Gallagher’s “Readicide”

               The book Readicide by Kelly Gallagher promotes many excellent ways at which teachers can approach attempts to get students to actually like what they are reading. The section I found to be most valuable has to be the part where Gallagher introduces the Los Angeles Unified School District’s unit plan for the novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The unit plan is shockingly comprehensive and long, teaching many different skills from just one novel. Students will spend months on this novel it seems like, and not being too far removed from the role of student myself, I know that by the end of the unit I would never want to pick up To Kill a Mockingbird ever again. I feel that in order to get students to actually enjoy reading and want to read novels on their own outside of the classroom we have to provide for them a variety of works that they can explore. Maybe going even so far as to only teach one important literacy skill or concept per novel that they read. Sure, it would mean having to find many more novels to use in the classroom, but at least the students would not be spending almost half of the school year reading out of the same book over and over again. Granted, there is no roundabout way to avoid having to meet common standards that are set for teachers to get students to achieve. Teachers still have to meet those standards one way or another and learning as many as you can out of one novel seems like the easiest and most cost efficient way to achieve those standards. However, I feel that is doing students a disservice to ease the burden on the teachers end. We need to not take the easy way out and actually motivate students to go out in to the world and read as much as they can by giving those opportunities to learn many different skills and concepts out of just as many pieces of literature.

Tovani’s “I Read it, but I don’t get it”

               Getting students actually interested in what they are reading and knowing why they are reading it is perhaps one of the biggest challenges I can think of as a future teacher (there are probably bigger issues, but for right now this is the extant of my knowledge). Like it says in Chris Tovani’s I Read It, but I Don’t Get It, students will most likely lose interest in actually reading the text they are assigned and will turn to online and other outside sources in order to get a summary of the book/text and find answers for talking points about the text in class, rather than thinking about it themselves. I was guilty of this, and I am positive that my future students will be guilty of this too, even if I do discourage it. But I most likely will not openly discourage going online and getting summaries/themes of texts that I assign in class. Instead, I will create assignments (not necessarily tests) that can only be perfectly completed if the student actually read the text, thus encouraging students to read what they are assigned. Also, making connections of the reading material to outside known information is another good way to generate interest in student reading and learning. For example, by connecting an historical fiction novel to a major war in history that students have already learned about, students will be able to connect and pick out fictional parts of the novel that relate to the actual historical events that they learned in social studies. Finding any way to connect something you are leading the class through to something that they already know (or know of) is an invaluable skill to have and is an easy way to promote student learning and interest. Even if the teacher knows that what they are reading does not connect with anything that the students already know, they can introduce something that the students will surely be interested in first, and then go on to connect the reading to that. There is no shortage of background information to be had.

Social Justice in the Classroom

               When I am teaching my future classroom, I want the concept of respect to be highly valued by every student present in the class. This means that every student is respectful of everyone else, whether it comes in the form of letting one speak till conclusion or staying silent when unkind thoughts enter one’s head. In my classroom, every student is equal and is to be treat with equality. The study “Social Justice in the Classroom” by Jacqueline Grennon Brooks and Eustace G. Thompson summarizes that with respect, students can create a safer and more productive learning environment for themselves. Now I know the old saying “respect is earned, not provided,” but in my class respect is already present and by no means can it be taken away. By coming to and participating in class, students have already earned their respect right out of the gate. Every student in the classroom comes from a different background. In my field experience school I am at right now, there are students that come from all walks of life, but yet they are able to get along just fine and treat each other with equal respect. Now I am not saying that we should ignore our differences and simply pretend that we are all the same, because we are not. In fact, our differences should be utilized and, in a way, celebrated because that is what makes the classroom diverse. Equality in the face of diversity can be a challenging topic, but when everyone has respect for everyone else, equality is possible. Let us use those differences to enrich our learning and gain multiple perspectives on critical thinking topics and issues. A diverse but respectful classroom may possibly be the safest, best learning environment for all students, regardless of their backgrounds or shortcomings. 

Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s “Critical Pedagogy and Popular Culture in an Urban Secondary English Classroom”

               Well now I know why the TPA lesson format stresses to us that we should connect our lessons in a way to our students’ cultural and communal background. In order to get students interested in doing research projects and to gather background information on their culture, the researchers let some students choose what they wanted to do and about four of them were interested in doing a project/study on hip-hop. Hip-hop, I feel, can be a great representation of urban backgrounds and cultures, so long as they choose the right artists to study and no just talk about trap music or whips. Artists like Vince Staples, Kendrick Lamar, Biggie, will all give you great insights to their personal lives and all talk about how they grew up in maybe similar cases to the students chosen for the study. All of this leads back to classroom management and holding the students interests or sparking interest in them; creating motivation. I also agree with their conclusion that students (and everyone, for that matter) should critically think about and analyze the news that the mainstream media provides for us. More than once have I came across a major story (that was confirmed) on a website or cable channel that seemed to be ignored on the main media channels, and conversely media channels seem to run stories every now and then that either are non-news or are, in rare cases, completely made up in order to boost ratings. Students do need to be listened rather than talked at. By letting them tell us what they want to learn, we can pick out what we need to teach them and how to go around teaching it. Students need to be ready for the 21^st century and all that it brings in media and education, so teachers must be one step ahead of them, preparing them for this task.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

        The likening of passive students to being oppressed was kind of a shock to get past when first reading this article, but the more I read the article and the more I thought about it, educators who simply rely on narration of information to students really is making them oppressed. Pure narration is keeping the students from getting the education that they deserve, including critical thinking. Filling up students like trash cans with the “garbage” that is simply facts and gospel from the narrating educator is a way of saying that banking education (providing an education that simply consists of memorizing and absorbing information) is a very ineffective way of teaching students. For example, as I am writing this I am sitting in one of the history classes I need for my minor, an entry level class, and the professor (if he is a professor, I forget and do not care to look at the syllabus right now) is doing nothing but reading history facts and dates off of a power point at the front of the class. It is not like this class is even that big; there are maybe 25 students enrolled in the class. What does me reading this article and writing this post during the middle of this class say about the effectiveness of simple narration as a means of educating? I am not engaged at all with the class, an even if I was taking notes on all of the slides he is reading off of and then going off on tangents on, I still would not be learning anything. I wanted to learn about this point and place in history and learn what the mindset was between the nations and leaders/peoples of the era, but instead I am learning dates and names and locations with no end to this trend in sight. Oh well, at least the teacher posts his power points online.

Beach, Appleman, Hynds, and Wilhelm’s “Assessing and Evaluating Students’ Learning: How Do You Know What They Have Learned?” (Handout) and "Secondary Standards-Based Grading and Reporting Handbook"

            I always find myself constantly struggling to write and revise rubrics I will use in the classroom. They always seem to be too vague throughout the entire scoring process or they are so detailed they do not allow the students any creative freedom. Reading all of the examples in the handout “Assessing and Evaluating Students’ Learning: How Do You Know What They Have Learned?” helped in my understanding in what makes a legible, student-friendly rubric that has a clear set of goals for each point level. As a side note, I never thought to provide students with rubrics for self-evaluation. It kind of provides them a pathway for which students can grade themselves on how well they are meeting the objectives of the lesson. As with the handout, I have never been a fan of “correct answer” tests. However, some students do not like the alternative essay that might be in place of a “standard” test, so determining what assessment strategy one uses really depends on the makeup of their classroom.

            The handbook that we read on grading and reporting, I feel, was kind of confusing since we read it not really in any context and, being a handbook, it does not provide much detail for itself, other than the first section. In actuality, the handbook is probably a great resource to have but I just do not understand some of the syntax and layout of it as of right now. The two pieces of text we were given to read about for this blog seem to not really flow together in my mind, but I am sure they do in some way and I am just not seeing it. I do like the part of the handbook where it says that we as teachers should avoid giving out “zeros” as grades. I feel that giving a zero will do nothing but kill a student’s confidence and their motivation will be thrown in to the trash.

California State Universities Expository Reading and Writing Course Assignment Template

           This is possibly the most valuable handout to me I have received ever since I decided to enroll in the education program. I thought that the most help I would ever have going through this experience would be the list of Common Core State Standards that I would have to meet and then form my lesson around that. This handout feels almost like a cheat sheet to teaching it is so helpful. One thing I have always had trouble figuring out is how to properly introduce a piece of text to the class and teach them the proper background knowledge that they need before they read the text. Making the students predict what is going to happen in the text, teaching the necessary vocabulary they need, and then getting them started on reading and outlining may seem like such simple and obvious things to do but it is comforting to have these steps written out by an accredited source. Then, instead of just having them read the text and report back, the teacher can turn the reading into an experience by having the students annotate the text and summarize little bits and pieces of the text. Critical thinking is, to me, the most important skill you can learn in the classroom. This handout does a great job at explaining how to introduce the concept of critical thinking to the classroom by having them read information text and then having them question all aspects of it, from questioning the author to the logic behind the piece. The handout then goes on to talk about how to write about the piece but for right now, I am feeling so relieved that there are all of these ideas and solutions about how to introduce and read a text that I was thinking about in a scholarly piece, written by people other than myself.