Backward design in a few simple steps:

1. Formulate essential questions and enduring understandings.  What would you like your students to be able to do and understand by the end of your unit/semester/program?  These are not meant to be super content-specific, but, rather, long-ranging “deep” ideas that should undergird your entire instructional program.  These can be specific to your unit or much more general.  Further, there can (should) be essential questions/enduring understandings at the lesson level, unit level, and curriculum level.  Think of those nested Matryoshka dolls: your goals at each level should fit within one another.
2. Assessment: How will you be able to tell that your students have reached these enduring understandings?  How can you measure/assess authentic understanding?
3. Activities/Tasks: What tasks and activities can prepare your students to demonstrate mastery/authentic understanding? (Importantly, backward design is usually not based on content first, but, instead, skills and general, deep ideas that emanate from study in your discipline.)
4. Differentiation: How can you tailor your activities to meet the needs of and engage your particular group of learners?

So, I began to think about my goals as an English teacher.  It’s interesting that without specific content/literature to ground these goals, I’ve been able to think more broadly, about how English works as a discipline.  What do I want my students to understand about English literature from their experiences in my classroom?

I came up with lots of general goals, which I grouped into three categories: academic goals, behavioral/social goals, and “metacognitive” goals.  Again, like the Russian nesting dolls, these goals fit within one another.

• Academic goals (THE “WHAT”) are the most content-based goals.  I would define these generally as the practices of the discipline and content-based knowledge that equip students to think about and work with literature specifically.SOME OF THESE GOALS: process writing, grammar, literature content knowledge, vocabulary fluency, literary movements, important figures, patterns, and cultural movements
• Behavioral/social goals (THE “HOW”) are the “dispositions” and behaviors that enable students to be successful learners.SOME OF THESE GOALS: cooperation, groupwork, empathy, speaking, listening, presentation, thinking critically, inquiry, questioning, social responsibility
• “Metacognitive” goals (THE “WHY”) are the self-regulation and reflection skills that enable students to understand themselves as learners, set their own goals, and create and use strategies for success.SOME OF THESE GOALS: goal setting, self-assessment, self-regulation, reflection on progress, identifying mistakes, teaching others, understanding learning processes, identifying/evaluating strategies for problem-solving

When I think about my goals, I try to always keep in mind that I want my students to walk away from my classroom with skills that they can apply in other circumstances.  I want them to have grown as learners and to have a “toolkit” of strategies and, most of all, to understand what these strategies mean and how they work.  Academic goals are the “smallest” goals in terms of scope, and I think that these are the ones that kids most quickly forget after they leave the classroom.  I remember reading The Great Gatsby in high school, for example, and I remember what it’s about, but I’m not sure that our study really gave me anything to take away.

My point in writing this post is not to pretend that I have all of the answers (or even most of them).  My point is that I think it’s hugely important for teachers to keep the “end” and the big picture in mind at all times.  And the first step along that path is to figure out what the big picture is in the first place.  It’s a crime to forget to leave time to reflect and consider your place in the grand old scheme of things.  In the thick of planning and surviving your every day life, this can feel next to impossible.  But take the time–it’s worth it.  And it will help you to keep your teaching focused toward lasting skills for your students.

1. They don’t push the students’ critical thinking.
2. They limit thoughts and responses.
3. 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.I wholeheartedly agree with the three limits of graphic organizers that Fredrick points out in his post.  But I also see these three limits as reasons to use graphic organizers sparingly, and only as needed.  The idea of teaching students how to recognize the structure of information in a text and also how to best represent it graphically is intriguing, and sounds like a really great idea.  But the whole problem in the first place is that kids can’t make sense of the text that the graphic organizer is meant to help with.  I think that, at this point, it becomes a matter of priority.  In general, ready-made graphic organizers are a crutch, and they fill a very specific purpose, which is scaffolding a student to take a slug-monster of information fit it into a structure.  So that they first recognize that there is a structure.  Which, I believe, comes long before they can create this structure themselves.

As a kid in high school I made “graphic organizers” while I read my AP Biology text book.  It wasn’t something someone told me to do, and I wasn’t really aware that I was doing it, but I think that that ability to take in information, process it, and reorganize it into a structure that intuitively made sense to me, was a large part of why I was so successful at playing the school game.  But I recognize now, too, that that is a pretty advanced skill (which, I think, grew out of my embarrassing obsession with organizing and reorganizing my belongings and school supplies).  I don’t think that it’s a skill we can take for granted.

I digress, but what I think I’m trying to say is that the order for this whole graphic organizer process feels a little like potty training to me.  To use another odd and stretched metaphor.  First, you allow the use of pre-fab graphic organizers.  Yes, with one possible answer.  One correct way to fill in the blocks.  To sort of model the fact that text can fit into an organized structure.  And second, you begin to remove the training wheels only once the content is accessible (because that’s the whole point, isn’t it?).  You invite your kids to take this information that they now have one structured way of thinking about, and present it in a new way, themselves.  You model other ways of representing information (various ways, exciting ways… nongraphical, nonlinear ways).  I think that this second skill is much more difficult than it sounds. That being said, I also think it’s much more valuable.  Makes me think about that proverb: you give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day.  You teach him to fish, he’ll eat for the rest of his life.  So, guys, let’s teach our kids to fish.  After they know what fish taste and look like.

And now I’m motivated to think about this whole thing more.  What are the cognitive processes involved in asking kids to organize and represent information another way?  And, developmentally, when can we expect kids to be able to do this?  As a high school teacher, I should mostly be OK.  In terms of good old Bloom, we’re definitely pushing level 2 (maybe 3 and 4).  So now I have some homework.

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?

First things first: let’s talk about interest. As it turns out, the way that we talk about interest in everyday speech is a bit different from the way that educational psychologists conceive of things.  We talk about being interested in something–as in, “I’m interested in baseball,” or “I’m really interested in finding out why Hurley never lost weight after being on that island for 6 years.”  The way that we use interest in everyday speech implies that our interests are static, almost like personality traits.  We are or are not interested in something, and if we’re not, we most likely will not change our minds and become interested in it.  However, interest, as a “scientific” motivational variable, is different creature entirely.

I think that we realize that in the classroom it’s a little different, and that we can find ways to engage our students and to win them over.  We try to find exciting ways to make learning relevant in order to do just that.  So if we start to think about how interest really works, and how we can support it to develop, we can more easily find concrete strategies to get our kids interested in writing (and make English teachers’ dreams come true).

I think a great place to start is listening to the people who’ve done the research.  Hidi & Renninger’s (2006) work on interest (as well as their earlier work and the literature that they build on) defines interest as a “predisposition to reengage content over time.”  Most importantly, interest is a variable which can be developed (or supported to develop).  Interest exists in what they call “phases”–four phases to be exact.  Importantly, interest is not a static trait, as most of us mistakenly believe, at least in terms of its implications for teaching and learning.  What does this mean?  This means that being interested in baseball, painting, whatever, means different things to different people, and also means different things to the same person at different stages of interest.  Okay.  So that’s a lot to take in.  Bear with me.

The phases of interest include:

1. Triggered situational interest
2. Maintained situational interest
3. Emerging individual interest
4. Well-developed individual interest

Now, let’s talk about each, in turn.  The first phase, triggered situational interest, refers to a state in which interest is sparked by some kind of surprising new information that inspires an individual to find out more.  Maybe you’ve just learned something about a celebrity that you can personally relate to and you’re motivated to do a quick Google search to find out more.  BAM.  Triggered situational interest.

Maintained situational interest refers to the continued predisposition to reengage the content.  This basically means that you’re interested enough in this celebrity’s life (or whatever) that you are motivated to persist in searching for information to absorb.  You go through all of Perez Hilton’s archives about this particular person, maybe across several different days.

The next phase, emerging individual interest, refers to a more “enduring” predisposition, or tendency, to engage the content over time.  You might go and rent every movie that Celebrity X has had a part of and watch them all.  Seek out some documentary, too.  This celebrity example is beginning to be a stretch.

The final phase, well-developed individual interest, is characterized by a long-term predisposition to engage the content area.  In this phase of interest, a learner can generate/direct his own learning opportunities and explore freely without the need of external support.

Let’s pause here for some important clarification.  These descriptions are brief and admittedly a bit vague.  It will all make a little more sense once we get to the writing portion of the post, so keep on reading.  It is important to keep in mind that as interest deepens (or progresses in its development through the phases), learners participate differently in the gathering of information, pursuit of skills, or completion of tasks.  Engagement looks different at different phases of interest.  Further, as interest deepens, so do stored knowledge and positive feelings toward the content.  Thus, the more interested a person is in a particular subject, the more they know about it and the more they “like” it.  This intuitively makes sense, yes? At different phases of interest, an individual is “equipped” with certain tools, and these tools change as interest changes.  Okay.

Some “rules”:

• Engagement looks different at different phases of interest.  In other words, a person who has a “well-developed individual interest” for American literature, for example, will be able to explore freely and meaningfully, while an individual with only “triggered situational interest” for the same will not.
• As interest deepens, so does stored knowledge
• As interest deepens, so do positive feelings
• Interest development (i.e. progression through the four phases of interest) is “pushed along” by environmental factors and support, and opportunities for challenge and reengagement.
• Individuals at earlier phases of interest require more external support and guidance than individuals at later phases of interest

Phew.  So, finally, let’s talk about writing.  By this point, we should have abandoned the conception of interest as a static, unchangeable “character trait” in a person.  Meaning that just because you have a classroom of students who are “not interested” in writing, it doesn’t mean that their interest for writing cannot be supported to develop.  Again, this should make sense to any teacher.  Once you find a way to trigger their interest, once you help students to find a way into the content, you’ve struck gold.  The best part is, it’s science.  The key is to figure out, for your particular group of young learners, what exactly can trigger their interest for writing.

Interest and Writing: Part II will discuss the phases of interest in the context of writing, specifically.

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.During this time of transition, there are some things that I feel sure of (some are bigger than others):

1. I want to be sure that in teaching others I never stop learning.
2. Teaching is now and always should be an exciting, problem-solving process.
3. Job hunting is an unpleasant side-effect of beginning your professional life.  Selling yourself is uncomfortable but necessary.
4. Cooperation and collaboration (between students and teachers, among students themselves, among colleagues) are immensely important aspects of teaching.
5. If I feel like I have a new idea, there are probably 1,000 others who have already had the same epiphanies that I’ve had.  And bigger, and better.
6. Reading can be scary.
7. Feeling stupid is even more scary.  And teachers/parents/classrooms/schools/peers/others make one another feel stupid far more often than is necessary.
8. Every stakeholder in education, from the tippity top to the bottomest bottom has an important voice that must be heard.  Hearing these voices and incorporating the ideas of people from the top to the bottom is the surest way to improve the odds for our kids.
9. I don’t know everything.  Teachers don’t know everything.  No one knows everything.  And the sooner that we all accept this, the better off we’ll all be.
10. I hope that I can spend the bulk of my professional life remembering not to get lazy, and taking the opportunities and experience that I’ve had (and been given) to improve myself and my practice every day.
11. It is important to talk, and keep talking, with everyone around you in order to work through your own ideas and to learn everything that you can.
12. Knowledge is power.  Very few people are given access to this power. My job is to provide my students with access to opportunities that allow them to become strong, independent, powerful young people.

So I have started this blog.  I have big plans in my mind that I hope I can keep up with.  I want to sort of reflect on the theoretical frameworks I’ve encountered as well as the experiences that I’ve had in classrooms and mush all of this together in a way that is useful for me as a new teacher (and could someday be useful to others as new teachers).  Ambitious, yes.  But also necessary.  I process information through talking and writing about it, so this makes sense to me.

I’m interested in teaching young people to question their world.  I’m interested in utilizing technology to enhance instruction.  I’m interested in finding out what my students are interested in and going from there.  I’m interested in problem-solving, adapting, and growing as a person and an educator.  I’m interested in thinking about the ways that we organize teaching and learning in our schools, and thinking about whether there could be a better way to get all of this done.  Sometimes the easiest way or the most efficient way is not the most effective.  And sometimes often, tradition prevails over reason, especially in schools.

So, off we go.  Let’s get this thing started.