I’d like to create a space on our blog for us to take up an iquiry stance toward our teaching. What questions bubble up for you as you think about your classes. Maybe it’s something nagging like ID’s or texting–”How am I dealing with texting in the classroom?” Maybe it’s curricular…why do I always teach To Kill a Mockingbird(or photosynthesis or genetics or WW II or whatever) first semester? Maybe it’s a look at the difference between assigning and teaching…what’s the difference between assigning writing and teaching writing?
The inquiry I’m tackling this semester is how I can use literature to challenge students…to examine assumptions we hold about the world and our place in it. How can I see and teach, and help students see, literature as something more than just content to be delivered.
For me, that starts with the kinds of questions I ask. My seniors have recently read some short stories about war–Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” and Earnest Hemingway’s “Soldier’s Home.” A better question to come from this reading is, how do we know it’s glorious to fight and die for your country? Do Tim O’Brien, Earnest Hemingway, Wilfred Owen agree?
As the semester unfolds, I’ll post more on what I notice and wonder about my class and my teaching. I invite you to do the same and to react and think about what I (what we) post).
Jeff
Jeff, my son, invited me to contribute. Although I’m not in the classroom now, I was for 28.5 years. I’m still interested.
A former colleague ticked me off recently during email discussions of educational philosophy. We were talking about what kids succeed and what kids don’t and why. She referred to successful students as “Smart” kids and unsuccessful kids as “dumb” kids.
What she was trying to say was “smart” kids know how to manage the system and “dumb” kids don’t, or won’t.
I wonder if that is true. Can it be that simple?
My sense is the general approach of public education is too limited. Because our time, resources, and energies are limited and controlled by factors we (classroom teachers) cannot control. We are compelled to use selective techniques and apply them to almost all students. Is that true and can anything be done about it?
Don Hudson
Mr. Hudson, we have a great example of opportunity at AHS concerning the “smart and dumb” kids you mentioned. At the end of semester one, eighteen of our sophomores were moved to an honors class. It wasn’t because they learned the system; it was because the classroom teachers recognized a spark and potential in them. Unfortunately, we don’t always look for that spark as often as we should. These teachers should be commended for their observations. I do think you have a valid point – that students are sometimes labeled according to their ability to “play the game.” That’s how I felt in some of my college classes. I hope we are moving away from this notion quickly.
Jeff asked us to read an article for Wednesday’s meeting. Unfortunately, I have a conflict and cannot attend, so I will post my comments here. The David Kelley article first reminds me of Randy Pausch. The similarities are amazing right down to the Carnegie Mellon University connection. I cannot fathom this level of creativity. As I read this, I was thinking about the assessment of writing in my classroom. I am still struggling with the marking of grammar mistakes instead of focusing on the ideas expressed. I try very diligently to work on both as I evaluate the students’ writings, but I need more training in how to get them to add more creativity and details to their work. So often when I give them a writing assignment, I get complaints that it is too challenging and impossible. Then the products they give me often are very good. I need suggestions on how to build their confidence. When I read the Procter and Gamble example about how the return to work took them right back to the old ideas of marketing, I thought about all of the workshops I have attended with great ideas; however, when I return to the classroom, those ideas just seem to get lost in the daily routine. As I thought about this entry, a technique I learned over the summer for teaching creativity came to mind. I plan to use this in class on Thursday, so I’ll let you know how it works. The concept is the metaphor bag. It will give my students a chance to be very creative in the classroom. Creativity – I need help in this area!!
Karen,
I thought of Randy Pausch, too, and Morie!
Your post zeros in on two classic questions English teachers are always wrestlting with. The first is the issue of grammar–should you teach it, how do you teach it? A better question, maybe, is how is grammar learned? What is the realtionship between gramar instruction and writing instruction? What I will do is create another page on our blog here just for a discussion of grammar–sounds exciting doesn’t it?
The other question you raise for us, a more compelling one to my mind, is the issue of assessment. Like grammar, the spin-off questions around assessment are limitless. A foundational question, one I’d like us to engage here in “blogospere,” is what is good writing? How do you know if something is well-written? What is the value of teaching students to assess their own writing? I am making a distinction between assessing writing and grading writing.
As for the creativity David Kelly has brought to design, I see significant similarities between his process and “the writing process.” David Kelly concerns himself with making better designers as opposed to better designs. Process pedagogy is student-centered, concerned with making better writers as opposed to better writing. That shift is a significant one, I think. Engage writers authentic writing and they appropriate skills (essential skills, if you will). To bring this back to Randy Pausch its what he referred to as “head fake” learning.
Thanks for starting us off Karen. I’ll make those new pages soon too, grammar and assessment
Perhaps I’m being redundant here but I’ve always thought if we want our students to learn science then we need to help them be scientists, or to learn math help them be mathematicians. No less so, if we want them to learn to write then help them be writers.
As a general rule, do we, public educators, understand what the (a) writing process is? Do we allow for idiosyncratic differences? Do we tolerate individual ownership, or enforce compliance? Do we value collaboration and encourage community building?
The skeptical response is likely to be, “what does that have to do with Johnny learning to spell?” And the answer to that is, “in that supportive process is where Johnny learns to spell not where he is taught to spell. It’s where he learns to write real sentences, finds and expresses what he wants and needs to say, and empowers himself to move forward even into unknown territory.
I am reminded of the idea I first read about in the book “Future Shock”. The sheer amount of information that exists is expanding faster than exponentially. Trying to be practical, how does a science teacher, math teacher, history teacher, and English teacher keep up? For me the answer is “learning how to learn”. If kids entering kindergarten today will grow up to compete for jobs that don’t exist yet, what can we possibly teach them (content wise) that will help?
But if they develop strong, sound behaviors that empower them to identify, articulate, investigate, plan, test, re-plan, re-test and solve any problem or issue they confront then it doesn’t make any difference what their standardized test scores are, or if they are above average on the NCLB requirements.
Given the right chance and right environment is amazing how fast kids make up their seeming lags in spelling, grammar and punctuation. Learning to learn covers all the gaps. In fact I think our current, popular mythology is saying that. The most common theme I see in contemporary entertainment is the good guy vs. bad guy computer battle. Which one can find the other’s weakness or solve the critical problem first is the winner. Unfortunately, flailing away at the keyboard is equal to solving the problem. It’s not that simple, like being able to spell correctly means you can write well. But the concept is relevant. If there is a problematic issue, identify it, articulate it, theorize on it, communicate in different modes, test ideas, modify the ideas and tests, until you can handle or solve the issue. Don’t stop because the word is spelled wrong! That is never where the problem lies.
Teaching without a net
A reality of public school teaching is that when the textbooks are gone…they are gone. After proving numerous times to clerks at the high school and then at the administrative center that the text for English IV Honors Lit/Comp is not a supplementary text, but required, the books for an “Early Bird” class were finally ordered. But what to do until the big brown truck arrived loomed large in my lesson plans.
After spending one morning running from copy machine to copy machine, just to find them all jammed, I decided that I would roll up the safety net. How hard can it be to teach comparison essays or essays of explication to honors kids? After all, students have written compare-contrast since Grade 2. For the first essay we outlined patterns of development on the whiteboard, did some group prewriting, read each others’ screens as we wrote, and everything went pretty well.
Next assignment: write a two- to five-page Essay of Explication on a teacher-approved poem (I really didn’t want to get stuck with a room-full of Shel Silverstein again). After the initial shock of discovering that no one knew what “explication” meant, we embarked on our journey. There was no text to assign pages 272 to 281 on how to write an essay of explication. This would require starting from scratch with OH NO NO NO…TEACHER INSTRUCTION!!! Could I survive without a book?
Essays are due next week. We are still working on close reading of the poetry, and today some students had an epiphany. Who knew that they needed to really interpret the poems line-by-line, or maybe even word-by-word? Currently, the examples of figurative language they are “discovering” in the poem seem to be selected by multiple choice, but occasionally I am seeing that “aha” moment when, “Oh, this is metonymy,” or, “Now, I get it; she is using ‘eye rhyme,’” is heard from a cluster of students. I have resource books stacked up on a table and students are independently discovering that Perrine and Meyer are pretty useful guys to get to know.
As I balance on that high wire down the center of my classroom, I am considering that I may be on to something here. Is this a ground-breaking technique or am I reaching back to the ancients for my lesson plan? All I know for sure right now is that this feels right. The energy, the uncertainty of not having the book to back me up, is sure making this circus act more exciting…and more dangerous.
Risking moving us toward the esoteric, I’m interested in this idea of teaching being dangerous, as Annice writes above. Writers will tell you that writing is dangerous. I’m thinking specifically here of Terry Tempest Williams who writes of the dangerous nature of writing in her book _Red_. I use a short piece of hers from that book, “Why I Write.” And I agree, writing is dangerous on many levels. Nothing, I’ve learned from writers/scholars like Lisa Delpit, is more closely connected to indentity than language. So writing is “putting yourself out there” in a literal way. Understanding writing in this way has implications for assessment and for teaching writing.
What about teaching…how is teaching dangerous, as Annice suggests? There is certainly the belief that teachers “have all the answers.” Maybe that comes from the way we guard and revere the teacher’s edition, souutions manual, final exams… So what happens when we go off script? One, we risk expsosing the fact that we do not have all the answers. When we ask students to write authentically, we ask them to take risks, put them at risk. What if a kid writes a piece exposing a disturbing racist or sexist philosphy? What if a kid writes a short story about a plot to blow up a school? It’s much safer to assign a 5 paragrpah persuasive essay on school uniforms, isn’t it. I wonder if anyone here has taught a text, novel or otherwise, they hadn’t read before, one you read along with the students. What are the risks? What are the rewards…and is that a false dichotomy, risk v. reward? After reading Zen with my seniors I’m skeptical of either/or dichotomies. Right or wrong, left or right, classic or romanitc, Math or English, Coke or Pepsi
There are two books that speak eloquently about the dangers of being an agent of change; Che Guevarra’s autobiography (I think the title is just “Che”) and Ken Macrorie’s “A Vulnerable Teacher”.
What are the dangers of being a teacher of genuine literacy? My experience led me to one (not the only one) major danger, security. Allowing students to behave literately and to seek literacy will challenge traditions, past practices, authority, accuracy, pre-conceptions, rules and orders, and the notion of control. None of that challenging and disruption is usually acceptable in a public school classroom. In graduate school I met a young teacher from South Carolina and we got into a discussion of religion, religious literature, and religious language in the classroom. At that time, in that place (SC) the only tolerated religious text was the Bible, and then the class must be called “The Bible as Literature”. The guidelines for such a class were unbelievably narrow and strict. He told me one of the quickest ways to get fired was to stray across those guidelines. But how can you study the Bible as literature without thinking about what literature is? And in South Carolina, at that time, the Bible was a fundamental, iconic dogma unavailable to interpretation.
That conversation began a string or conversations and confrontations that always ended in the same place – “If you want to do that (teach) close your door.” And it was true, the only way to survive was to close the door, to teach in secrecy. And of course, that doesn’t really work. Any spark that creates an idea or question cannot be contained behind a closed door.
For me, this question of security or freedom is a major one. The more students take ownership of their learning the more unacceptable it becomes to the controlling establishment of education. To have students go off in their own direction certainly must mean “basics” will be missed and gaps in a well-rounded education will get bigger and bigger. That’s one reason Johnny can’t read, “nobody teaches phonics any more”!
In education, control is the synonym for change. If you (a teacher) don’t have control then you cannot change your students!” And extending that logically, the more control you have the more change you make.
This is one of the easiest ways to maintain conformity – more control, more standardized tests, more guided instruction, more fundamentals. And if a teacher is not doing that, then he is not doing his job and that will show up on his student’s test results.
Of course this is nonsense but in the real world it is what the danger of being literate and teaching students to be literate sounds like.
As much as I love the writing project and my personal Valhalla, Bread Loaf School of English, neither of these have done enough thinking about, preparing for and protecting its agents of change from the dangers of being agents of change.
This post is the first time I’ve seen a direct address to the issue of security and safety as a literate teacher and supporter of literate behavior. And I have talked only selfishly of the aspect of a teacher keeping his job. The larger question of what does literacy look like, sound like, behave like, and work like in the classroom is in most ways more important.
In a free, open, democratic society, it should not be necessary to close the door to be free, open and democratic.
This past week we have been brinstorming ideas for our essays about Anthem to send to the national contest. I made copies of the essay winners from the past three years, and we analyzed these essays in class. I was amazed and pleased with the students’ comments. They really examined the winning essays and were very critical. Time after time, student groups were calling me over saying, “How did this essay win? It is little more than a summary of the plot of the novel.” Sadly, they were right. Two of the last three were little more than “book reports.” This makes me wonder if showing them poor as well as good examples helps them understand what makes a good analytical piece of writing. Like Robert Pirsig’s students, mine are able to identify quality or a lack thereof, but does this technique help them at all when they write their own essays? What do you think???
Identifying the marks of a good piece of writing is a metacognitive act. But, that’s not writing; it’s reading and identifying. After you’ve written something yourself, it makes sense to turn that sort of focus on your own text to see what you have left to do.
First, I think you have to write. Fluency is first and that comes with putting words down on a page or a screen. It can be fun to have your students write something awful that they know is awful: perhaps write the essay for the contest like the wining submissions even though they know they are little more than book reports. Writing something awful does promote fluency and there is little worry that they’ll imitate this awfulness in the future. Sometimes, students will try and reproduce TV scripts or, as one memorable student did, reproduce Dashiell Hammett. But, most want to write their own compositions.
However, having the marks of good writing identified lets them help each other improve what has been written, if you have students edit other’s writings.
Yes! And the first question that comes to my mind is what do the kids in those groups think could have or should have been done?
Larry’s insight on metacognition becomes a useful tool here. Either in writing, or in presentation before the group, what can a writer say she was trying to do in a composition. And, where did she hit or miss the mark.
What a clarifying lens to look through. Just to get a student to say, “Instead of a book report, I was trying to do a comparison/contrast paper between O’Brien and Hemingway. I think they both have (or don’t have) a romantic/realistic concept of war.” The possibilities that open up because of saying that will be the start of making all the difference. The student is choosing the content and purpose of the writing as well as wrestling with the shape of the writing. That’s ownership and it’s the student’s original thinking.
“And what if that doesn’t happen?” you ask. Ask the questions that lead the student to make it happen. For example, take something in the writing that is good, has some originality, some cleverness, some insight, and ask the student to take it out, to cut it! Listen to what the student says, she will almost always defend keeping it, and she will use reason/s that embrace a purpose such as compare and contrast. The student might not recognize that is why she is writing and needs a little nudge to see it.
With not too much time and practice, students start to see those questions and connections all by themselves.
The process Karen and Larry are talking about above is what I call in my class “reading like a writer”–an expression I stole from Katie Ray. Looking closesly at what writers do (good or bad) NAMING it (teaching grammar) and envisioning those manuevers in our own writing is powerful
The best writers in my classes, inevitably, are readers. Of course we learn to write by reading. I see it in my daughters all the time. Jaycie has written books, plural, in which she’s imitated the books she’s reading-using sound effects, quotation marks for dialogue, even more specific quirky things like all caps when a character shouts which she “learned” from reading Junie B. Jones. Jaycie has done this on her own–just because she reads a lot and delights in language and story telling.
Reading like a writing in my class is a little more intentional. We stop and talk, specifically about what a writer is doing, why we think she did it, and what such a manuever might do for our own writing.
And, I think there is just as much to learn from poorly written texts. What makes it poorly written? How could we fix it?
How can I see and teach, and help students see, literature as something more than just content to be delivered.
Jeff, this comment really caught my eye.
Students seem to have a difficult time taking literature out of a book and inserting it into the real world. As a teacher we need to ask thought provoking questions about why an author writes the way he/she does.
As far as this semester goes, Fall, 2011– I have some very entertaining, intelligent students in my courses. The challenge is to get them to see beyond the content to the actual learning and thinking involved in both reading and writing. How is what we are doing right now, important to your future, your success, your life? Sometimes school is just a place kids go; it’s not a place to think and enrich their lives.