Reflection

I have learned that I need to always have patience. Whether it be with students, faculty, or just the school day in general, patience is key. I realized that no matter what you want to get accomplished in a day, that things will inevitably come up and force you to reconsider your plans. I need to make sure that I do not get frustrated by this, and am flexible to change. Students do need to have a structure, and I think giving them specific amounts of time to do something is good, but it is important to listen to them if they really do struggle or need more time.

I also realized that students will always surprise you. The 8th graders I worked with were always thinking of clever ways to complete an assignment (or a witty excuse for why it wasn’t finished). I love how much students respond to you when you show them that you really do care about them. I think it is important for students to see me as someone that is there to teach them, as well as listen to them. I want students to feel comfortable enough with me to tell me when they are struggling and know that I want to help them succeed.

Finally, I realized how much I am going to miss those kids. It was very hard for me to leave the kids, and I loved going back for my final evaluation and having so many be excited to see me. I think it is crucial for students and their teachers to have positive working relationships. I am so looking forward to meeting the students at BMS and becoming a part of their academic world. I’m a little uneasy, but the excitement outweighs the nerves.

Rubrics

Throughout my middle and high school career, I can not think of rubrics really being used. Teachers seemed to grade papers on what they thought was right or wrong and we just had to look at their comments to understand why we received the grade we received. I loved when the teacher gave ample feedback, and I normally never had a complaint if I could figure out why they gave me a specific grade based on their comments. However, I was also the student who would ask why if a teacher just assigned a grade and never gave me any real reason. In college, minus education classes, I also never received a rubric for a paper, where I think I would have liked a rubric the most. I had to learn how to write for the professor on my own, figuring out their personal writing style based on their comments and critiques on my first paper – then I would tailor the rest of my papers accordingly. I feel like rubrics set a standard that everyone must meet, and I think that overall they are a good idea, especially in schools today.

Rubrics have really been brought to my attention this semester. Dalton is using rubrics fairly often, and I am sure I will encounter them at Blacksburg Middle, as well as I will be making them myself. I do think Wilson made some good points about how student’s writing never seems to surprise her and that rubrics do not (typically) account for potential, effort, and progress. I agree that many times we do not want students “writing for the rubric,” but I feel that is what many of them do. Many times rubrics may not give students enough freedom to be themselves, which is why some subjectivity or openness should still be left in a rubric. If I was a student given a rubric, I would simply write exactly to the rubric, making sure all elements were included; my creative thinking would turn to more practical thinking as I tried to make sure I followed the guidelines to get the good grade. Many students need the guidelines, and rubrics are a good way to prevent bias. I think the most important thing is to remember that there is no perfect rubric, and a student’s reasoning for doing something the way they did should always be taken into consideration.

Writing About Literature

I have always thought that writing about literature is one of the more exciting aspects of teaching English. It is a way for students to be “essayists, editorialists, playwrights, fiction writers, poets.” I really enjoyed the freedom I was given in college to take something that was important to me in whatever it was that I was reading and roll with it. I want to, in some ways, incorporate that kind of freedom/choice into my middle school classroom. I want students to care about what they are writing and they need to feel like they are having a say in their work in order to really make it significant to them. I think students also must be exposed to a wide variety of writing styles. Some may not like to write an essay all the time, while other students hate poetry work. The multi-genre paper, which I was introduced to when I was in college, is a great way to incorporate many types of writing styles. I loved writing mine and I think it can be incorporated into the classroom quite nicely and easily. It can be used with a unit plan or as a 6 weeks project. In the end, it is something the kids will be proud of doing and they will have a binder-of-sorts of all their accomplishments, together for all to see.

Something interesting, that I agree with, yet had not specifically thought about for a while was the fact that teachers need to be writers. If teachers want to teach writing, they must develop their craft. If they do so, they will discover what works and what does not, what is beneficial, what takes time, where frustrations may set in, and etcetera. Teachers also need to think about the students they will be teaching. Rief gives us questions to as ourselves as writing teachers, “What do I believe and why? How do I shape those beliefs into sound practices in my classroom? Who are the students with whom and from whom I learn, to whom I teach, and for whom I care and have a responsibility.” If we think about these questions before we teach, we may be able to better prepare our lessons and our students for the assignments and challenges to come.

Also, something that I 100% agree with in the reading is that one cannot write without reading. I think it is extremely important for reading and writing to be taught hand in hand and relationships between the two illustrated often. Finally, I think a writers journal or folder is essential for students. It gives them a place to put their ideas, and also, they are all in one spot and much harder to lose.

Media in the Classroom

Media in the English classroom has mainly seemed to be a reward/relaxation time for me when I was in middle and high school. We would read a novel or play, and then we would watch the movie. That would give us two or three class periods where we did not have to do anything, because we were never asked to do something with what we watched. I think that media needs to be used for a meaningful purpose. Media needs to be used in a way that makes something more alive, vivifying the text or activity; students need to be aware that media can be approached critically and can expand an experience. I really liked the idea of analyzing magazines (339), however once the students performed the four steps the book talked about, I think it would be interesting to expand off of that and have students write their own article for the magazine and use the tools they learned while dissecting it in their previous activities/assignments. I also really liked the idea for the bumper stickers. We had to make a bumper sticker in one of my education classes; they had to speak to our field of study. It was concise, interesting ways to think about my English profession and how I could sum up something I love about teaching into a few words. I believe I may be teaching quite a bit of grammar next semester, and I think it may be a fun idea to give a student, or pairs of students, each a grammar term and have them come up with bumper stickers that help us remember the term in a clever, precise way. They can then be presented and hung around the room.

Last week, at Dalton, we had the students look at pictures and think about what the poems they were about to read could be about just from looking at the picture. The students were able to think visually, and many of them picked out minute details that ended up being important in the poem(s). We also read a poem a few weeks back and had the students draw what they heard before we gave them the poem – we did not give them the title of the poem because it would have given the topic away. The kids need to think more creatively, and from the pictures we were able to see how well the students were listening and understanding what they were hearing.

Vocabulary Instruction

Teaching vocabulary is something that all English teachers are going to have to do to some degree in their classrooms. My cooperating teacher has an interesting way to teach vocabulary – it is called CSSD. (Context – Structure - Sound & Definition).

This is a sentence that was demonstrated on the board for my 8th graders, “When I retire, I plan to live at the beach in a peaceful, picturesque setting.” The students then drew three boxes side by side in their notebooks, one for context, one for structure (root word), and one for sound. Then we went over the sentence. The kids looked for words in picturesque that sounded like any other words they had heard – they came up with “picture.” They also thought the word picturesque could be broken down into the root word “picture.” Then the students went to the sentence to look for context clues. They came up with “beach” and “peaceful” and they thought the sentence described a place that was “happy” and “beautiful.” From those three boxes, the students create their own definition, which was “like a beautiful picture.” After doing this with all their vocabulary words they look them up in the dictionary to see how accurate they were.

This is by no means a full proof way to teach vocabulary, but it is really a good way to get students looking at the word and the sentence(s) around it to try and use context clues to make sense of a word they do not know. Not every box in the CSSD method will be used with every word and that took a few practice tries for students to see that. I think that once students get a feel for how to use the CSSD it could be very useful for them and something they can do in their head eventually once it becomes more of a habit to them. This technique will be helpful for them when they are reading individually as well as trying to determine a definition on an SOL test. When it come time to test the 8th graders, my cooperating teacher gives them a test that is a little more advanced than a fill in the blank/matching test. The vocabulary tests usually take a vocabulary word and then have the student pick the synonym or the antonym in the form of multiple choice questions. I think this shows if the students really do grasp the concept of the word – often times student are also asked to use the word in a sentence they create themselves.


As the book says, I really do think that books and reading are a key way to strengthen vocabulary knowledge, and many times kids do not even know they are learning new words. I also think audio-assisted readings are a great idea for the classroom. This has been done in the middle school I am working at and it gives kids a chance to follow along and the reader can set the mood and enunciate words that a child might not be able to figure out. This also has the downfall of students zoning out, but I think it is important to stop the tape at specific point and go back and discuss to make sure students are understanding and are staying on task. Finally, it is important that students have multiple encounters with new words. The contexts of new words need to be meaningful as well as useful. For a student to really remember a word, they need to ad detail to the word, make associations/elaborate on it, as well as see it in multiple situations.

Thoughts on Teaching Grammar

I can not remember having formal grammar lessons since I was in the 9th grade, when we would do a couple sentences a day at the beginning of each class. I think grammar is the thing that makes me most nervous about teaching, but I see it as something I will brush up on as I go along and something I will become better at with time. I have to say, I think I’m still developing my ‘most compelling reason for teaching grammar.’ I do think that correctness matters, and for students to prosper in academic/professional settings, it is something they will need to learn. I also think it is extremely important that students know that there is a difference between the formal grammar in writing versus the everyday speech they use. As an undergraduate, I took Linguistics and Language & Society, and from those classes, I developed an adoration for the spoken word. I became aware of the fact that all dialects are unique, beautiful, and worthwhile. I think Nancy Patterson has it right when she says, “Grammar becomes a highly compelling subject for students when they can use their language and play with it, recast it in other modes for other audiences than their immediate peers and family. This is true for all students, regardless of dialect.” Students need grammar, like all school subjects, to be made relevant to them. Grammar should never be taught as a “deficit.” I think the separated, stimulated, and integrated way of instruction that Jeff Anderson talks about is a good way to think about teaching grammar. We need to Zoom In and Zoom Out in a contextual way that will be full of meaning making.

I think teachers will need to work with grammar issues as they come. Pretests and daily activities will be a good gauge for how students are doing in their work and show teachers how much they already know. Teachers will also find grammar “mistakes” in students writing. This is something that happened in a 7th grade class that I work with at Dalton. The teacher was just reading the students’ papers and noticed that many of the students were writing could of instead of could’ve. When students write this Nonstandard form of could’ve, they do not even know they are doing so. They are writing what they hear themselves say. I am sure that these 7th graders are unaware of what they are doing. The teacher of this class is going to make a worksheet to go over this writing error with the entire class as to not single anyone out. (She told me that this error is a big one on the SOLs.) She will be able to use students’ writing to illustrate her point and make kids aware of something they do subconsciously.

A Book Trailer

The past few weeks I have been very stressed out about working on and completing our book trailer project. I am very much an amateur at technology, and I was apprehensive about having to do something like this all on my own. I will admit that I was not looking forward to the project at all. The project really took me a long time, and I would have been lost if it was not for google images. The project probably took me longer than most to complete, but I feel like I got an understanding for a teaching tool that I had not previously had before. I ended up writing a script for my book trailer and having a friend narrate it with a bit of an accent (sort of Reading Rainbow-ish),and that got me thinking about collaboration and doing something like this in my classroom one day. I think, for middle schoolers, a book trailer might be just the thing to get them excited about reading. They can read their book and then do a book trailer for it instead of a typical book talk or report. Yet, a teacher will be able to tell if they read the book based on what is included in the trailer. Student could also work in pairs and create book trailers for a book that the class has read as a whole, just pick and choose different scenes/chapters. I ended up showing my book trailer to the reading specialist at my school, and she is going to use it this coming week after she has the kids write about what they think might happen in the book. I am interested to see how the students respond to the trailer. One thing I would do differently for next time is I would try to figure out how to incorporate my own video footage (maybe) or at least my own pictures. I really enjoyed finding the music for the end credits, and I think students will enjoy that as well. I think one important thing to do with students when they are working on the book trailers is to make sure that they are given a specific amount of time to complete it – otherwise I could see them taking an excess amount of time.

Required Listening

I think it is a great idea to incorporate iPods into the classroom. Taking a device, such as an iPod, something that kids see as enjoyable and on trend, and bringing that into an educational setting, can definitely make learning more meaningful to students. I never thought about how helpful an iPod could be for a student struggling with the English language. Having students learn songs that are popular in English can definitely help them with learning words that are commonly used in our society today. It can also help with pronunciation, and teachers can move from the words of the songs to the written lyrics, and students can work on their spelling as well. I do think it is important to make sure that the students are actually learning the material and not just memorizing words. The words/lyrics need to be explained and understood for the language barrier to be truly broken. Overall, I think putting learning to music is a fabulous idea because, in general, it is typically very easy to memorize songs/tunes and they stick with you much longer than simply memorizing a list of facts.

I was also thinking that it may not be the best idea for iPods to be a requirement for the classroom. Students should have access to them at school, but I know, in my school for example, there are some families that could just not afford it and they would not benefit from having one. Schools need to offer them to rent, but I would just want to make sure that students were not feeling like they are being singled out when they have to ask to borrow one. I get really sad when I see the ‘haves’ and have-nots’ in school, and I want to try to keep that reality to a minimum as much as I can in my classroom.

Assessment, Curriculum, etc.

The article on assessment is something I really found interesting and helpful. I wish more of my teachers in middle and high school had given me rubrics before I was to hand in a project. I think a rubric will help hold a student accountable. They can not say they did not know something was to be included in their project or assignment if they were given the rubric ahead of time. A rubric needs to be specific, and if it is detailed enough, it will assist in saving a teacher time in grading because they too can just follow the rubric. I also think rubrics help teachers be less bias in their grading. I think “self-assessments” are very useful tools for the classroom for both students and teachers. A teacher can know where their students are and if they understand what it is they are supposed to comprehend. I also think it is a way for students to reflect on what they are doing and be honest with themselves about their progress/success.

In the article on curriculum, I found myself underlining the announcement to “anticipate obstacles.” As I have learned from working in Radford these past few weeks, there is never going to be that perfect day where all of your plans go exactly as you have them written out. We are all human, and a teacher needs to be flexible to problems and extenuating circumstances. A teacher must remind him/herself that there are going to be times when plans will have to change and resources will not always be available. I also think it is extremely important that instructors periodically remind students of what they are trying to accomplish in the ‘long run.’ (Recursive teaching, where the instructor circles back around to make sure students understand and are achieving the objectives. 262) Index cards for reflection/questions at the end of a class are also a very useful tool to understanding how a student is doing/what they’ve done for the day. I agree that when we plan, “we must include time to dream and time to master, time to study and time to learn.”

In the M&M reading, I found myself again thinking about group work and its effectiveness in the classroom. I found the five important features that a teacher must consider when making groups/group work to be very helpful. Those five components being: size, stability, selection, roles, and self-consciousness (37). For me, roles are very crucial to a group’s success because there is always going to be a student that does not want to do anything. Roles make sure all group members are responsible for something, and that without their contribution, the group would not be as successful. Learning is very much a social experience, yet it can also be an individual activity. I liked working on individual projects because it gave me more freedom to express myself. Individual projects also gave me the liberty of working at my own pace and going about a project the way I wanted to. I liked the idea Nancy Johnson suggested on page 41 about silent dialogue, sketch to stretch, and also the Quaker read. I want to use all three in my teaching. I really like students responding to other students in a very non-threatening, yet meaningful and stimulating, way.

Articles

The articles this week really got me thinking about the classes I am working with this semester at Dalton. The 7th and 8th graders were assigned their first book project and the students were all allowed to choose the books they were going to read as long as they were on or a little above their reading level. The 8th graders were not allowed to choose R.L. Stine though. The 7th graders were given a page limit that they had to meet, and I found this to not be the best idea. When I was with the 7th graders in the library, they were so concerned with page length and not getting a really long book, that I feel many may have missed out on some great novels. In my 8th grade classes however, the students were not given a page length and it was never really a discussion. Kids chose books where the title jumped out at them or from the suggestions of myself, my cooperating teacher, or the librarians. I found that the kids loved the idea of choosing a book for themselves, and I took that opportunity to have them tell me why they chose their books. It is so exciting to see kids reading and being excited about what they are doing. I also love it when my students come up to me to tell me how they like the book that I helped them pick out!

I agree with Julie Lause when she says that reading can not become strictly an academic exercise or it will become “BORing.” Students need the opportunity to read about things that matter to them, they need to read for meaning, and that will strengthen their language development. I also really liked “The Reader’s Bill or Rights” in the New Voices article. At Dalton, the kids are given a week with their book, and in that first week if they really can not get into their novel, they are allowed to pick another one. I really think the focus of all of these articles is to get kids reading, and the more they read, the more they will want to read, but they need to be able to have a choice in many/most of their reading materials.

Old and New

BPR Ch. 3

New technologies and the changing times are things that teachers now much just learn about and accept. I feel that many digital devices could provide positive reinforcements to the more standard class materials. I do not think it needs to be thought about as an either/or for the classroom. I like what Gee had to say about online games; he predicts that Internet video games will “sit beside [books], interact with them, and change them and their role in society in various ways” (25). It is important for teachers to learn about new and emerging technologies, and many different digital tools, and play around with them to see how they could be used in the classroom as an enlightening learning resource. Many kids see text messaging, video games, blogging, etcetera as gear to use when they are not in school or not in an educational mindset. If we can get kids using those same tools in a classroom environment, it may increase their motivation and interest. I think it is important that the new goods be used alongside the more standard texts, novels, and pen/paper. For example, if a student reads a book in class, they could have the choice of writing a response or maybe creating a webquest. Most importantly, technology in the classroom needs to be used in a meaningful way. I think it is probably true that “learning with multiple sign systems often helps even the least motivated and underachieving readers redefine their literate competence” (26). A reluctant student may become more intrigued with literature and learning if they are given a different outlet in which to express themselves that may interest them more than a standard written assignment would. Most importantly new and old teaching tools/devices need to be used in collaboration with each other.

The Book Thief

As I finished The Book Thief, I found myself wiping tears off my already soaked cheeks. I found this book to be very powerfully and beautifully written. I was fascinated how Zusak showed the brutality and sadness of the time period in a way that was not obvious or crude. The way humans were portrayed many times as things (Hans is an accordion, the Jews were tablets) and many times the objects were given human qualities (the ribcage of the plane). I loved how often knees were spoken about in subtle ways. I also was struck by the character of death. Death was made out to be so human like, and at times he was so wise, and yet other times ironic and witty. I particularly found his line, “It kills me sometimes, how people die” to be very powerful (454). I feel that high school students could really excavate many strong details/connections from this text and have many brilliant conversations as well as endless paper topics. (This would also be great taught alongside Art Spiegelman’s Maus).

However, I tried to think about it as something I could use with my middle school children as well. I think this may be too much for a young middle schooler (though Liesel is actually of the middle school age), I may suggest it to children who really like reading and can handle the content of such a story as this. I think if this book was taught in a middle school, there would really need to be significant time spent on it for kids to really understand what was going on and they would need time to express and work through their emotions and confusion. Or, am I mistaken? What grade level should this book be taught?

I also think that it would be beneficial if this was taught alongside a history class (or even IN a history class) when the Holocaust is being discussed.

"So What?"

The “So What” responses these unnamed students gave were very interesting. It is apparent that these students, whatever the age/race/gender, are digging into the poem. They are thinking about what they read and applying it to the bigger picture. The “So What” question also brings about more questions from the students. It is interesting to see how each student caught on to the racial tensions of the poem, yet there was some disparity about the gender of the two people in the poem. This shows how each student will take a poem and make it their own. I really liked that one of the students said that, “literature provides a way for us to step outside our protective bubble into situations that are foreign…” Students need their teachers to present them with material that pushes them out of their comfort zone and exposes them to new ideas and situations. Students should be aware of the wide array of materials available. Hopefully, the more diverse materials students read, the more well-informed and tolerant they will become.

Up For Discussion

I feel that group/whole class discussion is becoming more and more prevalent in schools today. When I was in middle and high school, we were rarely engaged in whole classroom discussion, especially where the students would lead the discussion. It is important that we, as teachers, remember that there is a social context to learning. Discussion needs to be a fairly significant part of a student’s education, yet the discussion needs to go beyond “common recitative answering of closed questions with their anticipated correct answers” (M&M 25). Students need to be challenged when talking in class; they need to feel that they have a “stake” in the conversation. Children will then be prone to take class more seriously and take ownership of their thoughts and of their learning. Students should lead the discussion a fair amount of the class discussion time, yet they need some ground rules to make sure their learning is meaningful.

Also, kids should respond to each other; when a student asks a question, another student should answer back to him/her, not back to/through the teacher. I thought it was a good idea for students to write down questions they have and then they could trade with another student and they could respond to each other. Another idea is to have students write down their questions/topics for discussion and give them to the teacher. The teacher can then bring up the questions without students knowing who is asking a particular question. The anonymity of this discussion may make shy or quiet children more likely to participate since there would not be that fear of ridicule when stating what they want to discuss.

Ridicule, humiliation, or punishment for an incorrect answer can keep many kids from wanting to speak up in class discussion. It is important that students feel that they are in an amicable, encouraging environment where they can speak freely and debate respectfully. Nancy Rost Goulden says that teachers should expect, and teach their students to expect, that every student will speak every day. I see where that could lead to a fully participatory classroom, but I also think that additional written assignments should occasionally be made available to those students who have an extremely high anxiety for speaking in class. That way a teacher can see that the timid student was actively listening in class and their written assignment is responding to something they heard in class discussion that day. I suppose I just have a soft spot for those extremely nervous children, because I was that child in many of my classes growing up. I do, however, feel it is important that all students speak up in classroom discussions, so it does not become a place where two or three children show off their “verbal acrobatics.”

This I believe...

This I believe (now) about teaching English…

It is all about literacy!...

Students need a learning environment that is encouraging and respectful.

My classroom needs be literature-rich; where what we read is made stimulating and relevant.

Reading and writing require a foundation. To build this foundation, all aspects of reading and writing need to be addressed (visual, auditory, physical, intellectual, and emotional).

There is no set way to read, and there is no one way to learn.

Students need choice. Kids need some options as to what they read and write about in class. They also need to be given different ways to express themselves when they are to discuss. Many kids prefer to draw, or act, than to simply write a paper. *Also, since all students learn differently, their evaluation should also come in a variety of forms, as to be able to best identify each student’s learning and progress.

The multi-layered aspects of the English language should be exposed and appreciated.

I should be learning right along with my students. After all, learning is a never ending process.

What my students learn in their English class will support/influence them in many other areas of their academic and social lives.