One Year Down

Tonight I sat on a panel of first-year teachers before a class of preservice teachers. It felt good to return to Dr. Cramer's class and to reflect aloud on (to use the cheesiest, most overused metaphor) my journey this school year. Seeing my former professor in the education building at my former university reminded me that this blog, which I started for her class, has been collecting dust since last summer. And so I decided that I should put down in writing some of the (to use a word that I continuously caution my students against) things that I didn't get to or forgot to say to my new peers in the field of teaching.

Firstly, I finished student teaching and graduated college as an anxious, neurotic, and insufferable perfectionist. I spent last summer tirelessly preparing - for hours a day - for my first teaching job. I read and reread every text that I anticipated teaching, annotating each page with a preposterous color coding system. I emailed back and forth with my theory and practice in composition professor about highfalutin theories that I believed I could apply to my writing instruction. I found and consumed podcasts and books about teaching at a ridiculous rate. And through it all, I was not reassuring myself, but somehow making myself panic more. With every early morning or late evening that I spread myself over these materials, I exponentially increased the pressure on myself to make a flawless entrance to my new profession. This anxiety was so palpable that I had entirely resigned myself to not having any sort of personal life whatsoever for the next ten months.

As it turns out, this school year coincided with an unprecedented number of significant personal events for me. This school year, I became pregnant (my first), two very close family friends died, my brother died, my grandmother died, and to top it all off, Donald flipping Trump was elected president. If somebody had told me this last summer that any ONE of these things was going to happen during my first year of teaching, I probably would have had to be committed. I would not have been able to fathom that I was going to remain responsible for over 120 students while dealing with literally anything else. The truth is, as it turns out, teaching helped me get through it all.

Relationships with classes and with students are just that: relationships. I made a point in my introduction at the beginning of the school year to tell my students that I wanted to know them and that I wanted them to know me. I knew that I wanted my students to not only learn about English but also about human empathy and compassion. I then set about the work of making this come true. I decided that we would start every class with a brief and informal chat about what's going on with everyone (including me). It did not take long at all for lighthearted storylines to flourish (Jake continuously updating us on his sugar gliders, Kelli filling us in on the latest from the bowling team, etc). Also, students eventually became comfortable sharing more intimate or difficult details about their life, and in turn, more comfortable with maturely and sensitively receiving these bits of news.

With this rapport established, it was easy for me to also feel safe and comforted by these relationships. It was a joyful day when I announced that I was pregnant. My students celebrated with me, and in turn, were very sensitive to my needs as the pregnancy progressed. It was especially hard to return to school after my brother's death, but I quickly realized that I was returning to 120 people who care about me. Working with these bright young people was and continues to be the best therapy that the doctor could have possibly ordered.

All of this is to say that teaching has taught me, among many other lessons, that I will grow and adapt in any situation. Virtually none of my summer plans actually played out in my classroom this year, but in the midst of personal successes and tragedies, I was able to plan, to grade, and to build meaningful relationships. Bring on another year.

Literature Class as a Book Club

Recently, my husband and I joined my father-in-law and his girlfriend for dinner. As we sawed into our steaks and sipped the wine, our conversation made the usual rounds: work, family, friends, health. After dinner, my husband and his father split off to go talk music while Sharon and I remained at the table. She turned to me excitedly and chirped, “So what’s your English class going to be like? A book club?” Her tone jested, though simultaneously expressed a hopefulness: I could appreciate both sentiments. On one hand, it’s an insulting notion that English teachers merely lead book clubs, a notion that severely downplays the preparation and thought that goes into each lesson. We don’t just kick back and read books, we use books as vehicles for teaching an enormous range of skills that span everything from vocabulary and literary devices to critical thinking and human empathy. Sharon knows this, and this is why she protected her question with the disclaimer of a half-smile; however, her eyes sparkled suggestively, as if to say, “What if?”

When I consider how I learned to love reading, which is of course the absolute first step to learning from reading, it was in fact through situations that mimicked a book club scenario. Believe it or not, I’ve never actually belonged to or attended a formal book club (does this disqualify me from being an English teacher?), but I have engaged in numerous discussions about literature, some having been completely organic and spontaneous social interactions, and some having been staged in a classroom (though equally genuine nonetheless). Why did these experiences, which occurred in very different circumstances and venues, all appeal to me as genuine, and therefore worthwhile, educational, and enjoyable? More importantly, how can I harness that quality and infuse my teaching with it?

As I explore this question, I can assert one thing with absolute certainty: I did not learn to love reading by taking what I call “gotcha quizzes”. These are the mechanisms by which teachers audited students with what felt like benign trivia questions to ensure that they had simply done the reading. I hated these. When I knew that these quizzes were coming, my reading experience was a joyless one, one in which I felt like I was hunting frantically with my eyes for inane details that my teacher may ask me about. This experience is the exact opposite of a genuine exchange between both the author and the reader and between the student and the teacher. This experience is completely contrived and creates a power dynamic that would leave Paulo Freire reeling.

"For crying out loud, STOP asking questions that you already know the answer to!"
 

My new colleagues suggested that I study and use the strategies proposed by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst in Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading. As I rummaged through the book, I was pleased with the authors’ emphasis on building a problem-posing classroom in which students learn to be mindful and attentive readers rather than blank-fillers and multiple-choice-answer-circlers. Beers and Probst present six so-called “signposts” for students to look out for, and suggest questions related to each signpost that they can ponder as they read. For example, the “Words of the Wiser” signpost appears when “a wiser and often older character offers a life lesson of some sort to the protagonist” (72).  When a student finds an example of this in the text, they are prompted to ask themselves, “What’s the life lesson and how might it affect the character?” (79). All signposts have their own detailed descriptions and related anchor questions, and all seemed like they would be easy enough to recognize in the wild, so to speak.

I imagined that I would challenge students to find examples of these signposts in their assigned reading, along with unfamiliar vocabulary words that they encounter and instances of figurative language; they could then bring these artifacts to our class discussion. Now THIS would be a book club English class, in which students would experience a bona fide literary round table, a truly honest learning experience that does not rely on canned (or even planned) questions. Naturally, however, I would actually always need to have my own (open-ended and authentic) questions ready, for even Beers and Probst suggest that the teacher “put conversation prompts or questions on note cards and distribute them to a few students” to pitch to the class “when there is a lull in the conversation” (30). Being that I had multiple books to comb through this summer in preparation for teaching at my new school, I decided that I would approach each text as if I were a student hunting for signposts. My resulting questions could help fill the void on those quieter days.

As I worked through first The Great Gatsby and then The Grapes of Wrath I found it easy to circle vocabulary words that may stump my students, and I found it easy to identify instances of literary language that would lend itself to thoughtful analysis writing. As for the signposts, I often found myself caught up in terse arguments with myself: “Does it count as a ‘Words of the Wiser’ if a minor character, rather than the protagonist, is receiving the advice?” “What if something is very clearly being emphasized but it is only repeated once? Does it still count as an “Again and Again” signpost?” “What if something happens that does not fall under any of these signposts, but it inspires a question that I’d like to explore?” These questions made me feel almost as tense and confused as a “gotcha quiz”.

This exercise taught me a couple of important lessons. For one thing, it is crucial to preemptively complete any exercises that I expect students to complete. This allows me to stumble upon, acknowledge, and plan beyond any obstacles that may inhibit them. Furthermore, I learned that no matter how appealing and sound a teaching strategy may appear, students should always be provided with tools and choices rather than a so-called surefire approach to a task as complicated and personal as text interaction. Not all students would hem and haw and split hairs over the definitions of these signposts the way that I did, but some most certainly would. My educational experiment ultimately lead me to conclude that I will teach my students how to use the strategies presented within Notice and Note while reading, but I will also not limit them to these strategies. Within a literature class, the goal is not to test a student on the definition of a term that was created by a former teacher, published in some book written for fellow educators. The larger picture shows a classroom that coaches students to be inquisitive, interested, and diligent readers. These readers can independently pose thoughtful questions and answer them collaboratively with other readers. These readers can simultaneously enjoy a complicated text while auditing and mending their own confusion regarding that text. These readers would love reading so much that they may, of their own volition, form and lead a book club.

Sharon, to answer your question, yes: I will do my very best to make my English class look like a book club.

Works Cited

Beers, Kylene and Robert E. Probst. Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2013. Print.

A Good-Bye Letter

Dear students,

When I first came to this school as a para, over two years ago, I felt so unsure of myself. I was new to the College of Education, and I had wrestled with the idea of being a teacher for ten years. For ten years I wallowed in self-doubt, questioned my own abilities, and resigned myself to earning an income rather than fulfilling any sort of profound calling. Even during my first two years of college, when I was notably older than most of my classmates, I felt lost: but I pushed myself to keep going to class, to complete the work, to keep enrolling each semester. What I didn’t know was that this process, as frustrating and as directionless as it seemed, was invisibly shaping me to achieve a goal that I wasn’t even fully aware of yet.

After I managed to complete my public speaking class, the class that originally filled me with massive anxiety, I decided to take the plunge and to pursue a teaching career. I had always had the vague, gnawing notion that I would be good at teaching if I could only magically acquire the self-esteem and confidence; as it turns out, there was no magic involved, but rather my own tenacity in the face of uncertainty. Shortly after I started education classes, I began working here.

Being a part of this school has imbued me with all the validation I could have possibly asked for. Working with students has made my brain size double, and has made my heart size triple. For the first time in my life, I cannot wait to go to work every day. I cannot wait to talk to students about their fascinating, complicated, and sometimes funny ideas. I cannot wait to see their growth, and, even better, to see them see their own growth. I cannot wait to see their unique talents. I cannot wait to see them. Period.

Thank you all for being so wonderful. Thank you for helping me to achieve my dreams. As the years roll on, please take a lesson from me: do not fear failure, and do not stop trying. I know that young people hate to hear things like, “You’ll understand when you’re older”…heck, I hate to hear it myself, so I’ll word it differently here: it might not be very clear to you now, but you are making progress, even if it doesn’t feel like it. Push ahead. Don’t cut corners. Try, try try. Someday, you too will wake up excited to go to work, and will realize that it all started many years prior, on the day that you decided to believe in yourself.

In gratitude,

Ms. Harrison

Teaching Listening with Podcasts

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve increasingly become a morning person. I have learned to enjoy waking up at 5:00 AM and leisurely getting ready for work. I find that my mind is clear and sharp in the mornings, and that I’m all the more prepared for a day of teaching if I find a way to exercise my brain before leaving the house. This is how I became addicted to podcasts.

When I empty the dishwasher, feed the pets, and put on makeup at the crack of dawn, I’m learning – learning through listening. Sometimes I’m discovering how the movements of the economy affect seemingly unrelated social phenomena (Freakonomics). Sometimes I’m learning about the stories behind those punchy and sensationalized political headlines (The Diane Rehm Show).  Sometimes I’m learning more about how to live a healthy lifestyle (Zorba Paster). Sometimes I’m discovering a new short story author that completely grips me with their story and style (The New Yorker Fiction podcast and Selected Shorts). No matter where these podcasts take me, I’m always left wondering, “How can I incorporate this in my classroom?”

In the Language Arts classroom, we devote ourselves to teaching reading, writing, speaking, and listening. I fear, however, that many, including myself, fall short of actually intentionally instructing students in the ways of active listening: it generally seems to simply be an expectation. Often, teachers lead a shared reading and count the activity as listening instruction, but it’s not; in a shared reading, students have the text in front of them, and can rely on their eyes. Active listening becomes the expectation when students are held accountable for what they hear.

In her article “The Value of Sharing Stories Orally with Middle Grade Students”, Hollee A. Frick speaks to the value of read-alouds for older students. Though she published her ideas and researched support in 1986, her arguments still hold water, and the implementation of her proposed strategies can certainly be augmented with modern technology, such as podcasts. She asserts that “The first and most obvious skills nurtured by storytelling and oral reading are those involving listening” and adds that “Refinement of this skill can be effectively used later when students must listen for directions or participate in discussions” (301). Here, Frick makes an important connection: not only should students engage in active listening during read-alouds, but should be given opportunities to draw connections between those experiences and meaningful applications. I have witnessed very juvenile class discussions among very intelligent students, and couldn’t help but wonder if they had ever been deliberately taught to listen carefully to others and then respond in context. So how could I use a podcast to this end?

This type of instruction would look slightly different with different types of podcasts, and I do think a variety should be introduced to students. I could provide students with guided notes to complete as they listen intently, pausing the audio at certain points to give them time to digest and react; this type of activity would particularly lend itself to informational or argumentative selections. Their notes could serve as a springboard for discussion about the topic at hand, in which they can directly apply the skill of listening closely and responding appropriately to live conversation with their peers.

Regarding fiction and storytelling, Frick cites a survey in which “101 high school students most often mentioned the activity of being read aloud to as one which initiated positive attitudes toward reading” (300). The Selected Shorts podcast would be a wonderful classroom tool for inspiring a love of reading, as it features professional—and famous—actors expressively reading exceptional short stories to a live audience. Aside from proving the entertainment value of stories, the lesson could move into a writing exercise that holds students accountable for what they’ve heard. I would challenge students to notice the structure, style, or mood of the story and to create their own piece of short fiction that emulates the one they listened to. I could also ask students to compile a class list of other stories that they’ve read independently that share traits with the story we’ve enjoyed together as a class.

As teachers, we must constantly be on the lookout for new methods that engage our students in important literacies with many types of text. While textbooks and traditional approaches to Language Arts instruction still have a place in my classroom, I am excited about the prospect of building a classroom culture that embraces technology, thereby embracing my students’ interests. As students shuffle through the hallway with their earbuds attached, I can only hope that at least one of them is listening to This American Life and thinking, “Man, what a great story.”

Works Cited

Frick, Hollee A. "The Value of Sharing Stories Orally with Middle Grade Students." Journal of

Reading 29.4 (1986): 300-303. Web. 13 Apr. 2015.

Creating a Thirst for Knowledge with Cooperative Learning

I recently attended a district-wide inservice for English teachers. During the morning, we shuffled in small groups from one break-out session to the next, experiencing purposeful activities in each that pertained to various instructional strategies and unit guides. The presenters posed questions and modeled activities, and then asked the participants to actively engage with the material. I filled my notebook with ideas that I wanted to preserve and apply to my own instruction, most of these ideas either coming from other participants or hatching from my own brain as I talked.

After lunch, everyone filed into the auditorium as one large group to listen to a speaker. The speaker, using a PowerPoint, expounded on research findings related to the educational needs of the students in our district. Although the speaker was knowledgeable and well spoken, and although I was interested in what she was saying, I felt my eyes burn with a sleepy heaviness, and I watched helplessly as my mind lifted off and wandered around. It suddenly occurred to me to check my email. As I reached for my phone, I stopped myself. “Why am I doing this?” I thought, “I hate it when I see other people do that during a presentation.” Why couldn’t I keep my focus on this speaker? Was it simply that I had lunch settling in my belly, or was there something else to it?

The oldest trick in the book.

This experience granted me a unique opportunity to empathize with my students. While I strive to involve them as actively as possible during class, sometimes, a lecture is in order. As I speak, I can see their eyes sink, I can see their minds wander. Kagan to the rescue! Kagan Cooperative Learning stands on the philosophy that “it is through student discourse and the interaction of different ideas that students construct meaning” and that “we retain a great deal more of what we say than what we hear” (1.4-1.5). This would explain why it is that I could prattle on a great deal about what I discussed with colleagues during the breakout sessions the morning of inservice, yet I have almost nothing to say about the after-lunch presentation. So how can I manipulate my lesson plans to get students talking, even when I simply must lecture or lead an extended shared reading?

Thankfully, my mentor teacher is Kagan trained, and I’ve seen her model effective strategies many times. Being that she is a well-seasoned veteran, she possesses a keen ability to determine exactly when she’s losing her students, and she pulls out her “toolkit”.  Her go-to Kagan structure, stand up-hand up-pair up, works nicely in virtually any lesson. After presenting a bit of information or after reading with students for a period of time, she stops and asks students to stand, throw a hand in the air, high five somebody from across the room, and discuss the content with them. Often she provides them with a specific prompt, such as “what do you think of…” or “name one thing that you learned from this.” At this moment, something beautiful happens: every student is not only fully awake, but is actively talking about the material.

Why is this kind of talking so important? As the Kagans report, “Working memory can only hold a limited amount of information; more information beyond about ten minutes is like pouring more water into a glass that is already full. However, if the teacher stops and has students interact over the content, students tag the information for storage in long-term memory so recall is greatly enhanced” (6.17). Like the after-lunch presenter, when I lecture or read for too long, I am only wasting water. In the weeks to come, I vow to keep students moving, talking, and thirsting for knowledge.

Works Cited

Kagan, Dr. Spencer and Miguel Kagan. Kagan Cooperative Learning. San Clemente: Kagan Publishing, 2009. Print.

How to Shut Up

I love to talk. I would be lying if I didn’t readily admit that one of the many, many reasons that I decided to become a teacher is that I love to talk. My head buzzes and brims with ideas, especially when it comes in contact with interesting and challenging text. The idea of working in an environment where I can share these ideas, where I can man the helm of intellectual discourse, where I can talk talk talk to my heart’s content, utterly exhilarates me.

This vision of ecstasy quickly tarnishes when juxtaposed with the reality of a class that stares blankly when goaded to extemporize about a shared reading. If students don’t speak and I fill the void with my own textual interpretation, the exercise feels empty, lonely, and completely unfulfilling. As I talk, students gaze onward with a far-off look in their eyes, they look downward, as if ashamed, or they play the role of stenographer, mindlessly transcribing my every utterance. Why did I enjoy classroom discussion so much more in college than when I sit here, in the power seat? What is missing? Just that: discussion. I am not discussing anything in this scenario, and nor are my students. Rather, I am a lone actor, performing a monologue before a captive audience.

 Above: Me checking the pulse of one of my students.

When I pause and reflect, I realize that I was taught how to discuss text responsibly, and in learning how, I learned to love. One of the first 300-level literature courses I took, Major American Writers I, forced me to read volumes of difficult, often very dry text that I usually didn’t immediately enjoy, and yet, it was one of my favorite classes to date. The professor always assigned the reading for next class along with a couple of writing prompts. We students would post our written responses online (complete with textual evidence to support our stances) and would respond to one another there. During our next class, the professor would split us into small groups to talk about new discussion prompts. Finally, we would come together for a class-wide discussion, during which our professor would do little more than rephrase and rebroadcast points that students were making and ensure that we weren’t stepping on one another. Simple. Clean. Student-led.

My natural inclinations for English Language Arts allowed me to learn how to engage in discussion through submersion in this environment, but my bug-eyed ninth graders may require more explicit instruction. To begin, Randy Bomer suggests that students be directed to take time before discussion to write down their topic ideas (143). Just like the writing prompts that my professor assigned before class discussion, this exercise will help students to visualize and prioritize their ideas before speaking, which may give them greater confidence to share.

As we come together and students share their most favored topics, I can record them on the board, and students can democratically decide where to start. As students discuss, I will play stenographer, tracking the movements of their discussion where everyone can see it. As Bomer posits, “When people start perceiving of conversations as more like texts, they can start to take control of the moves they make in talk” (141). With my written summary of their points, students will have a point of reference so that they can effectively build on the comments of others rather than share isolated, disjointed opinions. This sort of tracking also helps to facilitate a reflection about the discussion. Bomer suggests that teachers ask students to respond in writing to questions such as, “’What did someone say that really surprised you today? Why was that a surprise, and what new things did it make you think’ Or ‘In what ways did your mind change across your conversation today? What did you do to make it change, and what did others do?’” (150). These reflections solidify the concept that discussion is an invaluable form of collaborative learning, and it challenges students to view one another and themselves as academic authorities.

As I study and strive to implement these discussion strategies, I am reminded that while my love for talking certainly affected my career choice, the more important task before me is to teach my students to love talking. Here’s to me shutting up.

Works Cited

Bomer, Randy. Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2011. Print.