I Wish I Knew Then What I Know Now!!!

The other day a young...ish and naive Mrs. T had a heart to heart talk with a much older (yet still attractive) and wiser Mrs. T. The following is a written account of the actual conversation. It was recorded by a middle-aged and chubby Mrs.T.

Hi, Mrs. T. Can I ask you a question?

Of course you may!  Just don't take too long. I have persuasive essays 

to grade, and at my age, a little persuasion is just what the

doctor ordered.

How am I going to decide what vocabulary words to teach, and 

how am I going to effectively teach them to my students?

Well, one thing that I have learned is it is best to let the students

create their own lists of vocabulary words.

When given the chance to choose words, they seem

to be more invested in the learning process.

To teach the vocab, I like to give the students time to

discuss the words and what they think the meanings might be

based on prefixes, suffixes, roots, and context. Another thing is to give them opportunities

to use the words in classroom discussions, written responses, and

other activities based on the text. I also love a huge Word Wall in my 

classroom where students can post vocabulary so it is always there

to act as a resource. Just monitor the Wall. High schoolers like to 

put the F-word up there...a lot!

Duly noted! I also wonder what the best practice is for

giving students opportunities to use oral language?

Any suggestions?

In my experience, there are very few students who don't like to talk.

The challenge is giving them something constructive to talk

about!  I always like to engage them in class discussions to get

their jaws warmed up a little, then they can continue their

discussions in small groups. Another thing that I have found is some

students actually prefer giving an oral presentation of a text better than submitting it in formal

writing. When able, I like to offer this option on summative assessments. And,

by requesting a written draft of the presentation, I am able to kill two birds

with one stone. Written and oral language skills done!

You've become devious in your old age!

I've also become a little hard of hearing, so could you speak

up a little?

Sure thing. When students are asked to create written texts,

how do you support them in their writing?

Actually, I like to act as a facilitator who enables the students

to help support one another in their writing. Of course, I supply the

students with instruction on the technical elements of writing, but the students

learn to conduct writing workshops to edit and polish their writing until it

turns into something they are proud to share.

Isn't that hard to teach?

It takes some time to lay the ground work for the writing workshops,

but the benefits outweigh the initial time it takes to instruct the kids.  Besides,

I'm telling you right now, if you want easy, DON'T become a teacher!

Get a job at Target or Home Depot. Teaching is not for the faint of heart!

Wow! You don't hold anything back.

Hell, my subtlety left me long ago, along with my muscle tone and

normal bladder capacity. One more thing that I do to help make my students better

writers is I make sure they are surrounded by good texts to read. I have

a pretty decent classroom library that includes YA novels, literary classics,

informational and nonfiction texts, graphic novels, comic books, magazines, digital texts,

newspapers. If you can read it, and it's school appropriate--mostly--you can probably

find it in my classroom. I know that the more a student reads, the better

that student writes!

It sounds like you have gotten pretty smart with age!

Any advice you want to give a younger you?

Laugh more, worry less, and for Pity's sake, invest in money in

MacIntosh stock! That little apple is going to make you a rich woman, then you

can teach for fun instead of for the big money that

school districts offer to sweeten the deal. Of course, I'm kidding.

Sarcasm is not one of the things that I have lost with age!

Can You Hear Me?

Last semester I had the "pleasure" of doing my practicum hours with a teacher we will call Ms. X.  Ms. X has been teaching English in junior high school for 15 years.  While I am sure that she is more than competent in her discipline and passed her education courses with flying colors, there is one shortcoming in her teaching strategies that I noticed during my time in her classroom...there is NO opportunity for students to practice oral literacy!

Her classroom may be the only one in the entire building that is silent.  When students enter her classroom, they are required to read silently for 15 minutes.  They quickly transition to a lecture given by Ms. X which is then followed by a short individual activity time where students work alone until the end of class.  I know that you must think that I am exaggerating, but I am telling the absolute truth!  In 35 hours of classroom observation I never witnessed one ThinkPairShare, Fishbowl, Small Group Discussion, or any of the other oral literacy activities shared in this week's module.  What I did witness was groups of students who lacked motivation and excitement for Language Arts, and it was not a pretty sight.

So what could Ms. X do to help her students make their voices heard?  A lot!  In one of the lessons that she taught about personification, she began the instruction by showing commercials in which inanimate objects showed human qualities. (Remember the one with the broom begging to come back after being ousted for the cleaner, sleeker Swiffer?  Poor broom! Whisked aside for a newer model.) After showing the videos, she asked the students to write down three examples of personification that they had seen on television or in movies. Some students were so overcome with excitement that they actually called out their responses!  She promptly squelched their little voices and instructed them to keep their answers to themselves.

AAAGGGHHH!  Why not ask the students to turn to their neighbor and share their answers with their neighbors and include how the items shared are examples of personification?  There are only benefits to be had.  First, students are learning to communicate with their peers (a lost art); second, students are practicing the skill of giving textual examples and supporting those examples; third, students have the opportunity to help classmates who may not understand the concept of personification by giving examples and discussing them; fourth, students are able to release their wiggles and have fun in class!

Also, during my time in her class, students wrote several types of essays: persuasive, narrative, expository, etc.  Not once did they ever have the chance to edit those essays using peer groups.  They wrote the essays, handed them in to the teacher, and received them back with a grade written on the top in purple ink.  No feedback offered.  About this time I was ready to pack up the little 7th graders and smuggle them into the "fun" English class so they could know the feeling of sunshine on their faces and the taste of  lemonade on their parched tongues!  Conducting small groups activities, such as peer groups to edit papers, is a fantastic way for students to interact in a way that encourages them to use academic language (e.g. "I like the hook you chose to use." or "I couldn't find the topic sentence for your third body paragraph."), to gain experience in editing written texts, and helping fellow students to succeed. Is there a downside to this?  I think not!

While I did not necessarily enjoy my experience in Ms. X's classroom, I am grateful that I had the chance to observe her teaching practices because I know that I want my classroom climate to be very different from hers.  I want students to express themselves through writing and speaking.  I want students to learn to collaborate with their peers to find the best solutions to problems.  I want students to understand that the spoken word is powerful!  Spending 6 hours in school is hard enough on teenagers (and teachers:). Why make it harder by stifling them?

I Don't Mean to be Critical, but...

The article "From Print to Critical Multimedia Literacy: One Teacher’s Foray Into New Literacies Practices" discusses the need for students to be literate in digital texts.  This is, after all, the 21st century!  We may not have the transportation the George Jetson led us to believe, nor the somewhat robotronic yet surprisingly witty housekeeper, Rosie; but we do have an unbelievable wealth of knowledge literally at our fingertips through the internet.  The students that we are teaching have been raised with this phenomenon, and, as teachers, sometimes we just assume that our kids are able to successfully navigate the internet.  This is where teachers are wrong.

In the article, it states that digital literacies "allow us to use the Internet and other ICTs to identify important questions, locate information, critically evaluate the usefulness of that information, synthesize information to answer those questions, and then communicate the answers to others."   I don't know about you, but this seems like a lot to expect our children to know just  because they have been raised with the internet.  I know that most students with whom I work are capable of forming a question about a topic and locating information on that topic using a search engine, such as Google or Bing, but what next? There are very few students at Tooele Junior High who are able to employ a critical literacy lens to evaluate the validity and importance of the information found, fully understand the information read, and communicate the information gleaned from the internet in an intelligent manner to their peers.  If all students were born with an innate ability to do all of these things just because they were born in this technological age, teachers would be out of a job!

Luckily, teachers still have jobs because students still need to learn. They need to learn critical literacy!  They need to learn everything that Googles is not gold. Being able to read a text and comprehend what is being communicated uses the lower levels of thinking according to Bloom's Taxonomy.  Critical literacy begins when students are able to read, understand, and apply that understanding in a critical/analytical/practical way.

So, how can a teacher help students "bloom" when it comes to critical literacy?  I believe that the best way to help students develop the skills needed to successfully utilize digital literacies is to give them opportunities to use digital literacies in meaningful ways. Many times students are asked to gather information using the internet and paste their findings into a worksheet or research project, but we need to ask our students to do a little more. They need to have the chance to take the information they find and apply it to a real-life application.  How does the information they found impact their lives?  The lives of their families and friends?  The community in which they live?  When we can get our students to ask deeper questions, we will foster deeper understanding. For example, when studying the Holocaust, ask the students to look for information about the Nuremberg Laws.  Now, instead of asking students to summarize those laws, ask them to apply them to their own families:  "How would the Nuremberg Laws affect your family?"   In this way, students learn to find the information on the internet AND apply the information in a critical way to create a new idea or concept. Pretty sneaky, huh?  You know, all of the best teachers are spies/ninjas with special abilities to help students learn without the kids knowing they are learning. Oh, you didn't know that?  Well, now you do:)

I have a confession.  Although I have been married to my kind, devoted, patient, loving husband for 18 years, I have had impure thoughts of another.  In these fantasies, this other man is lying on a beach with the white sand and turquoise waters surrounding his magnificent being.  Then, just as the sun is dipping below the horizon in a glorious golden display, he pulls out...a red pen, and we begin proofreading student essays.  My man-crush is the one and only Kelly Gallagher, writing teacher extraordinaire! 

Isn't he dreamy?!  He can spot a sentence fragment faster than a locomotive. He can leap split infinitives in a single bound. He is my writing Superman!


So, how does my unhealthy obsession with this man relate to the blog topic this week?  I am glad you asked!  I was first introduced to this bespectacled god's work during my first semester as an English Education student at USU, which happened to coincide with my daughter's first semester in her freshman Honors English class at THS. At the same time that I was learning about "Golden Lines," real world writing, and writing improvement through feedback (here's a link to see what makes Gallagher so great, if you want to share my man crush http://youtu.be/Km1dQjVNu00), my daughter was writing endless essays to a seemingly unpleasable--yes, I did just make up a word-- teacher.  My daughter and I would sit at the computer agonizing over essays (her final essay was a 15-page analysis) until the tears flowed, mine and hers.  After spending hours writing and rewriting, she would get her paper back with red slashes and "weak thesis" or "proof?" written in the margins and a grade, that in no way reflected the time and energy spent, circled at the top of the page.  There was no rubric, no praise, no suggestions to help my daughter. There were NONE of the great ideas and techniques that Gallagher suggests.  There was nothing but criticism that crushed my daughter and made her doubt herself as a writer.


I decided two things very quickly during my daughter's freshman year. First, I disliked her teacher very much!  Second, I vowed to never be the type of teacher that left students feeling like they have nothing of value to share.  Students are going to grow into adults who will have many opportunities and responsibilities to write.  They need to be given not only the tools to be good writers, but also the confidence to be good writers. I have had a professor in college who is the best at making me feel good about my writing.  He does this through specific and thought-provoking feedback that shows me he is really reading my papers and thinking about how I can improve them.  His feedback never makes me feel like I have missed my mark...it just makes me see that I can get a little closer to my mark with a few tweaks.  This is the way to effectively teach writing.  Take the students where they are and help them improve.  I am not saying that every student will be a Pulitzer Prize-winning author by the end of the year, but I am saying every student can be better than they were at the beginning of the year with a little effort and a lot of Gallagher.

Oh, so that is what that word means...

Let me recreate a typical vocabulary instruction lesson at Lehi High in the 1980s.


Teacher:  Good morning.  Today we are going to find definitions for some of the words contained in John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.


Students:  <Groan, grimace, guffaw>


Teacher:  The paper that I am passing out has 20 words on it.  Use the dictionaries from the bookshelf to find the meaning for each word.  Hand in the paper when you are finished.


THE END


So, at the end of this vocabulary lesson, I felt a little like Lane Meyer in this class:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmdVqCNev6Q&x-yt-ts=1422503916&x-yt-cl=85027636&feature=player_detailpage







I essentially spent 45 minutes copying words from a dictionary onto a piece of paper.  Then, after we had read the text, I would be expected to remember the definitions well enough to correctly match each word with a coordinating definition on a multiple-choice test.  Can you see where this instruction left me a little bewildered and frustrated?


In the week's vocabulary reading by Harmon, Wood, and Hendrick, it states that teachers must help students do three things in order to effectively teach vocabulary to students: define the terms, put the terms in context, and demonstrate correct application of the terms.  What good is it to find the definitions to words we don't know if we will never be able to understand how the words fit into the text or how to use the words correctly or be given an opportunity to use the words?  In order to prepare students for college and careers, we must help them develop their literacy.  They have to become acquainted with vocabulary specific to various disciplines, but we also need to teach them how to decode new words in their own reading so that they will become independent readers who have the tools to succeed.


You may find this surprising, but I plan on doing my vocabulary instruction in a way that does not resemble the Lehi High instruction in any way, shape, or form because I want my students to actually learn the vocabulary from my class.  I plan on having hands-on activities to test students' understanding of words (e.g. Pictionary and charades) in ways that accommodate different learning styles.  I also want to be sure and include our vocabulary words in my own communication so students can understand how these words are used in context and become accustomed to hearing them spoken.  When students are asked to write in their journals or draft essays, they will be encouraged and expected to use the vocabulary words in their own texts to show me that they truly understand them.  I want my students to be immersed in the vocabulary of English so that it becomes a part of them.


As for the definitions from the dictionary, I will save those as punishment for students who don't like "Better Off Dead."

Teachers I Have Known

Many years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, I was a student at Lehi High School.  I was not an exemplary student by any stretch of the imagination.  I was one of those students who sat in the back corner desk and tried very hard to remain invisible, and I had a very high success rate in this area until my sophomore year when Mr. Achziger came along.  I remember writing an introductory essay for his class entitled "Five Cups of Me" in which I had to tell five things about myself.  After the very first assignment he marched to my mother's office--she was the secretary in the counseling office--and asked why I was not in the Honors English class.  This simple question put an end to my days of invisibility and mediocrity in the English world.  Now I was expected to "do my best" and "achieve my potential."  At that moment in time I began to despise Mr. Achziger.


What I failed to realize in my all-consuming rage against the man was the fact that Mr. Achziger was the first teacher who refused to accept my minimum effort because he knew that I had more to offer.  The time that I spent in his class contains some of my greatest memories from high school.  Why?  He was a teacher who made students feel important and intelligent.  I still remember the authors that we read in his class:  Bradbury, Vonnegut, O'Henry.  Not only did I read works by these great authors, I devoured them.  The reason for this is quite simple...Mr. Achziger made it fun.  Not like "balloons-and-streamers" fun, but fun in the sense that we had real discussions about the texts where he asked questions and allowed us to answer them without contradiction or condemnation.  Students were welcome to express their opinions and defend their ideas using textual evidence. He encouraged us to read these texts with an open mind and come to our own conclusions.  He let us read and appreciate the stories for the greatness that they contained.  I know this doesn't sound overly exciting, but for a student who had never been treated with this kind of respect from a teacher, this new experience was AWESOME! 


After leaving Mr. Achziger's class, I was excited to see what possibilities my junior year in English would hold, and then Mrs. (insert name that should not be named here) happened.  She was a "war veteran," as she called herself, because she had survived 25 years of teaching students who "would never be able to understand really good literature" and had lived to tell about it.  She taught with a thinly veiled attitude of superiority and contempt. I went from the greatest reading experience of my life to the worst in 12 short months.  There are only a couple of memories I have of Mrs. X's class.  First, we read The Illiad, and this teacher spoon fed us every ounce of symbolism and literary merit that this text contained because she didn't think that we, in our near vegetative state, could ever figure it out for ourselves.  I hated every moment of the reading I did in her class.  No one likes to be made to feel inferior, and no one likes to be taught (I use the word loosely in this case) by a know-it-all.  The second memory is much happier.  It just so happens that one day Mrs. X took on her haughty tone with a student who didn't appreciate it at all, and she got knocked out, literally!  One minute she was berating this student in front of the entire class, and the next minute she was laying on the floor due to the right cross that landed on her chin.  Now, I am in no way condoning violence, but I think there was a bit of karma that happened that day.  In short, Mrs. X's teaching style had an adverse effect on my love of reading because she never trusted me as a reader.  She never gave me the opportunity to come up with my own ideas or conclusions.  She never gave any students the chance to discuss a text and decide on its theme.  She only let us know from the beginning that we weren't capable, and when a teacher doesn't trust a student's abilities, it is nearly impossible of a student to trust in his or her own abilities.

Hello!

Hello to all of my fellow SCED 4200 peeps!  My name is Polly Tolbert, and I love English.  I am not talking about Hugh Grant, scones (not the deep-fried kind), and Big Ben.  I have a love of the English language in all its glory!  So, as you can probably guess, my interests and hobbies include, but are not limited to, reading, writing, and reading some more.  When I am not reading, I can be found cooking, baking, gardening, laughing, and playing with my human kids and my puppy kids, as well.  So, it will also come as no surprise that my major is English Education with a  Literacy teaching minor.


A question that you may be asking yourself is "What does a Literacy minor include?"  I have had the opportunity to take courses that delve into the nooks and crannies of texts.  I have studied how students begin their literacy journey in the very early stages of childhood.  I have studied how to motivate reluctant adolescent readers to pick up a book and give reading a try.  I have studied how to develop lessons that will help the formerly mentioned reluctant readers continue along the literacy path.  And, I hope to study many more aspects of literacy in the future.


If I am planning on teaching literacy, then I had better have a pretty good understanding of what it is, right?   I believe literacy is the ability to not only have the ability to read written text, but to also have the ability to understand, synthesize, and apply all forms of text.  Students are bombarded with information every day from so many sources:  books, texts, music, webpages, television, magazines, and a myriad of others.  It is important that they know how to navigate these texts to enhance understanding and application.  I mean, what's the good in watching a video on youTube about how to build a rocket if you can't use it to build a rocket?  Literacy is imperative to success in school and in life.


Well, that is me in a nutshell.  I am sure that we will all have a chance to get to know one another better throughout this semester, but at least you have a small idea of what I will be bringing to the table.  Don't say I didn't warn you!