My pedagogical goals
Posted by: revivingenglish on: February 22, 2010
- In: Curriculum | Ed Theory | Goals | Inspiration | pedagogy | Planning | Thinking aloud
- Leave a Comment
So, I’ve been subbing with The Substitute Teacher Service for a few weeks now and trying to use my downtime usefully. While sitting in other peoples’ classrooms during prep periods I’ve been thinking a lot about backward curriculum design (See Understanding By Design by Wiggins and McTighe for the low-down on backward design). Backward curriculum design hinges on the idea that teachers should design instruction while always keeping the “end” in mind, through the formulation of essential questions and goals. Read the rest of this entry »
Making graphic organizers work for you (and your students!)
Posted by: revivingenglish on: February 22, 2010
I’ve been poking around this book for a while now. It’s full of lots of useful approaches for working with dependent and struggling readers (and ways to help teachers recognize the variety of ways that these students can slip through the cracks). When Kids Can’t Read utilizes (among many other tools/ideas) many different kinds of graphic organizers to provide structure for these struggling readers, who may look at a text and not know how to begin making heads or tails of it. And then this post at Tim Fredrick’s ELA Teaching Blog got me thinking. He says (among other things):
- They don’t push the students’ critical thinking.
- They limit thoughts and responses.
- They represent ideas in one graphical manner, which may not make sense to everyone.
…Just giving them blank graphic organizers to fill out isn’t going to teach them how to figure out what type of graphic organizer to use for a particular text. We have to teach students about different graphic organizers, what kinds of texts to use them for, and how to draw them to suit the text. This is a lot more than just filling out a chart. It is recognizing text structures and forms. It is evaluating the best way to represent information – which helps students process the information.
I visualize struggling readers approaching text as if it’s an unwieldy slug-monster. Graphic organizers, in a sense, can help give a text (slug-monster) a bone structure. Which, yeah, immediately, sends off red flags in my brain. If I, as the teacher, want to put a structure (back) into a text, who’s to say that I’m giving it the right one, or the one that makes the most sense to the student (see Fredrick’s caveats above)? Of course, this kind of structuring is limiting. It stomps on creativity and also on the possibility of promoting critical thinking. But wait. Read the rest of this entry »
Interest and Writing: Part I, squaring away the variables
Posted by: revivingenglish on: February 21, 2010
When English teachers dream, we dream of interested writers. They are the students who invest themselves in writing, who carefully consider the structure of their arguments, who care about crafting a sentence. When we look around our classrooms, however, we find a mix of students, only some of them interested in writing.
from “Interest for writing: how teachers can make a difference” by Lipstein & Renninger (2007)
I would go even further, though, and say that apparently none of the students seem interested in the kind of analytical, academic writing that is commonplace in the high school English class. I remember vividly the first day I introduced my ninth graders to their first Odyssey essay, and it was met by a chorus of groans, followed by a lengthy struggle to get them on board. So, thus far there are two questions at hand: Is it the case that students dread any and all forms of writing, or just what they perceive to be the stale writing options that are called for at school? And, second, how can teachers find and draw on students’ existing interest(s) to make academic writing a little less like pulling teeth? Read the rest of this entry »
And so it begins
Posted by: revivingenglish on: February 16, 2010
But there are also other kinds of teachers: those without a sense of agency, those who impose inarticulateness on students who seem alien and whose voices teachers prefer not to hear. Yet the eager teachers do appear and reappear–teachers who provoke learners to pose their own questions, to teach themselves, to go at their own pace, to name their worlds. Young learners have to be noticed, it is now being realized; they have to be consulted; they have to question why.
from Maxine Greene’s Releasing the Imagination
This quotation from the very beginning of Releasing the Imagination has stuck with me since I encountered it in an Educational Policy course. My professor began and ended the course with readings from this book, I assume, to inspire us as we trudged through weeks of reading about the frustrations and problems in our public education system. I think it was a perfect start, and so I sample it here.
I am an English teacher at the very start of my career. I plan on using this blog to organize my thoughts and to keep track of the billion tiny pieces of information that I have encountered (and have yet to encounter) at the beginning of this journey. It sounds hokey to call my life slash my career a journey. I want to remain down to earth and I want to be sure that I have useful information at my fingertips once I’m enmeshed in this whole teaching thing. Read the rest of this entry »
