I wanted to bring up the issue of textbooks in the classroom because it's something that didn't come up in our class very much, but is definitely an issue that everyone will have to deal with in field experiences and your future teaching positions.
I am not sure if I was explicitly taught that using textbooks is bad, or if that was an implicit message, but I definitely had the impression when I began teaching that my job was to choose a variety of texts related to a unit theme for students to read. Sometimes this can get kind of hairy when your district, like many do, has complex procedures for approving anything students read. This can also get hairy if you don't get formal approval and a parent has a serious problem with a text.
Schmidt takes the party line on textbooks: teachers know what students need better than an anonymous textbook editor, so each teacher should choose appropriate texts for his or her students. Instruction should never center around a textbook. Schmidt [predictably] cites Dewey, Freire, and Foucault. She endorses Dewey's idea of linking educative experiences based on student interest/questions/experiences, and refers to Freire's banking metaphor (like Freire, Schmidt pushes back against "teaching as transmission"). She also calls on Foucault for lessons in uncovering the hidden power that textbooks have: using textbooks is an expectation, a norm, an implicit "right way" to teach, and part of the "business of schooling" (David Tyack's phrase). Schmidt also connects this textbook orthodoxy with current policy efforts to standardize curriculum to achieve universal literacy, higher test scores, etc. She makes the point that as students are not alike, neither should our curriculum be a "one-size-fits-all" approach just to satisfy the control and need for accountability of someone at the top. She also criticizes textbooks for often including only excerpts of works of literature, and prescribing a set order of skills, as well as promoting one authoritative, static interpretation of a text through the pre-made discussion questions and assignments.
I see a few different things going on here, and I find that even though I do what Schmidt is calling for, I don't wholeheartedly agree with her. Remember P. David Pearson's article on the reading wars? Schmidt, like most English educators at the college level, thoroughly subscribes to the philosophies that Pearson associates with whole language: authentic texts and tasks (as opposed to excerpts gathered in a textbook), teacher autonomy and professionalism, and interdisciplinary units drawing on a variety of text types. These are all embedded within philosophies of progressive pedagogy (Dewey), teaching for social justice (critical theory, i.e. Freire), sociocultural theories of knowledge (Vygotsky, Bruner), and poststructuralism (Foucault, and a focus on bringing implicit power structures to light.) Frankly, I'm almost a little bit surprised that English Journal published this because it's not exactly new information or a different point of view in our field!
I don't disagree with Smith, and my attitude is definitely similar to one of Schmidt's epigraphs (the source for the title): "The modern textbook is an invaluable servant, but an intolerable master for a competent teacher." I always sort of felt that I was "above" using a textbook, because wasn't that just for lazy teachers? That's not really fair, however. While plodding through a textbook chapter by chapter and using all of the textbook resources is completely antithetical to the core beliefs of all of English education, and I agree with Smith there, I can't say that textbooks are evil, or that teachers who use textbooks are bad teachers. That can't be true. I depart from Smith (I think) in saying that there is nothing wrong with using some texts that happen to be found in textbooks. There is an affective dimension to this worth mentioning, however, Students associate textbooks with boring stuff! If they are used to not using a textbook, they often moan and groan and assume that whatever is in the textbook will be dry, so that is something that the teacher has to think about how to overcome.
Schmidt, Renita. (2011). "Challenging Textbooks: Servants, Not Masters of Our Classrooms." English Journal. 100: 3, p. 92-96.
Friday, July 8, 2011
Louis Martinez, "Making Connections with the Boys Who Struggle in Your Classroom"
I choose this English Journal article because "making connections with boys who struggle in my classroom" was one of my most intractable problems as a teacher - especially as a female teacher who never struggled in school. I think it's difficult for many teachers, however, because it really gets to the heart of how to make someone care about something they are not inclined to care about, don't see a value in, or have had bad experiences in in the past. I know that my most frustrating experiences as a teacher were working with students who, no matter what I tried, still seemed totally impervious to my efforts, totally unwilling to even try to do their best work (or any work at all, sometimes), totally unwilling to read anything. This article also relates to my last post about students not reading assigned texts. I used to have independent reading days every other Friday, and despite my own classroom library, access to the school library, and despite how I modeled book passion of my own in talking about my reading habits, sharing what I was reading, reading with students while they were reading...there were always some middle school boys who would just pretend to read a magazine every week, for forty minutes. Why would they do this? Or, they would fight over the copy of Ripley's Believe It or Not, and The Guinness Book of World Records (boys also really seem to like Calvin and Hobbes)...which was ok for one day, but wasn't taking them any closer to getting their independent reading requirements finished when they would do that every reading day.
Martinez opens his article with an anecdote about a male student, Jayson, who moved to his class who didn't engage at first, or come prepared with a notebook. Martinez gives him a notebook, which seems to provoke an initial change in Jayson's behavior. Martinez then connects his action with what he has learned from some teacher research he had just (conveniently) finished conducting in his classroom, hoping to gain insight to the question "Why do some boys read in my class, while others will not?" Good question!! Martinez implements reading conferences (like Atwell) during independent reading time, which happens daily for 15-20 minutes, and says something intriguing that he doesn't really follow up on: "I began to understand the pressures and problems that often made reading not only a chose but - for some boys - also an impossibility."
Martinez says that the reading conferences were extremely valuable. They helped him to build rapport with his students and bring in reading materials related to their interests (I know that when I got some skateboarding magazines for a few students that would never read but loved skateboarding, it worked (sort of - some reading happened, whereas no reading happened before, and then of course the same kid tried to read the same skateboarding magazine like seven times instead of moving on to something else...)) He also learned the boys often prefer book series that have action and humor, but that there is no one "magic book" that every kid likes. (The findings were pretty slim; the largest section talks about the mechanics of how he did reading conferences - he did a brief check-in with every student where he recorded what they were reading, and then a longer conference with about three students per day.)
Martinez concludes by saying that relationships are the single factor that can make it or break it in a classroom (I agree - students do a lot for you when they know that you truly care about them and think they can succeed). He hints at the meaning of his previous statement about the pressures that boys feel related to reading. He says that there is a "masculine facade" for both him and his male students and seems to indicate that this is at odds with reading (it's not really clear). Maybe being seen as enjoying reading isn't "cool," or maybe some male students just don't connect as easily with a teacher without a systained invitation from that teacher. Regardless, connecting with students about what they are reading, or might like to read, made a major impact in Martinez's class, and I definitely experienced some similar things in my classroom.
Martinez, Louis. (2010). "Making Connections with the Boys Who Struggle in Your Classroom." English Journal. 100:2, p. 121-124.
Martinez opens his article with an anecdote about a male student, Jayson, who moved to his class who didn't engage at first, or come prepared with a notebook. Martinez gives him a notebook, which seems to provoke an initial change in Jayson's behavior. Martinez then connects his action with what he has learned from some teacher research he had just (conveniently) finished conducting in his classroom, hoping to gain insight to the question "Why do some boys read in my class, while others will not?" Good question!! Martinez implements reading conferences (like Atwell) during independent reading time, which happens daily for 15-20 minutes, and says something intriguing that he doesn't really follow up on: "I began to understand the pressures and problems that often made reading not only a chose but - for some boys - also an impossibility."
Martinez says that the reading conferences were extremely valuable. They helped him to build rapport with his students and bring in reading materials related to their interests (I know that when I got some skateboarding magazines for a few students that would never read but loved skateboarding, it worked (sort of - some reading happened, whereas no reading happened before, and then of course the same kid tried to read the same skateboarding magazine like seven times instead of moving on to something else...)) He also learned the boys often prefer book series that have action and humor, but that there is no one "magic book" that every kid likes. (The findings were pretty slim; the largest section talks about the mechanics of how he did reading conferences - he did a brief check-in with every student where he recorded what they were reading, and then a longer conference with about three students per day.)
Martinez concludes by saying that relationships are the single factor that can make it or break it in a classroom (I agree - students do a lot for you when they know that you truly care about them and think they can succeed). He hints at the meaning of his previous statement about the pressures that boys feel related to reading. He says that there is a "masculine facade" for both him and his male students and seems to indicate that this is at odds with reading (it's not really clear). Maybe being seen as enjoying reading isn't "cool," or maybe some male students just don't connect as easily with a teacher without a systained invitation from that teacher. Regardless, connecting with students about what they are reading, or might like to read, made a major impact in Martinez's class, and I definitely experienced some similar things in my classroom.
Martinez, Louis. (2010). "Making Connections with the Boys Who Struggle in Your Classroom." English Journal. 100:2, p. 121-124.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
William J. Broz, "Not Reading: The 800 Pound Mockingbird in the Classroom"
This article, in the most recent issue of English Journal (May 2011), talks about an issue that rarely appears in print, although it probably occurs in almost everyone's classroom: students who do not read whatever text they are supposed to be reading! (Thus the mixed metaphor of the title. Not reading is the proverbial "elephant in the room," but becomes the "mockingbird in the room" because William Broz is writing about how he assigned To Kill a Mockingbird to his college students, and he knows that some just won't read it!!)
Hilariously, he says he actually uses that book because he invariably finds that many of his students didn't read it the first time around when they were in high school (Broz asks them to admit it honestly). In response, he exhorts them with the main point of his piece: "If students do not read the assigned texts, nothing important is happening in your literature classroom" (italics are his). Then, most astounding, is his observation that despite this lecture, 20% of these future English teachers will actually fake it a second time. In Broz's words, "Not reading is such a strong mode of operation that at least two students will attempt to write reading response journals, student-generated discussion items, and short literary essays based on reading SparkNotes and other Internet chapter summaries they find among the 2.5 million Google hits on To Kill a Mockingbird." Wow.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, for sure.
Much of Broz's article is devoted to strategies to encourage reading, rather than faked reading. He shared that his first solution was to advise students to just not assign the "old chestnuts" that will have been written about ad nauseum on the internet, but later he realized that students not reading has much more to do with what teachers ask students to do. If teachers "use study guides, comprehension quizzes, pseudo whole-class “discussions” that serve mainly to summarize and interpret the reading, and similar enabling strategies, we send the message to students that no engaged reading or individual interpretation of the text is necessary and that not reading the text is just fine."
So what does Bros believe teachers should do instead?
*ask interpretive questions (rather than comprehension) that can not easily be answered by sparknotes.
*use reader response journals (and/or discussions of reactions to text). They are unique and personal, and cannot be easily faked, as opposed to test questions on character, plot, or the definitive meaning of a symbol.
*use YA, high-interest literature for whole class reading at the beginning of year. Encourage students to read what interests them, even if not particularly highbrow
*use student-generated "discussion items" and frequent discussions during reading, not just after reading
*use natural consequences - if students have not arrived prepared to discuss the day's reading, than they need to spend class time reading until they can participate with the group
Broz also has some DON'Ts:
*don't spend time in class going over what students should have already read to compensate for them not having read (I italicized this last bit because in at least two schools that I have worked in, teachers would frequently have students listen to the book on audio tapes, and then would have to spend time summarizing - especially in middle school. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is bad to enable students when they aren't reading.)
*don't use the film version unless there is a really good reason too
*don't make tests/quizzes "right answer games" that test comprehension or memorization of a particular interpretation
I guess I can never be 100% positive, but I never got the impression that students were secretly not reading in my class. They were accountable to their peers when we did literature circles, and we would often listen to the audiotapes of books we read as a class. Independent reading used to be faked on a rampant basis, so I tried doing book blogs instead of just a reading log, which did seem to help for the most part. (Sometimes students copied and pasted summaries of their book, but in most cases I think they did actually read them.) I will write in my next post about some of the most frustrating cases though, which are the disaffected boys who aren't interested in reading much of anything in any genre, no matter how open you make the requirements.
Broz, W. J. (2011) "Not Reading: The 800 Pound Mockingbird in the Classroom." English Journal. 100: 5.
*Note: I did look through several years of English Education and downloaded some articles that intrigued me, but I saw very few articles that I felt were directly related to adolescent literature/literacy. These last three articles I am posting about are all from English Journal.
Hilariously, he says he actually uses that book because he invariably finds that many of his students didn't read it the first time around when they were in high school (Broz asks them to admit it honestly). In response, he exhorts them with the main point of his piece: "If students do not read the assigned texts, nothing important is happening in your literature classroom" (italics are his). Then, most astounding, is his observation that despite this lecture, 20% of these future English teachers will actually fake it a second time. In Broz's words, "Not reading is such a strong mode of operation that at least two students will attempt to write reading response journals, student-generated discussion items, and short literary essays based on reading SparkNotes and other Internet chapter summaries they find among the 2.5 million Google hits on To Kill a Mockingbird." Wow.
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, for sure.
Much of Broz's article is devoted to strategies to encourage reading, rather than faked reading. He shared that his first solution was to advise students to just not assign the "old chestnuts" that will have been written about ad nauseum on the internet, but later he realized that students not reading has much more to do with what teachers ask students to do. If teachers "use study guides, comprehension quizzes, pseudo whole-class “discussions” that serve mainly to summarize and interpret the reading, and similar enabling strategies, we send the message to students that no engaged reading or individual interpretation of the text is necessary and that not reading the text is just fine."
So what does Bros believe teachers should do instead?
*ask interpretive questions (rather than comprehension) that can not easily be answered by sparknotes.
*use reader response journals (and/or discussions of reactions to text). They are unique and personal, and cannot be easily faked, as opposed to test questions on character, plot, or the definitive meaning of a symbol.
*use YA, high-interest literature for whole class reading at the beginning of year. Encourage students to read what interests them, even if not particularly highbrow
*use student-generated "discussion items" and frequent discussions during reading, not just after reading
*use natural consequences - if students have not arrived prepared to discuss the day's reading, than they need to spend class time reading until they can participate with the group
Broz also has some DON'Ts:
*don't spend time in class going over what students should have already read to compensate for them not having read (I italicized this last bit because in at least two schools that I have worked in, teachers would frequently have students listen to the book on audio tapes, and then would have to spend time summarizing - especially in middle school. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is bad to enable students when they aren't reading.)
*don't use the film version unless there is a really good reason too
*don't make tests/quizzes "right answer games" that test comprehension or memorization of a particular interpretation
I guess I can never be 100% positive, but I never got the impression that students were secretly not reading in my class. They were accountable to their peers when we did literature circles, and we would often listen to the audiotapes of books we read as a class. Independent reading used to be faked on a rampant basis, so I tried doing book blogs instead of just a reading log, which did seem to help for the most part. (Sometimes students copied and pasted summaries of their book, but in most cases I think they did actually read them.) I will write in my next post about some of the most frustrating cases though, which are the disaffected boys who aren't interested in reading much of anything in any genre, no matter how open you make the requirements.
Broz, W. J. (2011) "Not Reading: The 800 Pound Mockingbird in the Classroom." English Journal. 100: 5.
*Note: I did look through several years of English Education and downloaded some articles that intrigued me, but I saw very few articles that I felt were directly related to adolescent literature/literacy. These last three articles I am posting about are all from English Journal.
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