SED 407 Reading Response: Daniels & Zemelman ‘Subjects Matter’ Chapter 12

This last chapter is a good summary of important things to keep in mind as a teacher dedicated to helping students develop literacy skills. I want to keep this entire list as a quick reference when I am teaching to remind me what is most important about helping my students develop the skills of good readers and thinkers (and it’s good to know this stuff is backed by research). But rather than relist all of D&Z’s important points, I’ll talk about one that really stands out for me – the idea that “a sense of personal purpose is key to reading success.” Personal purpose can be extrinsically or intrinsically motivated, but as D&Z point out, “it is the intrinsic motivations that lead to greater learning in high school subject areas.” When I read this I thought how important teachers are in sparking and maintaining intrinsic motivation in students. Intrinsic motivation can develop and thrive in engaging, relevant, and rich learning environments in which students feel like a valued part of a community of learners that supports their growth and exploration. When students are encouraged to question and debate, when reading is a social activity, students can take ownership of the learning experience and find motivation in the learning itself. (I drafted this paragraph before reading D&Z’s conclusion paragraphs, but this gets at what they are saying in the last paragraph – those final two paragraphs pack a good punch in terms of getting to the big ideas of this book.)

Also just a note on the skills of good readers. As D&Z point out, good readers visualize what they read and make deep connections with the text. They say, “In contrast, those who don’t read well experience none of these things, and simply do not recognize that they are possible.” Even though we have talked many times about how the strategies we as experienced readers use when we read do not come naturally and were at one point taught to us, when I read this it was still surprising to me – goes to such just how much I take my reading skills for granted. I am so grateful to be a good reader and I want my students to experience the benefits of good reading skills as well – so I am glad to have identified those internalized skills and been exposed to strategies for teaching them. As D&Z point out, “bad readers” think that “good readers” read effortlessly with natural born skill – I want to breaking down that wall and give all students access to the power of good reading.

SED 407 Reading Response: Daniels & Zemelman ‘Subjects Matter’ Chapter 11

 

When reading about the importance of creating supportive relationships as a strategy for helping struggling readers, I was reminded of our class discussion of “the gremlin” (after listening to the Radiolab piece on the “Obama Effect”). The gremlin is that voice inside us that speaks loudly when we are challenged, telling us that we aren’t good enough or smart enough. The gremlin believes that we will fail and its voice is so distracting that we actually end up failing, proving the gremlin right and making it stronger. But the gremlin is wrong – and once we learn to talk back to it, to quiet or silence it, we can free ourselves from its damaging effects. For students who struggle with reading, the voice of the gremlin is loud. It may be so loud and have gone unchallenged for so long that they have given up. As teachers, the first thing we can do to help struggling readers is to help them recognize that the gremlin actually exists. The gremlin may have had control for so long that the students can’t separate it from their own voice. Recognizing the gremlin as something that can be changed is the first step. Next, we can teach students to talk back to the gremlin. This involves two things. First, we must be a counter-voice to the gremlin, telling students that we believe in their ability to learn and succeed. We have to approach our students with a growth mindset and be understanding of where they are coming from. As D&Z say, students need to know that “they’re in a safe place where they won’t suffer further hurt if they don’t succeed on the first attempt.” Next, we must set students up to succeed by using strategies like those mentioned by D&Z in this chapter an others.

SED 407 Reading Response: Daniels & Zemelman ‘Subjects Matter’ Chapters 9 & 10

D&Z present two more excellent structures for learning in these chapters: content-area book clubs and inquiry units. I definitely see the benefits of both and plan to use them in my future classes – but before I get into the details, a note on time. As I was reading, I made a mental note that I wanted to avoid going down the “These strategies are great but there’s no time for them due to curriculum demands and high-stakes testing!” path. I am a pre-service teacher with little understanding yet of how I will experience time in my future classroom, but there is definitely a gremlin in the back of my head screaming about how I won’t be able to teach the way I want to teach, the way I believe is good teaching. It’s easy to get stuck on the idea – but what a terrible starting place. I believe that in order to meet my responsibilities as a teacher and provide meaningful learning experiences for my students, I must make time for strategies such as book clubs and inquiry units. As D&Z say, “the effect [of such strategies] on students’ approach to learning and reading is just too large and too important” to not be doing such projects. To return to my response to chapter 6, making time for meaningful experiences means to “do less better”, to prioritize the curriculum in order to go deeper into fewer topics. (It’s interesting that D&Z note that this is what the NGSS suggest … the NGSS seem a bit overwhelming in terms of how much they cover – but they do emphasize cross cutting concepts and scientific practices…) Again, the idea is to engage students in real learning, to help them connect to the content and build transferable literacy skills – while a strategy such as a book club may not be teaching to the test, I think the benefits should carry over into test results. And anyway, as D&Z note the Common Core and NGSS are “desperately pleading” for students to be doing this kind of work (although maybe the tests are still not testing for it). So, don’t worry about time, just teach well.

We have looked at the use of content-area book clubs or literature circles in MLED 330 this semester and I am definitely sold on the idea. In science, I can see using literature circles with challenging primary source texts, biographies of scientists or historical texts about important scientific discoveries, and content-relevant fiction (such as the two books I read in my MLED 330 literature circles: The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages and The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly). I did a quick Google search for “literature circles in science classes” and found that there are many teachers doing this and sharing resources and lesson plans. This teacher blends the structure of a literature circle with the process of keeping a scientific notebook. Some of the roles given to students in this strategy are similar to traditional literature circle roles, but others are tailored to scientific literacy, such as the Inquiry Organizer whose role is to provide prompts for each part of the notebook (such as the hypothesis, materials, procedure, etc). As this other science teacher using literature circles says, “As adults, we know that scientists read all the time. In fact, scientific journals are the major way that scientific knowledge is spread. It is important for students to learn to read and interpret scientific knowledge as well. Literature circles are one relatively simple way to help students learn to read challenging articles and advance their scientific knowledge and excitement about the topic.” I appreciate this quote because I don’t think people realize that reading – and talking to other scientists about what you’ve read – is a huge part of science. Even if all my students don’t become scientists (I’ve almost accepted the fact that not all of them will ;)), I want my students to be scientifically literate citizens, to be able to read about science in the news, to have discussions with their family and friends about scientific issues, and to make scientifically informed decisions in the voting booth.

A few points that D&Z make about literature circles stick out for me. Role sheets should be used as “brief initial training” – the idea is that students are practicing specific strategies used by good readers individually so that ultimately they will be able to apply all these strategies more naturally when they read. D&Z point out that if role sheets are overused they “can swiftly morph into stultifying and mechanical make-work”, counteracting one of the greatest benefits of book circles, the development of a love of reading. I also really appreciate the guidance D&Z give on assessment of literature circles (most of which can be applied to inquiry projects too). I especially like the four part essay they describe on page 253 that asks students to reflect on the process as well as demonstrate knowledge they gained from the book – compared to a traditional book report, this essay is so much more valuable. I also really like the observation sheet they suggest teachers use as they observe students at work in their literature circles – I see the value of assessing students through such observations, but it’s good to have something to structure and document those observations.

I am a little confused by the concept of “backmapping” which D&Z discuss early on in chapter 10. It’s interesting incomparison to UbD – it almost seems like the opposite. With UbD, you begin with your desired results and then plan specific activities that will get you there. With backmapping, using the example D&Z use in the book, a project is planned and then the teacher works backwards to assign the standards the project addresses. Of course, this is only the opposite of UbD if you totally equate learning objectives with standards. In planning her inquiry project and all the activities that would be a part of it, the teacher used in the example likely started with her objectives and planned activities to meet them. I understand that standards are not the same as objectives, but there should be a relationship between the two, correct? Wouldn’t it be good to have an idea of the standards you want to address in mind as you are planning lessons? (Though the standards certainly should not limit your objectives.) I guess I am just confused as to what benefit D&Z see in backmapping. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

SED 407 Reading Response: Daniels & Zemelman ‘Subjects Matter’ Chapters 5 & 8

Once again D&Z have lots of good stuff to offer…

The wealth of strategies in chapter 5 is great, but before getting into those, it’s important not to overlook the idea of the gradual release of responsibility that D&Z state is the key to teaching the strategies. The “I do it, you watch; we do it together; you do it with my help; you do it alone” model reminded me of the “Main Idea; Example (I do); Group Practice (we do); Independent Practice (you do)” model of direct instruction we learned in SED 406. This model is tangible to me in the sense of a single lesson plan, the gradual release of responsibility over a class period. However, it’s interesting to think of the gradual release of responsibility over a more significant amount of time and spanning multiple lessons. I see the value in thinking of gradual release of responsibility at this scale, but it’s less obvious to me how this plays out in the classroom. It obviously requires a teacher being very tuned in to where her students are with particular skills. I found this brief overview of gradual release by Douglas Fisher, Professor of Language and Literacy Education at San Diego State University. Fisher says, “Importantly, the gradual release of responsibility model is not linear. Students move back and forth between each of the components as they master skills, strategies, and standards.” I find this idea of students moving between the components of gradual release helpful in visualizing the model in the classroom.

I can see using all of the strategies in chapter 5, depending on content and learning objectives – it’s comforting to have so many to work with. I think ‘Think-Alouds’ are great for modeling the thinking processes of a skilled reader and the way of thinking within a discipline and I agree that this is something a teacher should be doing on a regular basis. But as D&Z point out, despite how simple a strategy this is, it takes a lot of planning to do it well (though they do offer the variation of thinking-aloud with text you have never read before which is great too). Thinking-aloud is not a natural process, as so much of what skilled readers do when they read is subconscious – I think this is a strategy that will take some practice. There is more to it than there seems, so I am glad to have D&Z’s tips for doing it effectively

Reading workshops is another seemingly simple strategy that involves a lot more than just giving students time to read on their own. Minilessons, student journaling, one-on-one conferences, recording observations of student understanding, student sharing … these are all important to making sure that students are getting the most out of independent reading time. I think it’s interesting that D&Z refer to reading workshops as not only an instructional strategy but also as a “classroom management structure” (225). When reading workshops are done well, students are engaged, self-motivated, getting individual attention and differentiated support – I can see how this leads to a well-managed classroom in which meaningful learning can occur. I think this gets at the concern of making time for reading workshops as well. If students are engaged in independent reading in the content area, I think they will be more engaged in the content in general – so while reading workshops may take time, they support and deepen other instruction.

Here's a teacher who knows how to think aloud!

SED 407 Reading Response: Daniels & Zemelman ‘Subjects Matter’ Chapters 6 & 7

  

The picture above is from the office of the facilities manager where I used to work. He was an awesome guy – hard working, committed, and caring – he went above and beyond to care for the beautiful property at which we worked. But it was a huge property and there were many aspects to its management and I imagine at times the job was overwhelming. The note pictured above was pinned to a board in the facilities manager’s office – he had written it himself as a reminder that if he attempted to do everything, he wouldn’t be doing anything very well. Do fewer things, but do those things better.

I snapped a picture of this note because it spoke to me – “do less better” is an ideal I have been striving for my entire adult life, both personally and professionally. I thought of this picture as I was reading chapter 6 in D&Z – essentially “do less better” is what D&Z propose for textbook coverage and curriculum development. As they say, “teach a few things well and fully – and let some other stuff slide.” I love this idea – I think it is better teaching, leading to better learning, and it also relieves some of the pressure I imagine myself under when I become a teacher, pressure to cover a huge curriculum. But then I wonder, can I really get away with this? How much freedom will I have to let some stuff slide? I realize I keep asking essentially the same question and that it will depend on the climate of whatever school I end up at – but regardless of the expectations of the school I end up at, if I believe that “do less better” leads to better teaching and learning, then it is something I should fight for. Hopefully, if I am teaching well and my students are learning, this will be reflected in their assessment. As D&Z point out, textbook-based teaching isn’t leading to higher test scores – by superficially covering everything that might be on the test, students end up learning little. But, by doing less better – by helping students to uncover the reading (I love this idea of cover versus uncover), get at big ideas and “act upon them” – kids may actually do better on the tests even if they haven’t covered every little nugget of content. It’s encouraging that D&Z point out that tests are moving away from pure recall towards skills assessment, hopefully aligning better with “do less better” instruction.

Of course, doing less better requires prioritization. UbD, mentioned here by D&Z, offers a good filter for prioritization. I also like Isabel Beck’s three-tier vocabulary acquisition model – it’s a good lens to prevent getting hung up on those Tier 3 words that come across as so important in the textbook, but aren’t so crucial in terms of big ideas – the low utility terms. I think it’s especially easy for teachers and students to get hung up on these low utility words in science classes, so I am glad to have this model to help with that. I also appreciate that D&Z say “vocabulary work should be multimodal and multisensory.” Unfortunately, as a substitute teacher I see a lot of assignments where students are asked to simply copy definitions from the text, an activity they get nothing out of.  Sometimes they are asked to define new terms “in their own words”, but they are asked to do so when their only exposure to these terms has been reading the definition in the text – they haven’t played with, explored, or used the words, how can they be expected to define them in their own words, to have any ownership over them?

I appreciate the textbook activities D&Z offer in chapter 6 – I can see myself using all of them in moderation. I like how an activity like jigsawing creates an opportunity for students to “do” a subject, to act like real historians or scientists, making connections, sharing ideas, and building knowledge. 

I don’t have a ton to say about chapter 7 – there’s a lot of good stuff in this chapter …

know your students, respond to their interests – create a friendly classroom environment in which students feel safe to take risks – connect content to students’ lives – provide opportunities for students to work together and support each other and explicitly teach them skills for how to do so effectively – give students choices and responsibilities – foster self-esteem, character, and confidence – respect cultural differences – have high expectations – value communication with and between students – model the skills and behaviors of a passionate life-long learner

… all of which I think is very important despite my casual treatment of it here in this blog – but I don’t have much to add other than that I want to keep all this in mind when I teach. D&Z offer some good strategies about how to foster this kind of a classroom community which is refreshing because so often when I read about this stuff the message is simple “this is how it should be” without saying much about how to achieve it. I also like the perspective that D&Z offer that this classroom culture stuff is not just about making students feel good – it is important because it enables students to learn meaningfully and to develop a positive attitude towards learning. It shapes students’ roles as readers and learners, creators of knowledge – it gives personal value to learning beyond grades and pleasing a teacher.

SED 407 Reading Response: Strong ‘Designing Assignments and Rubrics’

I really love the simple yet powerful principles Strong offers for designing writing assignments – his list will be a good thing to keep handy, to check myself against lazy teaching. The CRAFT model is especially appealing – such a simple system for making assignments engaging and effective. Reading through the examples of CRAFT assignments, I was almost tempted to do a couple… how interesting would it be to pretend to be Hitler, writing a letter to Anne Frank in response to her diary? If I wasn’t so tired right now, maybe I’d give it a go. Certainly, this would be a more engaging assignment than to ask students to write this essay: “Diversity and discrimination are two major and related themes in this book. Where do these themes appear, and how do they work together to propel the plot of the book?” (Which I found here, along with several other painfully boring essay assignments.) The thought of writing that essay makes me want to cry… although, there was a time when I was writing essays like that all the time and could have whipped one up in a jiffy.

The CRAFT assignments seem like more fun for students to do (and would certainly be more fun for a teacher to read and grade) – I wonder though how most students would react to such assignments. Ideally, we imagine our students saying, “Oooo, this looks like a fun writing assignment that engages my interests, has personal relevance, invites critical thinking, and allows me to use my recently acquired knowledge in creative ways! Let me at it!” But for students who have lived through years of “Darth Vader” schooling, who can whip up a well-structured regurgitation of information in a jiffy as I once could, a CRAFT assignment is asking a lot of them. I imagine lots of groaning and eye rolling and confusion. This is not to say that we should give in to this resistance and resort to lazy essay assignments – in fact, it gives us all the more reason not to give in. Such assignments might make students uncomfortable, but that is the point – the challenge of writing in new and creative ways creates that cognitive dissonance that drives student learning. But I think it would be naïve to think that you could give an assignment like this to students who had never been asked to write in this way and expect them to take to it without some guidance and preparation. However, I think once they got the hang of it and saw how fun it can be, all those writing lasers would light up, fighting back the darkness. (Sorry guys, I’m really tired and I like that metaphor and wanted to sneak it in somehow.)

I had this idea for a CRAFT assignment where students take on the role of a mother cell, writing a letter for their daughter cells' baby scrap book about the day they were born ... "Next, during metaphase, all of my chromosomes lined up along my equater, coming together in one final embrace." ... OK, time for bed!

SED 407 Reading Response: Daniels & Zemelman ‘Subjects Matter’ Chapters 3 & 4

Sorry guys, I think this one is especially rambly..

Reading these chapters, I was trying to reflect on my experiences with textbooks in middle and high school. It’s been a long time, so I don’t quite remember, but I’m sure that textbooks were used pretty traditionally in most of my classes – I was certainly very familiar and comfortable with textbooks by the time I graduated high school. I do remember being exposed to and assigned other types of texts though. I especially remember one science teacher requiring us to read a science biography – I read the autobiography of the physicist Richard Feynman and I loved it. I was already confident that I wanted to pursue a career in science at that point, but reading this book stoked that flame in me. While this one reading assignment wasn’t a totally transformative experience in and of itself, I think it serves as an example of one of the many ways this teacher (one of my all-time favorite teachers) was able to broaden my view of science as a discipline. In addition to the biography assignment, he also required us to read and think about current scientific discoveries – we read about science in the news and he challenged us to tackle primary source research papers. It wasn’t just about what was in the textbook (though we did read the textbook too) – science also involved the stories of people and discoveries, science had a history and a life beyond the textbook that was daily evolving, science was something that I could be a part of. This teacher taught in a way, presented science in a way, that got me fired up in the way that D&Z talk about back in Chapter 1 as the wish all teachers have for their students – he helped me develop the passion of a life-long learner.

I feel like I’m getting a little off topic here… I am writing about this teacher because he was a teacher who used the textbook strategically and sparingly. He had respect for the textbook as a valuable reference, but he didn’t let the textbook dictate the curriculum or be the only voice of authority. And I had several teachers like this one, across disciplines. I wonder now if I was just lucky to have had a lot of great teachers or if my experience might be reflective of the fact that I was in school before (or at the very beginning of) the standards movement in education. (I graduated high school in 1997, it’s not entirely clear to me when the standards movement began, but I don’t think it was in full swing when I was in school). I can understand how these days schools and teachers, under the pressure of meeting standards and being sold the idea that a particular textbook is a sure shot for success, fall into the trap of letting textbooks dictate curriculum. Not that I approve of this situation, but I can understand why it happens – the pressure is great and the textbooks seem like an easy ticket. So I am glad that D&Z are getting this conversation going, presenting an alternative, reminding us of what should be common sense – that textbooks have value, but they are not enough on their own – that teachers need to be critical of the textbooks they have at their disposal, to use them sparingly and strategically, to supplement them with other kinds of texts – this is in the best interests of our students, this is good teaching. I want to be the kind of teacher that approaches the textbook in the way the D&Z propose, I want to assign biographies or even fiction in my science classes, to give my students opportunities to encounter all kinds of texts – but how much freedom will I have to do that? This will depend on what school I end up at. Going beyond the textbook takes extra time and money – but that is a challenge I can handle. But as D&Z point out, some schools dictate not only what textbook is to be used, but also how it will be used. I would not want to teach at such a school, but I also feel that such schools need reform and how will reform ever happen if teachers who care about reform always chose to teach elsewhere? This question comes up a lot for me and once again, I’ll just leave it hanging there…

I want to say a little about my personal relationship to textbooks. I guess this just goes to show how much of a nerd I am, but I kind of love a good textbook (“good” being the operative word here). Not that I often sit around reading them in my free time (though that has happened), but I enjoy reading textbooks. I have always been a keeper of textbooks, rarely selling them back at the end of a semester. I love having them to turn to when I need information. In college textbooks were central to most courses I took (there were even a couple courses that I pretty much taught myself from the textbook), and I realize that this has left me with a strong imprint of this model of a course being structured around a textbook. But while this is a model that I am familiar and comfortable with, I don’t want it to be how I approach teaching my own classroom. These chapters by D&Z are a good reminder that while textbooks can be a valuable resource, they should be used as a reference, not as a framework for curriculum or a book that students are expected to read from cover to cover. I think it’s important that we teach kids strategies for reading textbooks so that they are comfortable with them whenever they encounter them in their future. I also think it’s important for kids to respect textbooks for what they are (provided said textbooks are worthy of respect), while at the same time being critical of textbooks and understanding that there are many sources of information beyond textbooks.

These chapters bring up a lot of implications in terms of how I want to teach, which I will inelegantly summarize here:

• incorporate multiple types of text into my curriculum
• teach students the value of multiple sources and viewpoints – I love this quote from D&Z, “…it is unacceptable for schools in a democracy to teach young people that only one view is sufficient … We might think that students just need to learn the basics first and save the controversies for later – but too often, later never arrives.” I would add that it is also important that we expose students to the controversies so that we can teach them strategies for dealing with them.
• be a fact checker – keep up with developments in the content I teach so that I can bring it to my students attention if their textbook is incorrect or outdated
• keep a well-rounded classroom library – I am so excited about this and had actually already started an Amazon wishlist for books I would want in it
• strive for balance – in genres and types of texts used (fiction, nonfiction, classic, contemporary, primary, secondary, etc), in text level and length, in student/teacher choice of text, in “windows and mirrors”
• remember that readers do grow by reading “easy” material – students should have plenty of opportunities to read without struggle – but we should also challenge students to read at a higher level, while providing scaffolding for that challenge

D&Z note that a recent study shows that students preferred schoolbooks in paper over digital form. I was glad to read this, as a paper-preferrer myself. This got me thinking beyond preference to the implications of digital text on the learning experience. I am in no ways a luddite – I think technology can enrich the leaning experience in many ways – but I think we should be critical of the digital revolution. This article in Scientific American presents some interesting research on how reading on paper versus screen affects our brains and suggests there might be some cognitive advantages to good, old-fashioned book reading.

In addressing how teaching strictly to the textbook can lead to a focus on content-coverage in which the important big ideas of a discipline are lost, D&Z say, “It’s hard to make yourself put that textbook down and “teach less,” giving up so much time for one book, covering just one big idea.” D&Z propose that to do this, to teach more by “teaching less,” teachers should identify a few key concepts and link all teaching to these across the year (for example, a key concept in a history class could be “what it means to be an American”). This reminded me of the UbD concept of essential questions, ongoing inquiries leading to big ideas that “connect the dots of seemingly disconnected or disorderly content.” This idea of prioritizing the big ideas over the superficial coverage of every little thing in the textbook resonates with me – this is the kind of teacher I want to be – but again I wonder, how much freedom will I have to do this? 

A picture from David Macaulay's 'The Way We Work' - a book that I definitely want to include in my classroom library. Macaulay's books could almost be considered textbooks in that they present a lot of information - but they do so in such an engaging and beautiful way.

SED 407 Reading Response: Understanding by Design

As I was reading the UbD chapters, I found myself reflecting on my experience designing lesson plans in SED 406 (my first experience ever with designing lesson plans). Though I think I was doing some of what the UbD model outlines when I was designing my lesson plans, I think I would have been more successful if I had had the UbD framework to guide me. I like the way the UbD model organizes the design process into three stages and the specific questions posed in each stage that help the designer clarify the big ideas and essential questions of a lesson and determine instructional strategies and assessment methods. I know there is much more to the UbD model than the simple graphic below outlines, but I find this summary helpful and plan to use it next time I design a lesson plan.

Click for source.

When so clearly laid out, as it is in the UbD model, the idea that a curriculum is a means to an end – and therefore the design of a curriculum should begin with identifying what that end is – does seem like common sense. Yet, as the authors point out, this is not the typical approach to education – most teachers take an approach that focuses on superficial coverage of lots of content as specified by standards or outlined in textbooks. When I look at the content standards for science, I can understand how this might happen – the amount of content to cover feels overwhelming, I can see how it would be easy to focus on covering it all without stopping to prioritize or think about what is really important for the students to learn. I like this idea of prioritizing content – of identifying and teaching to the enduring and transferable ideas, the linchpin ideas – but I wonder how much freedom I will have as a teacher to do such prioritization. Will I not be accountable for delivering all of the content standards? Regardless of the answer to that question, I think the UbD model offers some excellent guiding questions to help teachers turn content standards into big ideas or understandings: Here is the content I have to deliver – what would use of this content look like? Here are the facts my students must learn, but what do they mean? What kind of changes do I want to see in my students as a result of this instruction? What are the best ways to guide and assess those changes?

I also find it helpful to think about essential questions as questions that foster ongoing inquiry – the goal is not necessarily to answer the essential questions, but to keep them alive. As the authors write, “Serious learning always involves inquiry in the face of uncertainty.” I love this idea of presenting students with uncertainty (as opposed to certainties that they must memorize and regurgitate) and teaching them the skills and strategies they need to be comfortable with uncertainty, to let it guide their learning experience instead of shutting it down. Unfortunately, I think that many students have become so used to just being given the answers that uncertainty terrifies them and turns them off from the learning process. I love the quote from a teacher that the authors share, that we want our students “to know what to do when they don’t know what to do.” This gets at what the authors are saying when they say that transfer of learning is a primary goal of education – I think this is an important tenet for teachers to keep in mind. It shapes the design of instruction in that it demands authentic learning experiences that present students with genuine problems that “shift a student from the role of a passive knowledge receiver into a more active role as a constructor of meaning.”

What I find interesting about this inquiry approach is that it frames understandings (or big ideas) as inferences that students are guided towards, even if the statement of the understanding sounds like a fact. This relates to what the authors say about the purpose of an essential question being more important than its format. Just because the big idea sounds like a fact, just because the essential question may appear to have a simple answer, this doesn’t mean that instruction should be simple delivery of that fact – that is lazy teaching. A teacher’s role is to frame essential questions and understandings within learning experiences that help students come to their own understanding – only in this way will the knowledge be enduring and transferable. And this idea extends to assessment as well – as this UbD tenet states, “Understanding is revealed when students autonomously make sense of and transfer their learning through authentic performance.”

This idea that understandings appear to teachers (content experts) as facts but can be framed for learners as inquiry got me thinking back to Wilhelm and Vygotsky. As the UbD authors point out, understandings eventually become facts – as content experts, we take it for granted that the knowledge we have is the result of a process we once went through. What just seem like facts to us now are actually the product of active knowledge construction. To be better teachers, we need to take a step back and acknowledge this process – as Wilhelm does with literacy. We need to provide our students with essential questions that begin as teacher prompts but eventually become internalized as self-prompts. In this way, essential questions are scaffolding, supporting students as they work through the zones of development.

SED 407 Reading Response: Daniels & Zemelman ‘Subjects Matter’ Chapters 1 & 2

I’m excited by the outline that D&Z present for their book in the first chapter – looks like we are going to be getting into some concrete practical strategies for teaching literacy. These first chapters are a great basis for the strategies to come, addressing the importance of creating engaging reading experiences for students (getting them “fired-up”) and the fundamentals of what it means to be a good reader.

The fast-food project that D&Z describe is a great example of engaged real-world learning, where students are passionate about a subject and take ownership of the learning experience. What I appreciate most about D&Z’s description of the project is how it was tied into the curriculum. For example, alongside reading Fast Food Nation, the students were meeting the requirements of their biology curriculum by learning about nutrition, etc. I think this is very important – while I think the value of real-world student-driven learning is huge, I worry that often such experiences lack depth when it comes to learning content-area knowledge. (I am thinking here about my experience at the MET high school – the real-world learning I saw happening there did not seem to be meeting learning goals in terms of both knowledge acquisition and skill development – I did not see students being challenged to go deeper with their projects.) Not that depth of knowledge is the most important thing in learning – development of critical thinking, practice in self-expression, and engagement in the real world are important as well – but these things are not enough on their own. I’m curious to know more about how the students involved in the fast-food project were assessed over all – I imagine they must have had more traditional assessments in their courses. The project outcomes (such as the children’s book) did seem naïve to me, as D&Z themselves point out. And that’s ok I think – they are kids after all – as long as there is deeper learning being assessed elsewhere. I do not mean to belittle the value of getting kids fired-up – I share with D&Z that dream of my future students  “catching my fever of ideas” – I love my content-area and I want to share that love with my students in the hopes that they will love it too. Love of learning is the foundation of the development of life-long learners, which is what I want to help my students become. And certainly to focus only on knowledge acquisition without value placed on the process would be worse – like the example of Mr. Cosgrove’s class, where there was essentially no learning happening at all.

I’m glad D&Z presented their ideas alongside the Common Core. I know so little about the Common Core standards, yet they have this looming presence in my future. It was good to see some analysis of their strengths and weaknesses and to understand that while I need to meet the CC standards, this doesn’t mean that I can’t go beyond them – and D&Z offer guidance on how to do that.

At the risk of bringing up a topic that I could go on and on about and making this post too long, I do want to say something about the issues raised by D&Z’s discussion of what we learn about the American educational system when PISA scores are disaggregated by family income. As D&Z say, “We do not have a “mediocre” school system in this country; we have many centers of true excellence, and we also have some shockingly underserved students and communities.” In FNED 346, we read David Berliner’s ‘Effects of Inequality and Poverty vs. Teachers and Schooling on America’s Youth’ in which Berliner addresses these same statistics. Berliner points out that when variance in test scores is examined along with the many factors that contribute to those test scores, what happens inside the school accounts for only 20% of the variation – and teachers themselves are just one of many parts of that 20%. Good teaching matters, but it is not enough on it’s own to overcome the enormous influence of factors beyond the walls of the school – namely income inequality. These all makes me feel a little hopeless – especially when, as D&Z say, “The significance of these numbers is effectively moot, since school reformers have already sold the narrative of a sudden, precipitous decline.” As a nation we’re not even recognizing the real problem and all the time, energy, and money we are spending on “reform” is really just spinning wheels because it’s addressing only a myth about what’s going on in education. Yes, reform is needed, but it needs to fit the problem. One way of not giving in to the seeming hopelessness of this situation is to recognize that as educators, we must be actively involved outside of the classroom in addressing income inequality. But D&Z also offer hope in the form of literacy strategies that educators can use within the classroom.

Reading about the importance of helping students to activate prior knowledge (turn on the appropriate schema) before encountering new information in texts made me think of a recent photo I saw on an Instagram account I follow, Humans of New York. There has been some interesting education-related stuff happening with Humans of New York recently, which I won’t get into, but you can read more about it here if you want. The photo I thought of while reading D&Z is the one below, due to what the teacher pictured says about her students and gaps in prior knowledge. I worry that activating prior knowledge is not just about instructional strategies – often students enter a classroom with a lack of the prior knowledge they need for success and as teachers we must catch them up before we can even begin teaching them what we are supposed to be teaching. As this teacher says, you don’t even know where to start – there’s that hopeless feeling again… but we believe and keep going.

“Sometimes the gaps are so large, you don’t even know where to start. The lesson plan says that you’re supposed to be teaching about tectonic plates. But if they’re going to understand tectonic plates, they need to understand density. And if they’re going to understand density, they need to understand mass and volume. And if they’re going to understand mass and volume, they need to know how to multiply. And some of the scholars don’t know how to multiply. The gaps can be so large you don’t even know where to start. How do you fill the gaps created by years of miseducation? Sometimes it feels so hopeless you want to give up."

And finally, just a few notes that I want to record here about other things I want to remember about these D&Z chapters … readers actively construct meaning from text, it’s not just decoding (a student can get a 100 on a reading comprehension test and still not really understand anything they read) … the importance of teaching students to recognize the structure and kind of thinking required when encountering texts in different content areas … that teaching literacy the way D&Z propose is a “two-fer” – you can teach content while teaching reading strategies, plus the students get a deeper understanding of the content if they are using good reading strategies.

SED 407 Literacy Profile: My Knitting Literacy

I started knitting after college, during a significant period of transition in my life. I had just left New York City where I had been in school and where all my friends remained. I was living with my parents, had an internship, and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next. This was also the early 2000s and the crafting/DIY movement was just getting started – all the cool kids were knitting. I have always been a crafty person and knitting appealed to me. I wanted to make beautiful knit garments that I could wear or give to friends and family. And, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t a student – no homework, no exams to study for, more time for hobbies. I also had this sense, which is funny to me now, that my real adult life was beginning. I was thinking a lot about what I wanted that life to be like, what kind of an adult I wanted to be, and part of how I envisioned myself was as a maker or a crafter – a knitter.

My knitting education began with me buying a skein of yarn, a pair of single-pointed knitting needles, and a how-to knitting book for beginners. I remember sitting on my bed at my parent’s house, teaching myself to knit. I think I successfully managed to cast-on, knit, and purl, but I quickly realized that if I wanted to do more, I’d need some help. So I signed up for a knitting class through the local continuing education program.  The teacher structured the class around knitting a sweater because she said a common mistake made by beginning knitters is that their first project is usually a long scarf in simple stockinette stitch – most people get bored with this, put the project down, and never pick it up again. Knitting a sweater is more interesting and demands that a knitter learn more than just simple stitches. I never finished the sweater I started in this class, but I’ve never stopped knitting. Taking that class, working through the mistakes and awkwardness of my first project with the instructor and my classmates, initiated me into the culture of knitting. I was no longer an outsider, with no clue what knitting was all about – I was knitting literate, at least on a basic level. I didn’t learn everything about knitting in that class, but I developed confidence in my ability to knit, allowing me to move forward and learn more on my own. I was officially a knitter.

Though now I am at the point where I can teach someone else how to knit, I still continue to learn about knitting every time I start a new project. When I need help, I turn to books, magazines, online videos, and other knitters. The community of knitters is rich and lively, both online and in real life. Knitters love to get together to share projects, talk about knitting, and help each other out. No matter what strange town I might find myself in, I know I could go into the local knitting shop and ask for help with a project (after fondling all the beautiful yarn, of course). The knitting community was particularly important to me in the year after I lost my father, when I joined a local Stitch & Bitch group. The weekly act of knitting with others, building new friendships over a shared interest, was healing. I’m inspired by the beautiful and creative things that other knitters make – from complicated Fair Isle sweaters to silly stuffed dinosaurs. I’m especially impressed by knitters who can create their own patterns, a level of knitting literacy that I have yet to achieve. I mean, check out this brilliant anatomically correct knit brain! And beyond learning more and more about how and what to knit, I love learning about the history and evolution of knitting. I love art inspired by or involving knitting, such as Dave Cole’s Knitting Machine or the giant knit rabbit made by Italian art collective Gelitin. I love the political side of knitting culture as well; that knitters are yarn bombing trees and army tanks and sending knit uteri to congress.

I have never thought about knitting in the context of literacy before, but as I do now, I realize how much of a specialized language knitting requires. There are the terms I’ve mentioned already, such as knit, purl, stockinette, casting on. But that’s just the beginning. There are many other types of stitches and techniques – garter stitch, seed stitch, ribbing, cables, binding off, increasing and decreasing, intarsia. There are needles of all sizes and they’re double-pointed or circular or used especially to make cables. Yarn comes in bundles called skeins, in numerous materials and weights, such as fingering and worsted and sport. You must learn how to read knitting patterns, in which everything is abbreviated – to know, for example, that “ssk” means “slip, slip, knit” (and what does that even mean?). And when you’re ready to try lace knitting, there’s the daunting challenge of reading lace charts. And now you want to crochet? That’s a whole new language. I’ve loved learning the language of knitting and being a part of the “knitting literate.” I also love the math and spatial reasoning of knitting, the problem solving. I’m a better knitter than I was when I bought that first skein of yarn, but knitting continues to be a pleasurable challenge.

For me knitting is more than a hobby, it’s something of a mindfulness practice. It’s simultaneously stimulating and relaxing, almost meditative. It can be a social activity, connecting me to others, or a solitary one, connecting me to myself. When I’m feeling down, the act of knitting can pull me up – on a bad day, if I accomplish nothing else, at least I can say, “I knit an inch of a sock today.” It feels good to have made something with my own hands. It’s interesting to think of the impact knitting has had on my life through the lens of literacy and in considering my future as a teacher. It’s helped me to recognize my knitting abilities as literacy, literacy that has helped me develop valuable skills and allowed me entrance into a rich community. As a teacher, sharing this experience with my students may be a way to model motivation for learning. I had an interest, set a personal challenge, and reached out for the help I needed to accomplish my goal. Furthermore, I want to be a teacher that recognizes and values the non-traditional literacies of my students and helps them use those skills and interests for academic success. I want to send the message that it is not only the traditional academic subjects that have value in our lives. Knitting could easily be brushed off as simply a fun hobby, but it has enriched my life and expanded my mind. And the world is full of other such seemingly unimportant pursuits for all of us to explore.

This is me (years ago) with an octopus I knit.

SED 407 Reading Response: Wilhelm – ‘Strategic Reading’ Chapters 1 & 2

While reading these chapters by Wilhelm, I kept thinking of that question that has come up in every education class I’ve taken so far (as it should): What kind of teacher do you want to be? Wilhelm essentially begins this book by asking that question. Specifically he is asking, ‘As a teacher, what will guide what happens in your classroom?’ Will you be a teacher who sees their role solely as content-deliverer, following a curriculum dictated by a textbook? Or will you be a teacher guided by a clearly articulated theory of teaching and learning?

Though my enrollment in the RITE program is the beginning of my formal training as a teacher, I have taught in various contexts throughout my professional career and I have always thought of myself as a “naturally” good teacher. However, when I think of this now, I wonder if what I really mean is that I am simply good at explaining things so that people can understand them – not a bad thing, but there is clearly more to teaching than that. Though I think there is more going on when I teach then simple direct transmission of content (as in the curriculum-centered model that Wilhelm writes about), I have never really thought about what I am doing when I teach and why I think what I am doing will work or not. As Wilhelm points out, a teacher’s most important job is to teach students how to get and process information, to read and write, to master literacy and problem solving skills and strategies that they can carry out of the classroom and apply in a wide variety of contexts – to teach them “the rules so they can play the game.” Though I think the way I teach gets at this kind of learning in some ways, I have never been clear in setting such objectives. And now, when I think about explicitly teaching literacy, I admit that I feel unprepared and a little overwhelmed. I appreciate that even as a science teacher, I will be teaching literacy – both general and content-specific – and I am eager to learn more about how I can do so successfully. I want to be a “wide awake” teacher with a clearly articulated theory of teaching and learning that, while it may (and should) evolve over time, guides what happens in my classroom – I agree with Wilhelm that to have such a theory, to teach to it, makes one a better teacher. (As Wilhelm points out, most teachers hold implicit theories about teaching and learning that inform what they do without their being aware of it – I think this is dangerous teaching.) I found these chapters by Wilhelm to be an excellent starting point for developing my own theory of teaching and learning, as he puts forth a model that makes a lot of sense to me.

I enjoyed the scenario ranking activity in the first chapter, and find the question that it raises very interesting – ‘Can learning usefully be separated from the teaching that engenders that learning?’ This question threw me off at first, but as I read the scenarios, I began to see what Wilhelm was getting at by asking it. For example, in scenario 4 where Tom learns to play his piano piece “exactly the way his teacher did” – his teacher was teaching, but did Tom really learn? His behavior changed, but did his understanding? And if Tom didn’t really learn, I guess this begs the question, did his teacher really teach? In scenario 5, with Jude in the student-centered classroom in which her teacher did very little actual teaching, was she really learning if she couldn’t articulate what she felt she had learned? Could she not have learned a lot more if her teacher had actually taught? Complicated questions, but important to think about.

I ranked scenario 6, in which Arlene learned about electricity in a real-world context with the guidance of her uncle, as the scenario in which the best teaching and learning was happening. It seemed like such an ideal situation to me that I didn’t even notice at first what was said about Arlene being burnt-out by the experience. (I can see how such burnout is something of a downside, but I think despite it, Arlene learned things that will stay with her and be applicable in other contexts, even if she steps away from the topic of electricity.) Arlene’s scenario exemplifies the Vygotskian perspective of teaching and learning and George Hillocks’ model of environmental teaching, both the basis for the model put forth by Wilhelm, Baker, and Dube in their book. (Side note: I was really glad to see Vygotsky in a deeper context, beyond just the passing knowledge I gained about his theories in Ed Psych last semester.) This “community of learners”, teaching/learning-centered model sits well with me, as opposed to the teacher/curriculum-centered or student-centered models it is compared with. While I do see a teacher as “a more capable other” with a responsibility to share their knowledge and experience with their students, I don’t think teaching and learning should be passive as they are in the curriculum-centered model in which teachers lecture and students memorize. Also, while I see value in giving students opportunities to naturally explore and guide their own learning experiences, as they do in the student-centered model, I don’t think this is enough on its own for real learning. The teaching/learning-centered model is exciting to me as it proposes that teaching and learning is a two-sided collaborative process through which both the student and teacher can be transformed. In this model, teachers work, play, and problem solve alongside their students, letting students make mistakes and discoveries, and giving them support when they need it. Learning begins with modeling, continues with guided practice during which support scaffolding is gradually removed, and ends with students working independently, having mastered or internalized the skills initially modeled by their teacher. The concept of scaffolding was made much clearer to me by Wilhelm than it was when I first encountered it in Ed Psych – I have this clear image now of a student building their cognitive abilities from the ground up, with the teacher supporting their cognitive structure as it grows. Scaffolding is gradually removed as one set of skills is internalized (becomes part of the student’s zone of actual development) and new scaffolding is built when the student is ready to take on a new skill set (work in their zone of proximal development). An excellent concept, but I am now eager to see scaffolding in action. While I appreciate the specific literacy and reading strategies Wilhelm outlines – guided reading, the Inquiry Square, Tharp and Gallimore’s six methods for teaching reading strategies – it’s difficult just reading about them to really understand how they pay out in the classroom. I hope to get to observe these strategies in action.

I think one of the most powerful things about the Vygotskian perspective and the model proposed by Wilhelm is that it encourages teachers to approach teaching by first recognizing their students’ current strengths and abilities and building on them, versus the more common approach of seeing students as having weaknesses that need to be remedied. Such a simple change in perspective, but so powerful in shaping the kind of teacher one can be. However, I recognize the significant challenge it must be to identify the ZPD of each student you encounter as they will each be at different levels in different cognitive areas. The goal is to recognize each student’s current skill set and provide a structure in which they can successfully build to the next level, to keep each student challenged and engaged, but not frustrated by being asked to do something they are not yet ready for – not easy to do when you will likely be working with something like 100 students a day.

There’s so much more in Wilhelm’s chapters that I could respond to … the major theories about learning to read and their parallel literary theories – the idea that “all reading and writing begin with inquiry” and how this can shape a teacher’s approach to teaching literacy – how teaching reading is especially challenging because the processes are internal or abstract – how reading support usually ends after elementary school even though middle and high school students need support as they encounter more varied and complex texts – the idea that what is learned must be taught (and subsequently why it is so important for pre-service teachers to think about the literacy skills that we have internalized and take for granted) – the idea that language is “the tool of tools” – the challenge of putting content into a real-world context and making learning “play that does work” … but this blog post is already so long that no one will want to read it, so I’ll stop here and save the rest of it for class – looking forward to the discussion!