This weeks reading highlighted key elements that are necessary to employ when teaching writing in today's classrooms. First of all, as evidenced in the literature, writing needs to be taught in every classroom by every teacher. If all of the responsibility for teaching writing is placed on the shoulders of the ELA teachers, then students are being done a disservice, as every discipline has a different way of reading and writing that needs to be taught, understood and relevant to the students. There is no way for students to effectively engage with and write in the discipline if it is not first explained why we write in certain discipline-specific ways and then students are taught how to do so.
For example, I am studying to become a history teacher and an idea I previously took for granted, is the empathy that historical reading takes. According to Wilson, “one aim of historical reading is to read empathetically, with the understanding that another’s viewpoint may be shaped by affiliations and experiences different from one’s own” (Timmins et al., 2005). If students do not first understand why it is neccessary to read empathetically then the entire relevance of history is lost and students will be unable to effectively engage with the content. Teaching the Civil Rights Era to students who have never experienced what African Americans have is impossible unless students develop their empathy.
This idea goes hand-in-hand with Gallagher's point about teachers modeling their own writing process in front of students. According to Gallager, "when teaching students how to write, the most effective strategy is a teacher who writes, and thinks out loud, in front of his or her students. We go first, then they go" (Gallagher, p. 16.) Gallagher continually emphasizes that teacher-modeling is the single best method for aiding student writing. However this strategy is woefully underutilized, especially by secondary education teachers. While there are many elementary and middle school teachers who model writing processes in front of their students, far less secondary education teachers do. I believe that the heart of this is the idea that elementary school is a place for building skills while high school is a place for disseminating knowledge, be that lecturing facts in a history classroom or only studying the classics in an English classroom. However, people are building skills throughout their entire lives and our writing and identity as people is continually evolving. This evolving identity needs to be nurtured within the learning environment. Thus writing skills, cultural relevancy, disciplinary relevancy and individual relevancy need to be focal points in the education of high school students across every discipline.
The above video is not meant to be diheartening, rather it is a call to all current and future educators to make school relevant, enjoyable and accessible to the entire student body.
Your emphasis on making instruction culturally relevant is extremely heartening. Although I do believe that as a disciplinary community we need to think a lot more about the meaning of cultural relevance and cultural sensitivity which can mean different things for different people in the same community and when we are outsiders to that community then our cultural sensitivity can also sometime verge on condescension. I say this because different cultures (and individuals within cultures) have different understandings of their own selves as well as the ways in which they view language. My own interactions with a very diverse (not a joke even though they are all Mexican) immigrant community has made me think deeply about this. I believe my own experiences of other people's beliefs about me (generally wrong)primarily in my own country have made me incredibly sensitive to this. A group of students may speak the same language and generally appear to be similar but the differences between individuals are inherent and a beautiful part of the world we live. To be truly culturally sensitive is to understand that all students are unique and they must be given affordances according to how they define themselves as individuals, as a community as well as in opposition to others.
ReplyDeleteI really appreaciate your comment. Cultural relevancy and cultural sensitivity are absolutely different things, but both are concepts I will be striving for in my classroom. As someone who grew up seeped in the dominant culture, I am sure I will make mistakes when it comes to trying to relate to students who come from other cultures. One point I have taken from this class is that it is not about being perfect as a teacher, but continuing to grow an have an open dialogue with students.
DeleteI really appreaciate your comment. Cultural relevancy and cultural sensitivity are absolutely different things, but both are concepts I will be striving for in my classroom. As someone who grew up seeped in the dominant culture, I am sure I will make mistakes when it comes to trying to relate to students who come from other cultures. One point I have taken from this class is that it is not about being perfect as a teacher, but continuing to grow an have an open dialogue with students.
DeleteI found it very interesting when you mentioned that self expression in school decreases over time. I too, think it is rather sad because usually, I think self expression occurs in a scoail studies classroom, or in a classroom where contraversial issues are talked about. The more students age, the more politics become relevant to them, and so students usually have stronger opinions on topics.
ReplyDeleteI also appreciated you mentioning teacher modeling of writing. Teachers should model a lot of the content they teach, such as writing, or going over a math problem. Too often we are given the information, and expected to know how to handle a task, but an example is always great to see, especially from a teacher. Teachers should also write down/say their thought process because students can always refer to those notes, especially if something was affecting the student's attention.
Building off of the point about self-expression. I think that it is scary for teachers to engage with controversial topics in the classroom. That is understandable, as no one knows exactly where the conversation will lead. Furthermore, students could go back home and say we talked about x and parents may be upset by this. This is one of the topics I struggle with a lot because I don't want my job to be jeopardized by angry parents, but I also want to provide a safe space for my students to think about and discuss important and relevant issues.
DeleteLiteracy and writing are simultaneously connected. Students that don’t read struggle in writing because they don’t have a grasp of the structure, use of vocabulary, and syntax of formal writing. Developing writers will more often than not write how they speak. In the younger grades they can get away with this because the sentence structures are simple and they are writing about what they think with concrete topics at hand. However, once the material becomes informative, abstract, and require academic structure, students tend to struggle with writing and see it as a lost cause. A majority of students are not surrounded by academic language outside of school through reading, writing or speaking. This lack of discourse puts students at a disadvantage. In chapter 1 of Write Like This- Teaching Real World Writing Through Modeling and Mentor Texts, the author makes interesting points on the importance of modeling in writing stating, “when teaching students how to write, the most effective strategy is a teacher who writes, and thinks out loud, in front of his or her students. We go first, then they go”. Students need strategies for how to become better writers. Showing students the relevance of what they are reading will improve writing. She explains how the reading needs to connect with students because their writing has purpose. They can draw on their own conclusion and be proud of their work. In my own classroom, I made major changes to my Reconstruction unit this year because of this exact problem. I had my students write a DBQ on a prompt “Who Killed Reconstruction: North or South?”. Reading through the lengthy responses, there was very little effort put into their work. They thought it was boring and not interesting. There was no connecting these old documents to their own life. This year I took their feedback and changed the DBQ with the question, “Are current political events in America a relic of the Reconstruction Era? With this new DBQ I included a youtube clip, a primary source tweet, primary source cartoon, and modern articles. I hope that my students find this interesting because it is authentic purposeful writing that will inspire them to be proud or their writing.
ReplyDeleteWow, that's great that you completely changed your lesson plan based upon student interest and feedback. I think that it can get really tough for teachers, who are intrinsically interested in their discipline to step outside of themselves and see that students may not share that interest.
DeleteAlso, I loved this video! What are the practices teachers and administrators can use to change the old traditional models of "school"? Are there examples that you have seen at schools you have observed at?
ReplyDeleteFor example, at my school, teachers have been encouraged to design their classroom with flexible seating instead of stale rowed desks. There are different stations around the room for individual work, pairs work and group collaboration.
I definitely see schools challenging this old model. There has been flexible seating in every single classroom I observed. Furthermore, teachers are relying much less on testing and more on projects and skills-based learning. Finally, there has been a big move away from textbooks (which kind of breaks my heart because I loved my history textbooks.) But research has found that this is not an effective way for many students to learn.
DeleteHi Erin,
ReplyDeleteId echo your experience that teacher-created opportunities of identity expression decrease as we enter high school. I wonder if part of the reason for this change is the shift to more discipline-focused classrooms. I felt like there was encouragement to express yourself in English Language Arts classes but not much else. As a future physics teacher (a class that most people probably think is as dry as it could get) this is both disheartening but exciting, because there is so much room for growth. A physics classroom I'm currently observing for a different course at Lane Tech uses a modeling-based method, in which there is zero chalkboard lecture in the class -- a problem is posed, students work in teams on whiteboards, present their solutions to the class, and the class discusses. While this is a step in the right direction to get students actively involved in the problem-solving of quantitative science, there is still that extra leap that needs to be made to make it more engaging on a personal level.
That really interesting, because my physics classroom in high school was purely lecture-based. I was actually just wondering how science courses have been changing as I am unfortunately very ignorant of the science world. I think that science projects could allow for a lot of self expression in terms of choosing a problem students see in the world and attempting to fix it themselves. However, as a person who came from a low-income family I have a problem with science projects because they add a lot of stress to students and families that cannot afford supplies. Furthermore, I think many students are embarrassed to admit this to their teacher, I know I was.
DeleteHey Erin, thank you for your sharing.
ReplyDeleteI agree that reading is important, and the method of reading skill is also important. I also think Gallagher's words is really make a sense, "when teaching students how to write, the most effective strategy is a teacher who writes, and thinks out loud, in front of his or her students. We go first, then they go" (Gallagher, p. 16.)The role of a teacher in a class is just like a model, his idea, his words, his concept of writing will have a deep influence on students.
I really liked this point of Gallagher's because I think that it is good for us to all keep in mind. No matter what we (as teachers) are doing in the classroom, we need to be aware that we are serving as models for our students and we should do this carefully and thoughtfully.
DeleteI loved your post. I especially agree with your assertion that student expression and individuality is nearly lost in secondary education. I went to a college prep high school where almost every single student was white, middle class, Irish, and Catholic. If we had projects that supported individual expression, maybe we could have found more differences to highlight as well as made the students who did not fit the majority mold of our school feel more supported in their differences. I also think the lack of doing this does a disservice to our students. Most jobs require you to have some form of individuality and very rarely are you just regurgitating the same information as others back and forth therefore the promotion of individuality is important. I also appreciated the reading and your post about reading with empathy in history. So many times in my history classes I hear students who talk about how truly evil things in the past were and how they would have never supported it. Although some, maybe all, of these were truly awful, one does not have a proper understanding of history if they can not read with empathy and try to understand how those individuals who followed the awful mindsets got to be there. This is an important part of history and without proper literacy education students would typically be unable to do this.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this response, I agree with you completely. I think that a history classroom is a great place for students to grapple with their own sense of self. For example we could ask "why do you think that this event or policy was so horrible?" "Why would you have protested this leader's actions" etc. If the classroom is not a place to grow in a deeply personal way, then it becomes just another societal structure that we must navigate instead of a true opportunity and service to our student body.
DeleteNice post Erin. I whole-heartedly agree with you on empathetical reading. As a teaching of History major myself, I can remember the first time I felt a personal connection from reading a piece of writing from a historical figure from the late eighteen hundreds. What surprised was how this person shared a lot of my personal beliefs. Since then I have found it easier to digest historical information and I appreciate primary sources a lot more. By focusing on connecting empathy to literacy for students, they will not only have an easier time remembering the materials, but they can also learn how to write in such a way that inspires empathy. Great Post!
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DeleteThanks! I am still trying to figure out creative ways to support historical empathy (and empathy in general) in my classroom. I think that modeling, as I talked about above with writing, could be a good way to promote it. However, I would love to hear other suggestions.
Thanks! I am still trying to figure out creative ways to support historical empathy (and empathy in general) in my classroom. I think that modeling, as I talked about above with writing, could be a good way to promote it. However, I would love to hear other suggestions.
ReplyDeleteI think something important to add to your point about giving students an identity in the classroom and a memorable experience is the accessibility of the texts they engage with. The Wilson reading discusses a lot about this, I particularly like the way it is phrased in the math section, "in mathematics, numbers and symbols hold a privileged and central position because they are a principal, if not exclusive, means through which mathematicians solve many of their problems," (p. 438). I think this is true of all disciplines. There is always some privilege or barrier not being addressed by the disciplinary expert in the room often because they now know this material like the back of their hand. (Like the memes of the college students that don't ask their professors questions out of fear of looking dumb because the topic is so easy to their professor at that point and they are disgruntled by such "simple" questions). In order for students to be able to express their identities in different disciplines, they must see themselves in the discipline first. -Kiley
ReplyDeleteThat was a really interesting point. I think that it is probably most difficult for us to see the privilege/barrier in our own discipline, because not only do we know it best, but it was probably a subject that we were drawn to in school. When we are engaged in a discipline or we think that a subject makes sense, then it is hard to see it from the point of view of someone who is struggling. This would explain why some of the best teachers struggled in their own discipline at one point in time. - Erin
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