Daniels and Zemelman Chapter 11- Struggling Readers

Daniels and Zemelman Chapter 11- Struggling Readers

I am so glad that this chapter is in here: this is most definitely one of my weaker points. I learned to read at a very young age, and read a great deal as a child, so reading has always sort of been easy for me. Emily brought up in her blog that for many teachers, reading is an easy task, and I think she's right. Many of the people who desire to be teachers are ones who had a good experience with teachers, and I think that teachers are partial to students who already have the needed skills.

I THINK THAT THIS IS A TRAGEDY AND NEEDS TO BE ADDRESSED.

The very fact that reading (as well as many other school-related tasks) are easy for teachers and may be what compelled them to become teachers is, I think, extremely telling. If you had a good experience with a teacher, in a lot of cases (I won't say most) it's because you came into the class with the skills you needed to be good at it. To me, this is terrifying, and I think D&Z comment a bit on this throughout the chapter. I think their focus on effective reader strategies is a way of them reaching out to teachers and saying that things need to be changed, and that if we want a whole class of engaged, compelled readers, then we can't just focus on those who already know how to read.

I want to break this to talk about a teacher that really got me into becoming a teacher. When I started college, I had very little idea what I wanted to do with my life and my career. I didn't do great in high school, but this was mainly due to my lack of interest in completing homework and doing anything that felt like busywork. I began college as a Linguistics major (I'll bet you didn't know they even had one of those). While linguistics is still of great interest to me, I had very little idea of what I would even do or would want to do with that. My very first college class, and my very first college professor, is the person who started my movement toward becoming an English educator.

This was just a Writing 100 class, required by all students, and he is still one of the best professors/ teachers/ educators I have ever had. I took another class with him a few semesters later and he was still great, and he is definitely a big figure in who I want to be as an educator. Why I think he is relevant and important to this topic is that he was leading a class of people who were not English majors, taking a gen ed course, with a relatively basic reading level. Yet he found ways to use shorter, simpler texts to engage some really deep and thoughtful conversation, as well as some of the better and more creative papers I have ever read. I have been in many English courses since then, and while the general writing level is much higher than in this Writing 100 course, the papers are generally at the same level of thoughtfulness and creativity. I am still so impressed and moved by his passion and care for a small class of students who did not care about writing, and his ability to use fairly simple texts to spark fairly complex conversation.

Book Clubs and Content-Area Reading

Chapter 9 dealt primarily with content area book clubs, a way of making reading accessible in disciplines other than English. As an future English teacher, I don't feel I can really comment on this fully, because I don't know the demands of a History or Biology or Geometry class. (This is not to say that a book club is not useable or useful for an English classroom, it's just that there is usually a good deal of reading in an English classroom already.)

What I do know is that reading is an important tool for students to have. Reading books on a subject that might otherwise be inaccessible, dry, or too difficult for a student may very well help them to master a concept or appreciate a topic in a way they might not have previously. I think that friendlier, more accessible language is key to this being a success in the classroom; if the book is inaccessible to students (much like those bad textbooks), and if reading them is too difficult, then nothing has really been accomplished. Struggling with a text is important, but it's a fine line between struggling and giving up entirely. You have to gauge your students ability and work ethic when it comes to difficulty in texts.

I also want to push the importance of writing in the classroom, and not just the English classroom. Writing is an extremely important tool for students; anyone, really. Reading is important, but it is too often a passive activity. I think this can and needs to be rethought, but I also think that writing is a key component to student engagement. It needs to be the English teacher's role to show students how to write, but that's not the only place that writing should be happening. And while in my experience there was a great deal of writing going on in my History classes as well, it was heavily prompted, specific-knowledge-driven writing. What I mean by this is that there was little to no student choice in writing, and the only knowledge needed to succeed in these essays was to know a small, specific set of recently-learned information.

This makes writing a passive activity as well. Information passes from the text to the essay, with no student mediating the transaction.  This makes writing a chore rather than a tool, and I have to stress its importance as a tool. Writing allows you to take your thoughts and ideas and make them readable for everyone else around you.

This may well have only been my experience, but regardless I ask that we use reading and writing in every classroom. And again, I do not know the specific needs and demands and handicaps of every classroom, both in a general content-area way and a specific individual-classroom way. I don't even know the specific needs and demands of an English classroom, really. Or any classroom.

Let me just say, then: Reading and writing cannot be a chore for students. They cannot be passive information-gathering techniques or passive information-regurgitation techniques.

(And lastly: I know it's become pretty cliché to use the word "regurgitate" when talking about students mindlessly retrieving information, but it's just such a visceral word, right? It's too good not to use.)

RAFTing vs. the Dark Side

RAFTing vs. the Dark Side

While the Darth Vader bit was a tad on the nose, it presents a very real image of high school and middle school classrooms. These are places where writing assignments are used as punishment, where lengthy reports come without any instruction, collaboration, or point other than the hope that a student might find it interesting. Which they don't.

I think some of the best questions teachers can ask themselves is: Would I enjoy doing this? Would I be interested in this? Would this make me think differently?

If the answer is no, then it's probably not a terribly useful assignment. Teachers tend to assign things because they think it is necessary, and I think a lot of teachers don't bother to think about what it is they're even assessing when they give out assignments. If you're not sure what an assignment helps you to assess, don't give it. Wait, think about what it is you want to assess, and come up with a better assignment. If you're not sure what an assignment is going to do to help you or the students, don't give it.

Of course, it's easy enough for me to say all of these things from my internet pedestal. Here's what I can say: I think that RAFTing, combined with backward design, is a very strong method to keep ourselves in check. It's very easy to slip into a pattern of giving easy, pointless, or vague assignments, and all of these things demotivate students. I have to imagine they demotivate teachers, too. And why bother being inefficient if you don't have to be?

Right now, I don't know what it's going to be like as a teacher. I know it will be hard. I know that I will be critical. And I know that the RAFT design will be useful to me. I hope teachers everywhere at least try and use this method.

D & Z Reading 4: Textbook Hatred

D & Z Reading 4: Textbook Hatred



What textbooks can feel like. Source: http://xkcd.com/971/ .



 

So, evidently, Daniels and Zemelman don't like textbooks. I think a lot of students aren't very fond of textbooks, either. They're bulky, the information is cluttered, and most of all, they're boring. And while perhaps the teachers today aren't fond of them for their price and supposed authority over information, it seems to me that my teachers were perfectly fine with using them.

To me, textbooks are useful tools for teachers to use and draw from, but not to just hand out to students and assign large portions for reading. There are passages from textbooks (as well as passages from other texts) that can be very useful, and I think D & Z are a bit too harsh on them. However, I think that we need to be extremely critical of textbook authority. This Newsweek article has some good points about some really bad textbooks. http://www.newsweek.com/2014/10/03/textbook-case-bad-textbooking-texas-272351.html

I think it's too easy to just say that textbooks are all bad or mostly bad. For the most part, I think they are generally pretty inefficient, outdated, and occasionally just wrong. But I think it's more useful to look towards what we could be doing with textbooks. Textbooks are, in their purest form, just an organization of a broad range of materials on a few topics that some people decided were important for students to know. This is exactly like what a curriculum is! The problem is that the agenda of a textbook and the agenda of a classroom don't always match up. So we need to be careful not to rely on textbooks, and we have to always be aware that they can be wrong. But they also have a broad range of materials, and this can be beneficial for teachers to increase the repertoire of materials that they are comfortable with and can draw from.

The other major problem I have with textbooks, though, is the fact that they present a version of history, and this version tends to ignore certain people or viewpoints. We have to always remember that textbook does not equal pure and equal truth, and that they tend to revise history in a way that propels only certain viewpoints. I think that educators in History and Social Studies are generally pretty aware of this, but English teachers are not necessarily as aware of this. The texts that editors of textbooks choose to put forth, as well as the commentary they choose to use for these texts, is a version of history, and it may very well be one that is racist, or denies the history of another people.

We need to be cautious with textbooks, but they can be valuable resources.


Backward Design and Understanding by Design

UbD and Backward Design

I found the chapter on UbD to be pretty useful: it fits in perfectly with the way I want to teach, and it also fits in with everything else we've learned so far in our SED courses. Backward design is interesting in that it is both useful for teachers, and also useful for those pesky tests that our society loves so much. If you start with an objective in mind, an ending point, and then work out how to get there, you'll always stay on track, and everything in a lesson will point toward your objective. If you don't, you may end up falling back on bad teaching strategies with no way to catch back up.



Pictured: What happens if you have no plan (Source: xkcd.com/1106)

To me, though, this chapter felt somewhat like review. I don't know if this is because we have already been inadvertently taught backward design, or if this just seems to be an intuitive idea. I have to imagine it's the first one; our lesson plan templates are already set up to work like this. With so much focus in SED 406 on sticking to a clear objective, backward design seems like something we've already learned.

The UbD modules are very useful when it comes to a definition of a seemingly simple word: understanding. At first, "understanding" feels like an easy word to define, but try it yourself: we know the word more through context than we do through actual knowledge of the concept. We know that understanding is different than just knowledge, but it's difficult to fully define such an broad concept. I think that when it comes down to it, "understanding" something is knowing it well enough that you could explain it to someone else, or knowing it well enough that you could do it. And I think this is one of the things we don't expect students to do: actually perform their knowledge. We certainly expect them to perform on a test, but we never actually ask them to do anything with their knowledge except regurgitate it back to us on tests.

Cooking as a Literacy

Cooking as a Literacy

            When we talk about “literacy”, we typically refer to a student’s ability to read and write. However, a literacy simply refers to competence or knowledge in a specific area. Over the last few years, partially through necessity, I’ve picked up a cooking “literacy”. Because my mother is so sick with Lyme disease, and has had it for so long, I have had to take on some of her responsibility. One of the ways I’ve had to do so is in cooking. I cook on a regular basis for my family, and I like to believe that I’m getting pretty good at it. I have been doing so for at least the past 5 years, and I am increasingly more satisfied and proud of my results. My influence is, of course, my mother’s cooking: she was essentially my teacher, through her cooking and through her instruction.

            The impact that this literacy has had on my life is huge. On the most basic level, it’s a skill that will help me when I am on my own. It is a skill that will help me to survive, and also one that helps me to enjoy and understand food. I also like to think of it as a skill that saves money: not having to buy processed or prepared foods and making them yourself is always cheaper. However, I think that cooking has a much larger impact on my life and future than just simply the ability to cook. Cooking is a bridge between cultures and people; whether we realize it or not, the things that we choose to eat say something about who we are and what we value. Cooking leads our present to a long traditional past. Italian food is not just food, it is a community of shared values.

Of course, in our current world, we can sample any kind of food we wish, separate from the context that it came from. I could head to Providence and try Vietnamese, Ethiopian, and Lebanese food all in the same day without any knowledge about Ethiopia, or Vietnam, or Lebanon. I think as we look at what we cook and eat, we can start to understand our pasts as well as our present. I think cooking in particular lends itself to a greater understanding of food. Eating is certainly an aspect of understanding food, but actually preparing it gives you a greater understanding and appreciation of all of the aspects of a dish. Cooking itself is just a useful task, too. I’ve never been very good at multitasking, and cooking is one of the things that I’ve gotten good enough at that I can multitask without much trouble. Cooking is at times inexact, at other times precise and scientific. It forces you to pay attention to too many things at the same time. At times, you must make sure everything happens perfectly, and at times you just have to sit back and let things happen. It’s a skill that forces you to be patient, yet forces you to pay close attention.

            I really think having any non-educational literacy is very important and can be very useful as a teacher. On the most basic level, it allows you to form a human bond with students who may have the same interests or literacies as you. A shared literacy creates an instant community around an understanding of how to do a task. I’m not trying to say that I expect many (or any) of my students to be able to cook, but food is an extremely important part of all of our lives. We spend so much time enjoying food, or perhaps just simply going through the motions, but food is what allows us to do what we do. I don’t think cooking necessarily has any kind of direct effect on my teaching, but I think that the experience as a whole has helped to make me who I am, and so it has had an effect on everything. When we begin to look at the literacies that our students may have, too, we can better understand and help them learn in an educational setting. All students can and do learn: when we can tap into the power of their literacies, we can use their knowledge to help them build new knowledge.

RITELL Conference 2014

RITELL Conference 2014: Strengths, Weaknesses

I attended the RITELL (Rhode Island Teachers of English Language Learners) Conference this year at RIC, and I'm ambivalent about what I found there.

Firstly, it must be said that it was more difficult for me to find anything that might relate to my classroom because it appears as though RITELL is more oriented towards elementary school. The highest grade level that anything was advertised to be for was 6th grade. And I can appreciate this; I'm the first one to say that we need to be targeting ELL's sooner rather than later, and that we need to be looking at kids who are behind in reading levels before it really starts to be problematic. Still, it seems a waste to have an entire ELL conference and not include anything that might relate to middle or high school.

But the real problem I had with this conference was not this; the presenters, to me, were far more problematic. While an excellent speaker, D.H. Figueredo spent as much time explaining the process of writing a book as he did saying anything that an educator could use. His book is very good, and he's a good speaker (and he seems like a pretty nice guy) but it seemed to me like his speech would be very good for informing people on how to get into publishing their own book. And I'm not saying that he should get up in front of us and tell teachers what they should be doing; we can draw our own conclusions from evidence. But there was argument to be made, there was nothing to be gleaned from his speech that might even apply to teaching. Sure, if you're an elementary educator, you can use his book and that's lovely, but you didn't need to listen to him for an hour to figure out that he has a pretty great book.

Still, my frustration with the conference has more to do with the other presentation that I went to. There were 3 going on at the same time; some others in my class and I split up between two of them so that we could explain what happened to each other and gain as much knowledge as possible. From what they told me, it appears that their presentation was essentially along the same lines as the one I attended.

The presentation I went to was called "Engaging ELL's with Culturally Diverse Authors and Themes", which seems good enough to me. There's no problem with the title; I was interested going in. However, the presentation ended up being about an hour of 3 speakers essentially giving book reviews of about 12 books they had in front of them, organized into 3 groups based on ethnicity. On one level, this was useful, because at least I know now that there are, indeed, Cambodian-American texts that I can use in a classroom. My problem is that I could have learned as much from a handout with a list of resources.

I have to trust in these people that these texts do, in fact, engage ELL's, because there wasn't any evidence saying that they would. I'm willing to believe that they will, especially if the books are about their own culture, but this wasn't even brought up. There was no, "So, therefore, use literature that pertains to the culture of your students, because it's out there." Even that would have made me feel better. It was just one book after another, telling the plot of each of them, giving us character synopses...I found it painful, and not all that useful. It is especially troubling that I spent, what, $35 dollars to listen to book reviews?

I was just disappointed. I didn't really gain very much from the experience; I knew going into it that using texts that match the culture of the students can be useful in getting them engaged and excited about reading. It can also give them a world of texts they didn't know existed. If I didn't know this going in, then hey, maybe I'd have learned something.