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.