This can all be done through, as VanDeWeghe argues, close readings, rereadings, writing and whole class discussion. It’s not that one activity or process is the best way to push students toward acquiring high-level cognitive skills. Instead, it’s a combination of all the aforementioned strategies, as well as others, that work together give students a chance to achieve authentic literacy. For instance, rereading can take place before a close reading, which leads to a whole class discussion where students are directed to summarize or finalize their thoughts on the discussion in a written response.

But why is authentic literacy necessary? Well, VanDeWeghe argues and I agree, that whether it’s to improve test scores, increase lifelong reading and learning or improve critical thinking or writing, students need to be pushed toward that authentic literacy. It’s something that, if possessed, can touch on many different learning goals, with the most important being a benefit for student achievement.

Through lessons where “students read many interesting texts, create arguments based on evidence from those texts, write to explore understandings, refine interpretations and bolster arguments,” teachers can push students and student can succeed.

I’ll leave you with this passage from Schmoker that VanDeWeghe uses in his piece about the importance of writing in the classroom:

When we help students write and revise, we are helping them to create and refine meaning itself, to make connections and see patterns that are at the heart of sophisticated thought. These connections lead to insight, invention, and solutions to problems in every realm—social, professional, and political. With reading as its raw material, writing exercises the intellect as it moves from amorphous understanding toward precision and practical application. In the end, writing allows us to discover and produce thought in its clearest and most potent form.

I’d say this could be done at times through class discussion. But isn’t unwritten thought incomplete thought? Then maybe it’s necessary to combine the reading, thinking and writing seamlessly for the benefit of student achievement.

In reading and preparing for my lessons this upcoming week on Niccolo Machiavelli‘s rules for a prince or leader, I couldn’t stop thinking about his rules as if that leader was a teacher. Call it whatever critical lens you want, but it was interesting looking at his beliefs about leaders through the eyes of a preservice teacher. Without going into the specifics about what Machiavelli believes (you know, in case my students come across this post) he does offer some interesting questions about what a leader – er, rather, a teacher if you’re using this lens – should do and how he or she should act.

If you aren’t familiar with Machiavelli, he lived during the late 1400s and early 1500s. Living during the Renaissance, he was quite the humanist. He also held some power in Italian politics. His party (used loosely in comparison to contemporary American politics) eventually lost power in Italy and he was arrested, tortured and banished – and, of course, left without any political influence. Because of this, he ended up writing The Prince, in which he outlines, through personal mental struggle, how leaders should act in power.  It’s a really interesting read, but using my “Educator Lens” I couldn’t help but apply his beliefs to the so-called leader of the classroom, a teacher.

Here are some of those characteristics and roles of a leader, as suggested by Machiavelli, to think about:

• Should a leader (teacher) do powerful and influential things that are virtuous but detrimental to personal well-being?
• Should a leader (teacher) do weak and unchallenging things that will bring about security and positive well-being?
• Is it better to be loved than to be feared, or the reverse?
• Should a leader (teacher) be tough in order to succeed but be disliked by many?
• Should a leader (teacher) be passive in order to be well liked but have his or her country (classroom) fail and be susceptible to attack?

I know where Machiavelli stands. Well, not in terms of a teacher exactly. But I think these questions work well in an adapted format. I’m not entirely sure where I would stand. Too bad finding the perfect mix isn’t easy.

• Learning and Teaching for the Long Haul by Amy Baeder

• The Benefits of Asking “How Can I Improve This Lesson?” by Alice Kramer

• Professional Relationships Influence Preservice Teacher Success by Tracy L. Durksen and Robert M. Klassen

• Learning How to Ask Questions

A short article that includes a 4-minute video shows the importance of asking questions in a lesson. What kind of questions to ask first? What about wait time? How many times should I repeat a question? The video deals with students in the primary levels, but I think some of the points brought up could apply to secondary level.

This might be the biggest change I’ve noticed over the last couple months. It’s not that I wasn’t planning before – and it definitely wasn’t that I felt it was unnecessary – but it seemed like I was just stuck in a rut. My mentor would plan the lessons and I’d follow in the footsteps of those lessons. In a sense, I felt like robot that copied exactly what it saw.

But in the last few months, especially since the start of the new year, I’ve made it a goal to get more involved in the planning. Even if it’s just looking a week at a time, I’m staying focused on what I want to teach and how I want to go about doing it. I’m getting the readings done well in advance of these lessons on the weekends. And because of that, I’m able to get multiple readings in before the actual lesson. I’m more prepared and comfortable when I teach, now. So, while planning has greatly impacted how I approach my teaching, I’ve also noticed that it’s having a huge influence on my students. It’s a win-win all-around and it’s all because I took the initiative to get ahead on my planning to make a difference for me and for my students.

And because I like this feeling so much, I don’t expect to ever go back to how it was. Planning lessons is crucial to keeping my good mood and rest of my life less stressful.

Students are the ones that drive our classrooms. Even in the most teacher-centered classrooms, a teacher should be adapting his or her lesson plans to suit the needs of students. In an English classroom like mine, though, there is a push to have students work together -  to collaborate – in order to deepen and complicate their understanding of a text. To do this, I’ve been asking my students to work together on a class wiki page. There, they’re able to edit pages, as a group, and post comments, as an individual, on given topics or studies of our text. And for the most part, these wikis have been successful. I think back to a wiki page that a group worked on this past week that went above and beyond my expectations in answering the “how they know something” and “why it’s important” questions on the group wiki. It was a fine example students’ potential in the English classroom and a key addition to their class’ collaborative and ever-growing wiki space. It truly was a great thing to see.

I have no doubt in my mind that students are capable of doing anything a teacher asks, so long as they’re encouraged and pushed to meet those expectations. But this great example of a group wiki page was the result of a group. How do I know every student got something out of the collaboration? How do I hold every student accountable in group work?

Those – and other similar questions – are the types of questions that I started to grapple with this past week. Wikis, for the most part, are done in groups. What strategies exist for me to hold individual students accountable for what the put into the wiki? For the example I mentioned above, I gave every student 7 or 8 minutes to individually look through their notes and readings about a specific topic. That way, whenever they met up with their group a few minutes later, they had something to bring to the table – literally. And in examining all of the wikis across all of the groups and periods, I noticed that they were the best to date, which suggests this strategy might be successful in the future.

But it still doesn’t answer my original question about teaching practices to hold individual accountable in groups.

And I’m afraid I don’t have the answer for it right now.

http://www.viddler.com/player/bd0ae6fe/

This video is password protected. For access to the video, please send me an e-mail and I will send you the password.

On another note, was “teaching this book” how this was worded as you discussed in class? That is how I remember the verbiage in my Pitt Ed classes as well. But, since I have been in the classroom my mindset has focused more on the text as a vehicle to teach skills. The difference may seem subtle linguistically, but has serious pedagogical implications for one’s approach to planning and teaching.

He goes on to suggest that students, then, might be more interested in reading if it’s something that they chose or have more of a say in. That doesn’t always seem feasible when it comes to public schools and their curriculum – and it seems even more difficult to pull off when I take into consideration that I am only an intern right now and don’t necessarily have my own classroom.

But in going back to the comment, I think we do need to use texts as a “vehicle to teach skills.” Yes, we can ask our students to read to broaden their knowledge on a subject or prepare for a test. But broadening knowledge will only work if students are genuinely interested in that and preparation for a test is too short-term.

I’m starting to believe that we need to use texts to teach our students skills. We can use these difficult texts to prepare them for the next step in their life.

If they go on to college, they will need to read, comprehend and interpret a vast array of textbooks, essays and other documents. If they go into trade and mechanical schools, they will need to read, comprehend and interpret various directions, signals and instructions. If they go on to play a sports in college or professionally, they’ll need to read, comprehend and interpret playbooks. If they go on into the work force, they’ll need to read, comprehend and interpret different documents, research, graphs and a wide range of other texts.

The point being, teachers need to use these texts as a way to teach reading skills. In my case, and I’m assuming most others, it’s to use these texts to show students the importance of deciphering and dissecting these texts because they’ll need to do it in some capacity – and it doesn’t matter what way of life or profession they go.

So, while this doesn’t entirely help me reach a conclusion on student motivation, it does help me work toward an understanding of why I need to teach difficult texts, like Beowulf. I need to show my students that comprehending a difficult or foreign text is an important skill.

Now to tackle that motivation issue…

As a teacher, though, that’s a hard concept to get across. So often – and I’m guilty of it as well – any time a student comes across a text that they can’t understand on the first read or even just by “judging” the text to difficult, they’ll just put it aside and claim it’s meaningless and pointless to attempt to read something like Beowulf. What my mentor teacher and I, then, have been working on is encouraging student to read it once and not to cast it aside because it seems impossible to understand. We want them to come into class the next day with questions about the text and their interpretation of certain parts of the reading. Then, as a class, we’ll work through it together. This week we focused heavily on close readings, partner conversation, small group discussion and whole group discussion to come to an understanding of the text from a comprehension standpoint as well as an investigative standpoint (the “why” is something included and “what” does it mean discussion). I’d have my students look at passage of Beowulf, read it to themselves and think about what it’s saying. Then, they might talk to a partner or other students at the their table before I’d bring it back to a whole class discussion where we could combine ideas and figure things out together.

Needless to say, we were able to get a majority of the students to do the reading and jump in on discussion. For my periods, especially, I was amazed at the amount of participation from all students in the classroom. They seemed genuinely interested to reach conclusions and find out what happened next. It makes for some good days.

Tomorrow evening, I hope to make a quick follow-up post with some activities and ideas that my mentor shared with me that do two things: checks that students are actually reading; and marks a place that can kickstart discussion.

The question that caused this sobering graphic: What word or words do you associate with No Child Left Behind?

As a side note, I did something similar when I was studying the future of  journalism at Pitt a few years ago.

But if you take a look at the word cloud, you see words like “flawed,” “failure” and “has to go.” But if you look hard enough you can see “goal is good” and “a wakeup call for parents and educators.” While I’m not here to debate one side or the other when it comes to NCLB – not yet, at least – I do want to look at what 10 years of NCLB means for me, a pre-service teacher (PST).If I was to respond to the question about what NCLB means to me, I thought process probably would have headed toward the word ‘accountability.’ I’m under the impression that everybody is being held accountable under the NCLB act. Public school districts are held accountable for what their administrators and teachers do all the way to how their students perform on standardized tests.  And because those tests have a lot of weight on how much federal funding, if any, a district may get, it seems like English teachers are in a struggle between teaching to the test and teaching for students to make meaning out of texts and other media.

I’m thinking this way because when it comes to teaching short stories or even excerpts of works that students haven’t seen before, I feel like there isn’t enough push to have students take into account different strategies like multiple perspectives and shared inquiry. Because of NCLB, I get the feeling that students expect to be taught for a test and not just taught to learn and make meaning.

I’d like to create an environment where class discussion doesn’t revolve around the question of whether or not it will be on the test. Instead, I’d like to see a class where students question, for example, whether or not the actions of a certain character were fate or free will. And in doing so, I’d like to have a classroom where students can question the teacher and form their own opinions rather than take my suggestion or response as the one and only true answer.

How can we, as teachers, combat the restrictions of NCLB?

So, for all my fans out there, you get your wish. There will be a weekly blog (or vlog) post on Fridays this semester.

As always, any feedback, suggestions and thoughts are appreciated in the comments.