Teaching The Teacher

As I read and pondered on Valerie's last few blog posts, I began to think of the ever-popular catch phrase that we have adopted in education of "Relevance, Rigor, and Relationship". This has become somewhat of a mantra in some educational institution. I remember the first time I heard this phrase during my student teaching experience. At the time I thought that I understood all three concepts. However, as time passes I see that relevance and rigor are still a gray area for me. When I began to think about why this is, it suddenly hit me when I looked at the picture in Valerie's last post.

The seniors pictured in Valerie's post are very important to me and are students that I will never forget. In January of 2007, I came to their class as a student myself who was trying to "learn how to teach" during my student teaching experience. It's hard to believe that they are seniors and that they will soon be college students just like I was when I met them. Though they were just high school students, I have found that they taught me so much about the importance of developing relationships.

As a new teacher, it can be very overwhelming to try and determine relevance and define rigor. I don't know how long it will take for me to fully understand relevance and the entire debate that surrounds it. However, I am making a conscious choice to not let my lack of understanding bother me. Years from now, I hope to look back on the class of 2009 and remember what they taught me about developing relationships. It is because of them that I am looking forward to future classes of students and what they will teach me. Who knows, perhaps a few years from now I will be able to look back and see how my students taught me about relevance and rigor.

Class Color Day at CCHS

This past week was our school's spirit week leading up to the homecoming game last night. I know how hard our SGO sponsor, a 2nd year teacher, and the SGO student reps worked in overseeing this week's activities, so big props to them. Friday was class color day with each grade wearing the designated color. Class color day has disconcerted faculty the last few years with some of the issues generated such as face painting, tagging, dress code violations and messes in the bathroom with the paint. I'm not sure what the answer is. I wonder what other schools do and if there is a solution that would satisfy the concerns and permit students the enjoyment they take in celebrating their class color? I look at the faces in this photograph and I see school pride, hope for the future and zest for life. I taught many of these folks as freshmen and some of them as sophomores. Their precious faces have frequented my classroom the past four years, and I know I'll miss seeing those faces when they graduate in June. I'm glad I was able to capture this rite of passage on film.

"Show me, help me, let me."

A teaching buddy of mine moved to a different school this year. Molly e-mailed to see if my colleague Linda and/or I had suggestions on how she could help US History students she has who are struggling with writing. When I copied Linda on my reply to Molly, Linda suggested I share my reply because others might be able to benefit, so I'm posting it here.

Hello Linda and Val,
OK - they all do their homework religiously here but I do have a rare
few who can't write their way out of a paper bag. Do you have any simple worksheet or format you might share to help the kid who responds to an essay prompt with only one paragraph and doesn't even have a thesis?...I need to offer some tutoring. Not too big of a request, yes?

Okay, here's the best advice I can give you for your students and writing. I've been reading my Jeff Wilhelm the past week or so and he starts all of his books with the main theory his practice is grounded in: Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky says that "given the proper assistance, nearly anyone can learn nearly anything and what is learned must be taught," (Wilhelm, 24). So, putting that in the simplest of terms: show me, help me, let me. Click here to find out more about Wilhelm's Action Strategies For Deepening Comprehension.

Here's how this would apply to your situation. The students need to see you model the PROCESS. Sure, show them models of written essays but more helpful would be to put a prompt up there and ask them to listen to you model your thinking process IF you were the student and had to write the essay. It's letting them see your brain and thoughts under the microscope. I know this may sound scary because some teachers think we have to have it all together before we can present it to our students, but trust me, it's okay if the students see you grapple. It's actually better because they come to see you as a writer who has to work through things and that it's not just some are good at it and some are not. I'd start from step one with the prompt. You speak out the thoughts you are having about what's important in prompt and what to focus on. Then, let them see you work out a thesis statement. How would you write a thesis if you were given that prompt. You may have to model that several times (the "show me" part of the Vygotsky formula) as some learners need to see it several times. Model the process of brainstorming and how you generate ideas for your essay. Once you model it, move to the "help me" stage. Brainstorm together as a class for prompts. Put a graphic organizer on overhead and call on different students to generate ideas for the planning part. Then, I'd even say you model taking a plan and writing paragraph by paragraph on the overhead as you are articulating your thoughts so that they see your thinking and how you work through the process. Again, you're modeling the process. Next, move to the "help me" by writing paragraph as a class. Ask for students to supply you sentences, so literally, you are writing the essay together as a whole class or group. Big picture here: you'll be writing several essays over a period of time beginning with you doing more and moving to them doing it eventually independently. When you see issues with writing traits (for example, how to set a focus with a thesis or how to support and elaborate with details), do a think aloud about how you address that trait in your own writing so that they see your thoughts. See what I mean about modeling the process?

I'd also bring in mentor texts. If a student is having problems knowing what a good thesis is, then bring in LOTS of thesis statements from various essays and articles. Compile them and have class analyze them. Analyze one together, noting what works and what doesn't. Whatever part they are struggling with, bring in loads of good examples so that they can see what good ones look like (So they are seeing models of PROCESS with you and models of PRODUCTS with the mentor texts). Jeff Anderson and Katie Wood Ray do a lot with the idea of mentor texts. And, once you get comfortable with it, ask students to model their thinking. So, pick a student who does a good job on something (like for example a student who knows how to write a pretty good thesis statement) and have that person come to front of room and model how he/she would generate a thesis statement from a prompt. Lots of repetition for this process and they will move to the "Let me" stage of the formula. :) Hope this doesn't come across as easy cause it's not. It's a lot easier to talk about but the actual working out of it is challenging but I think the more our students can see us as learners, the better it will be for their learning.

Finding Clarity in the Muddy Waters

Yesterday I had an epiphany: the power of metaphor lies not so much in the elaboration it provides but rather metaphorical thinking provides opportunity for me to articulate an understanding that I might not otherwise be able to articulate. Metaphor nominates a concept or insight. One of my teaching goals this semester has been to teach students to develop and use metaphors in their thinking and writing, so I've been scouring resources for different strategies to help me do that. Gabriele Lusser Rico's Writing the Natural Way has a chapter "Wedding Word to Image: Metaphor" on this idea that has been great food for thought.

Reflecting on my own cognitive processes, I realize that those occasions when I create a metaphor for a new insight, it solidifies my understanding and creates the vehicle I ride in to get to the truth. I was talking with a friend yesterday and explaining that there are those times when all the educational theories and ideas become, to use a cliche, crystal clear for me. Now, as I said to my friend, that clarity is not always long-lasting. But man, when the muddy waters from the storms die down and I can see the bottom, excitement runs high. My friend and I started talking about all the things in education that muddy the waters for teachers: top-down directives, competing different priorities, forgetting what teaching at its simplest really is, political agendas, money, power, and the list goes on. One of my colleagues, Buddy, made a statement a few weeks ago that I've continued to ponder. He said teaching is really a simple act. You need two things: a teacher and a student. There's a lot of truth in that. Why have we allowed education to get so complex and complicated when we know that in its purest form, learning is about an exchange, a simple dialogue, a transaction? While I might not be able to control the "storms" that muddy my thinking, I celebrate those times when the wind dies down, the sand settles and I look down to see the bottom clearly.

How to Be Goldilocks

My friends Linda, Amanda and I were discussing how to balance all we teach in our classes in this 21st century. We have students who tell us that it's really not important to learn mechanics such as the rules for apostrophes because that is not truly relevant and useful knowledge in this new age of technology and 21st century skills. Sure, students can demonstrate they know the rules for showing possession when you worksheet or quiz them, but too often, the application is not there in real, authentic writing. Students don't transfer the skills, so we teachers keep teaching and emphasizing it. I think many teachers are questioning what to keep and what to throw out as we adjust to the huge paradigm shift in education.

We constantly juggle the many competing factors in our quest to find the "porridge that is just right." Relevancy, standardized tests, cultural value, immediacy, practical application and many other factors compete for priority. Do you throw out all the classics? Only teach the contemporary young adult literature that students seem to enjoy? Do you give students 100% choice and never "assign" a book since that seems to be the quickest way, according to many students and adults, to steal the joy out of reading? Do you only teach formulaic writing because that is what is tested on the state writing test? Do you incorporate technology for technology's sake because it's all about technology these days? Do you continue to take off 5 points each time a student misuses an apostrophe because you've taught it over and over and still the student has not made correct usage a habit of excellence?

Do you teach lists of vocabulary words (even going so far as to choose the words from their literature so that they are in "context") even though students only use them for a short while but never transfer them to their writing? Do you sacrifice great works of literature such as Siddhartha, moving away from fiction and putting more emphasis on informational texts since that is where the students seem to struggle? After all, many experts today discourage doing a lot of traditional "literature" and instead think it's more important to study informational texts. Do you teach spelling at the high school level? Is it too late once students get to high school for them to master the basics of spelling and grammar? Do you teach grammar in isolation a little so that students can learn the basics they never learned before?

Is it reasonable to challenge students to learn something for learning's sake or is the new buzzword "relevant?" Must everything be "relevant" and if so, what does this mean? Who gets to define what is "relevant?" I've been pondering all of these questions and the only thing I know for sure is that I think we get to the answer through trial and error. Try different types of porridge. Some will be too hot, others too cold, but I look for the time when I sample the porridge that is "just right."

Teaching "Tone"

A week or so ago, one of my students asked me about the tone of the book she read for summer reading assignment: The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Part of her assignment was to describe the author's tone in the book and pull passages or diction to support her tone description. She stated in her journal that the book had absolutely no tone, something that really surprised me. I noted on her journal that every book has tone, so when I handed back her assignment, we sat down and had a conversation about it. I went to a few specific scenes in the book, read them aloud and then asked her to describe what she believed the author's attitude was in those passages. Although we discussed specific examples of diction, she still was not confident that the book had a tone or tones (as I explained to her that a book can have more than one tone).

This conversation prompted reflection on my part and dialogue about how to teach students to recognize tone, especially to students who don't instinctually "get it." What is tone really? I know the traditional definition but I'm thinking more deeply about it. I know that in AP, all roads lead to tone. One of the challenges is getting students to distinguish between mood and tone. Readers have an easier time identifying their own emotional response to a passage but asking them to pick up on the author's attitude can present a dilemma for some; particularly when the tone of a passage is more subtle. In pondering how to best teach students to recognize tone, I've discovered a few resources: a blog entry by a teacher who uses movie trailers to get his students to see how tone affects the perception of that film. See Todd Christian's entry on how to teach tone and mood to middle school students to read more about his technique.
I've also been reading Nancy Dean's Voice Lessons which provides sentences of small passages for students to work through diction, detail, imagery, syntax and tone.

In my discussion of this issue with Amanda, she stated that she thinks part of the problem for some students is that they are not visualizing the scene when they read. Afterall, reading is seeing. This started me thinking about how picturing the text in my mind or making a movie in my mind is such a natural thing for me to do. I have a hard time seeing how it's possible to read and NOT visualize, yet I know many of my students don't. Jeff Wilhelm speaks to this issue in several of his books including the Reading Is Seeing (Scholastic).

I think of tone as the emotional flavor of a text, so that automatically generates ideas of how I might use music and or actual food (sound and taste) to teach tone since I think teaching through the senses can be powerful. Art is the other vehicle I'm pondering to use to teach tone. I need to have a conversation with my art teachers about the art equivalent of tone and how they teach it. Poetry is an avenue I will explore in teaching tone. Hmm, wonder about having students write tone poems or poems with 2 distinct tones to get the to recognize how diction helps establish a tone. More to come as I continue to ponder this. The lesson I've learned the past few years is that my students need teaching that makes EXPLICIT the skills and concepts I and other "talented" readers/writers have. Too many of my students just think that I somehow just get tone. I know think alouds help break this misconception down for students. Now for lessons that address the different senses.