraph of the section, teachers did not even realize that the boys were talking more than the girls. If social institutions such as schools are seen as maintaining he hegemony, then it becomes more difficult to hold teachers completely responsible. They are very much a product of the system they are part of. This is not to say that teachers are stuck in a specific hegemony that treats boys and girls differently, but raher, that society is stuck in a hegemonic state; with one being replaced by another. The distinction between males and females is an old hegemony that has changed some, but it usually results in placing men over women. Because of this information, one of the primary goals of education should be to develope the ability to question what is presented as true.
               It is questioning that girls are taught not to do as this section states. Regardless whether the answer is wrong or right, or whether the question is good or not, boys are accepted and encouraged to interact with the classroom in this way. The article claims that girls are generally put down for showing the same kind of inititive as the boys do. Though the article already cites studies already done, this is an important issue regarding the education system and must be studied further. When teachers are reported to be unable to see their own biases, then it becomes harder to trust that the classroom is a fair place for the education of all the students. In the wake of academic effects such as No Child Left Behind, it is crucial to research classroom interactions with regards to equality and bias.

Thoughts on Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

                It would appear that the author disagrees with the so-called “blank-slate” model of education in which students are empty vessels that must be filled with information by a teacher. This model of education does not take into account the experiences that each student comes into the classroom with. Even if each student belongs to the same dominant culture, the experiences that each student has will have an effect on how they relate to the information being provided to them. This means that not every student will not take the information provided in a uniform way. Freire finds it illogical to require students, whom have had so many experiences, to sit and listen without actively considering the information provided. “The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what four times four really means. . . .”. Providing for students a large amount of information does not equate to their learning because it does not accurately gauge their understanding of it. What assessments do in this sort of situation is simply to test memorization. Simple memorization and repetition are not learning; they can be tools to help the learning process, but they are not learning itself.

                Humans explore, question, and tinker with the world around them, and because of that, models of education which fit this idea fair far better in Freire’s mind. The students should not be patient vessels for the knowledge of a higher power, but true thinkers who interrogate and compute the information that they find around them. In short, this older though often times still used method of learning is not natural, and destroys the natural curiosity that humans possess. If the authoritative figure fades from the classroom and instead is replaced by a community dedicated to actively learning about the world, then students will be truly treated as human beings.

Thoughts on "A Response Based Approach to Reading Literature"

Reading this article along with the previous two has made me realize a concept that each author is trying to voice through the writing: the classroom is not made up of a bunch of empty slates being fed information from a teacher; but rather, the classroom is a collection of minds that learn, share and think about each other's ideas. The response based approach in this article is another representation of this idea because it does not focus on the text itself. Instead, this approach focuses on the student's interpretation of the text, and because there are multiple students, the potential for multiple interpretations is raised. This creates a discussion that is defined in "Discussion as a Way of Teaching." This discussion will then be used to "Encourage students to develop their own well-formed interpretations and gain vision from others'. There is more than one way to interpret any piece of literature" (7). This gives the opportunity to compare each interpretation, which leads to further clarification and evidence gathering to complete the discussion. The teacher is not so much the leader; but rather, the facilitator of such a discussion. Ultimately the greater goal of such a classroom would be the students supporting their own interpretation with evidence, and comparing their ideas with the ideas of others. With each discussion brings multiple interpretations with further support and this increases the overall understanding of the literature.

Common Core State Standards

I think that one of the largest challenges that an education system faces is the balance between standards and individual classrooms. The Common Core State Standards projects itself as standards without the intention of creating complete standardization. One of the benefits of these standards is that children and parents will be able to understand where they are in their education, even if they were to change schools. However, at the same time, each classroom should be arranged to fit the students that are currently learning in it; or rather, the classroom could be arranged as the teacher feels is needed for the student’s education. Therefore, to overcome this apparent contradiction in ideals, The Common Core State Standards shows off its versatility by allowing the teacher freedom to pick materials and methods in which to teach and assess the abilities that Common Core requires.

                The CCSS explicitly states that the goal is not standardization, but rather, setting high standards in which the teacher is given the flexibility to guide the students to those standards as they see fit.  “The needs, abilities, knowledge base, and interests of teachers and students vary from school to school, from classroom to classroom, and even within every classroom – they cannot be standardized” The CCSS also describes ways of teaching students an otherwise standard lesson, such as the argumentative essay, by using methods that the students find interesting and feel comfortable with. For example, the ability to create online aliases to write and share the essays on a particular topic not only is realistic, given that aliases are common on the internet, but also great for reducing the anxiety a student may feel about sharing their opinion with their peers.

                Ultimately the students are the whole reason the classroom even exists, so it is vital that it reflects the student’s needs. Common Core is honest in the fact that they acknowledge the very real challenge of economic inequality and multiculturalism (or a lack thereof). It would appear that the goal of the CCSS is to create a system of standards that can be molded to the student’s needs but maintaining the same as any other school. It is easier said than done, but it would appear that CCSS has acknowledged the larger challenges.

Reading Response to "Discussion as a Way of Teaching"

I have many different thoughts after reading chapters 1 and 2 from Discussion as a Way of Teaching by Stephen Brookfield. Throughout the reading I kept asking myself how a teacher could direct a conversation in such a classroom as presented in the text. This may not seem like the right question to ask because the text itself states on page 19 that “‘guided discussion’ – if that phrase is taken to mean that students will be guided during the discussion to learn certain content – is an oxymoron.” This statement may be true, if the text’s definition of “discussion” is maintained. However, if the teacher is trying to teach something very specific, I can understand how frustrating such an idea may seem. Later, I went back and reread the text to see if I could find an answer to why this statement feels wrong to me, and I found a piece which I believe may solve it. The issue is not with the method that the text describes, but rather due to a jab at what I would consider another teaching tool, which is what “guided discussion” is.

                On page 19, right above the very sentence that I questioned, the text claims that discussion is not suited to teaching facts and truths that have already been defined. The text apparently disagrees with the idea of “guided discussion” because it is guided only toward a specific idea. As an example of this, the Earth orbits the Sun, and no amount of discussion is going to change this. However, I believe there are situations where a student may have a different way of looking at a fact, or a fact may bring up another related idea. These ideas, no matter how trivial in appearance, I think can help other people to look at the universe in multiple ways. Just because something is treated as fact does not mean it is absolute and thus not up for discussion. A fact is something that has not been proved wrong, and if we are not giving students the opportunity to understand how it has not been proved wrong, then we are doing them a disservice. I believe that such opportunities can be given by discussion, even though it may be guided toward teaching a specific fact.