Final Reflection

Over the past couple of years as a new teacher, I have attended a multitude of professional development sessions for Teach for America and for the district, as well as taken classes in the Education and Social Change program, and the majority of these experiences have left me with little useful, concrete knowledge to implement in my classroom. However, this class did not fall into this category. For the first time as a Spanish teacher, I was able to use the strategies and information that I learned.

            First, learning how to backwards plan a unit was very helpful. Teach for America had thrown around the term “backwards planning” before, but they had never actually walked us through the steps of how to do it. Having the literature and classroom discussion to guide us helped me to design a unit plan that I was actually able to use in my classroom with the novel that I was about to teach in my Spanish for Spanish speakers class.

            In particular, the Smagorinsky reading on the different types of final assessments helped me to think outside of the box in my unit planning. Rather than just give my students a final exam on the content of novel, I had them prepare for an analytic essay that was focused on the picaresque genre. Throughout our reading of the novel Lazarillo de Tormes, my students practiced finding and explaining quotes that illustrated the characteristics of the picaresque genre so that by the time they got to the final assessment, they were able to discuss at least three characteristics of this genre and use textual evidence to support their claim. In this way, students were less focused on remembering every detail of the novel’s events and more focused on understanding the cultural and historical importance of the novel in 16^th century Spain and the precedence it set as the first novel of this genre. Taking this “big picture” approach to my unit plan helped me to accomplish one of my goals as a Spanish teacher, which was to teach Spanish as a means of understanding the cultural context of the language.

            In addition to helping me restructure my planning process to help me reach my instructional goals, this class helped me to make my lessons more student-centered and therefore more engaging. Because I had to carefully design lesson plans as part of my unit plan, I took the time to think of more student-centered activities to include in them. For example, I started off the unit by having students do a jigsaw and be the experts on one characteristic of the picaresque novel that they would have to explain to the class. Rather than spoon-feeding notes to the students, I had them work in groups to do their own research using the study materials in the back of the book. Therefore, coming up with the notes on the genre characteristics was a student-led process. Also, many of my writing prompts throughout the reading of the novel involved student choice. Students would often get a topic to write about but they would be able to choose which scene or character to focus on. Making my class more student-centered as a result of the readings and discussions we had in this class made my overall experience as a teacher more enjoyable. I did more work in the planning process but was more of a facilitator in the classroom, which was a much more interesting role because I got to hear my students’ thoughts more and learn about them as people.

            Finally, I feel that I learned more in this class than in other classes in the program because of its structure. A lot of the classes we have taken thus far have been very general in their content because we have students who teach various grade levels and subjects. Being in small groups based on our content and grade level helped us to hone in on the challenges that we face in our content at the high school level and build more content-specific knowledge. In this setting, I feel like I was able to learn from the professor and my colleagues about new strategies that were applicable to my classroom. In addition, the more intimate setting allowed for us to share more of our own ideas and teaching style with our classmates. For example, when each of us presented an article or video about an issue in education, I found myself thinking about factors that affect my students that I had never examined in depth before. In addition, when we did our lesson presentations, I was able to pick up ideas from other people that I hadn’t used previously and that work well in a language classroom, like Whitney’s use of a popular song to introduce a theme. Finally, I liked that our professor had experience working in an ETO school because our discussions felt more relevant to the setting in which we work. When an idea was brought up that would be challenging to implement in the rigid structure of our schools, we discussed how we could modify it to attempt to make it work. In this way, we were constantly considering the realities of the environment in which we teach rather than focusing on idealistic hypotheticals.

Final Course Reflection- The Unit Planning Process

Theresa Thomas
Unit plan reflection

Upon reflecting on my growth as a teacher, it is clear that TAL 541 has been a significant factor. This semester has been very informative. I have been able to use a multitude of the strategies and best practices learned in my daily instruction. Not only is my planning more purposeful, my lessons are more student centered, and my students are more engaged. Creating a unit plan and receiving literature to support me in doing so, as well as the immediate feedback was what really helped me grow.
Early in the semester we began the task of backwards planning a unit. While this is a concept I am familiar with through my affiliation with TFA, this course helped me understand how to effectively backwards plan. Teaching in a failing school for the past three  years has stifled my creativity as a teacher. My teacher training program through Teach For America consisted of backwards planning from the statewide assessment, the FCAT. We were taught to be standards based. Everything we did aligned to the standards, so I spent a lot of time teaching kids the benchmarks in isolation. For the most part, I used very simple FCAT like passages that were not very rigorous or interesting. My students were very disengaged, and when I did try to implement rigorous passages and spark creative thinking, I was not sure how to scaffold my students to that point. There was a lot of trial and error, with no real feedback. This changed after reading Peter Smagorinsky's Teaching English Through Principled Practice. Through Smagorinsky's book I was able to learn about backwards planning a theme for the year, as well as for each unit. I learned the culminating assessment can be a wide variety of activities as opposed to a multiple choice test with a few short answer responses. I chose a portfolio assessment for my unit on "Black Boy". This would allow my students the freedom to choose the work they were most proud of at the end of the unit and be able to display it. This also pushed me to be creative in choosing my activities each week. I wanted to give my students a plethora of assignments to choose from. Professor Perez was also instrumental in providing feedback and suggestions that helped shape my vision.
After creating the culminating assessment I began lesson planning. I used Warner and Lovell's book, Teaching Writing Grades 7-12, and Smagorinsky's Teaching English Through Principled Practice to find student centered activities to incorporate in to my lessons. One strategy that worked well for my students was the response logs, also known as double journal entries.These entries were used as a response to the novel my students were reading. At the end of each selection of text, students could choose how they wanted to respond to the text. They always had to write a summary, but the second part could be an analysis of mood, tone, or the students could create questions that would be shared in class. Upon completing the response logs, students would share their response with their group members, generating student led discussions around the text. This is just one of the strategies I incorporated. I really enjoyed learning new ways to unit plan and engage my students.
Another thing that was extremely beneficial was the group lesson plan incorporating elements of Systemic Functional Linguistics. This was used to help students improve their comprehension of text as well as their writing. In learning about Systemic Functional Linguistics, it became extremely clear why my students are struggling to comprehend grade level text. The text is very complex, meaning the sentences are lengthier, embedding multiple clauses, and descriptions, making it harder for students to comprehend. The sentences no longer just contain an easily identifiable subject and predicate in which students are use to. I never really knew how to aid students in comprehending the text until we learned more about SFL. Previously, I was providing a lot of background knowledge and leading children to my understanding of the text. SFL is a tool to aid students in breaking down the text in to meaningful chunks of information. Additionally, analyzing the breakdown in text and the language features of each genre can help transform their writing, by giving them tools to add more details. While we just scratched the surface with SFL, I hope to learn more over the summer so I can begin implementing it with fidelity next year.

Final Course Reflection

            When I first walked into this class on a Monday evening in January, I was both nervous and excited.  It was the first day of the first course I was taking for my Master’s Degree and I didn’t really know what to expect, but I was looking forward to meeting fellow teachers and engaging in academic discourse.  To be honest, on that first day I didn’t really expect to learn very much in this class because unlike my cohorts who were in their first or second year of teaching, I had already been in the secondary English classroom for a decade.  I spent my first three years teaching in the public school system and was in my seventh year of teaching at one of the most prestigious private schools in the county.  Don’t get me wrong, I did not and do not think that I am a seasoned veteran that has nothing left to learn (I did enroll in graduate school to learn and improve as a teacher), but I thought this course would cover very basic secondary English teaching techniques that I would have learned and/or used somewhere along the way.  I was wrong.

            One of the first readings for this course was on backwards planning.  This concept did make a lot of sense to me as I read, but I had not encountered it prior to the reading.  Although the culminating activity (or at least one of them) for my prep school students is typically an analytical essay, I don’t usually know exactly what the prompt will be when I begin teaching a unit. Many times I choose an essay topic based off of a class discussion on the literary work.  I often tailor the essay prompt to each class period.  However, when I implemented the backwards planning strategy in crafting my unit plan for this course, I realized that it really affected my lessons in a positive way.  Every step of my lesson was created with the specific prompt that I had already selected in mind.  I did actually use the lessons that I created for my unit plan in my classroom this semester, although the final analytical essay has not been given yet because it will be a part of the final exam.  I do feel that implementing the backwards planning strategy has already had a positive impact on my teaching and has helped my students to produce better work.

            Another strategy that was new and extremely helpful was Nerd Libs.  While I have used a sentence frame in the past to teach my students how to craft a thesis statement, the Nerd Libs reading provided multiple frames for students to use in analyzing or writing about many different types of texts.  It also explained the reasoning behind the strategy and provided examples for each of the different frames.  I did include this tool in my unit plan in a basic way, but I plan on introducing it earlier in the school year next year and incorporating several different Nerd Libs throughout the school year in order to help strengthen my student’s analytical writing skills.

            One last thing that I learned was to incorporate an overarching theme in my class.  Because I teach secondary English at a college prep school, I do not teach from textbook.  I design the courses I teach based off of the literary selections the school provides, similar to a college literature course.  I do try to associate the works in some way, but reading about an overarching theme made me realize that I could do a better job of connecting the literary selections for my students.  This semester, I did just that with the four independent reading selections for my sophomore American Literature course.  They were Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Richard Wright’s Native Son, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.  I realized that the protagonists in all of these works wrestles with both isolation and alienation so I decided to change my focus on each of these novels.  I taught a compare/contrast lesson on alienation and isolation and then had students identify characters in The Great Gatsby that experience alienation and isolation.  In Native Son, my students looked for examples of the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, feeling alienated or isolated and examined how these feelings directly impacted his actions.  Now my students have begun reading The Catcher in the Rye and they will do the same with Holden Caulfield.  In a couple of weeks when we begin Death of a Salesman, I think recognizing these feelings in Willy Loman (despite his concerted effort to hide them) will help my students sympathize with this character more than they have in the past.  I feel like identifying an overarching theme for these works have not only enhanced my teaching, but also helped my students delve deeper into the characters and relate to them in a more authentic way.

            I really did enjoy this class and I know that I’m walking away from it with strategies that I will use in my classroom for years to come.  I have already seen my students benefit from them and I know that with a little refinement they will be even more effective next year.  I also really enjoyed being in a small class with other teachers who face different challenges than I do.  It made me remember my early days of teaching, taught me to be grateful for what I have, and gave me the opportunity to both teach and learn from my peers.

           

Lesson Feedback

Whitney - I really liked that you ask your students for their opinion on what they believe the song is actually saying about beauty and success and then asked them why they felt that way.  I think that many times as teachers we are focused on getting through the curriculum and making sure our students learn facts and concepts, and we forget to ask our students what they think about current events and topics in their world and more importantly, why they think that way.

Jacalyn - I loved the way your lesson promoted critical thinking through the types of questions you asked and incorporated the idea of honor versus money as a motivating factor to produce art.  I will definitely be bringing this idea into my class the next time we discuss art as a part of a literary movement.

Raul - The American dream aspect of your lesson is what speaks to me the most, especially because I think that so many of the youth generation don't understand this concept or that the dream is something that one must strive for or how unique our country is because of it.  Examining the American dream concept as presented in Gatsby by asking students to relate to it in their own lives and examine that concept in modern society is crucial in my opinion.

Theresa - I really liked the QAR presentation that you gave.  I had never heard of QAR before and it was really helpful to see the four different types of questions laid out in an easy-to-understand format.  The question stems that you provided were also a valuable resource to me as a teacher.   I may even use this information to teach a lesson or two for The Illustrated Man in the upcoming weeks.

Response to Elizabeth Birr Moje's "Foregrounding the Disciplines in Secondary Literacy Teaching and Learning: A Call for Change"

As I read through the article, I found myself nodding in agreement with a lot of what Moje had written.  I also found myself sympathizing with content area teachers who feel as though literary strategies "place an unfair burden of teaching reading on them when they should be teaching content" (98).  As I continued reading about how educators, researchers, and teacher educators need to re-conceptualize how they think of disciplinary learning and literacy instruction, I couldn't help but think (once again) about the Flipped Learning seminar I attended last November.  Although content area literacy was not specifically addressed, the idea of re-imagining secondary education was a central focus.  

Moje cites three key challenges in rethinking disciplinary learning and literacy instruction:  student knowledge, beliefs, and practices; teacher knowledge, belief, and practices; and school structures and subject matter dominance.  She asserts that students "bring ideas about what counts as learning to their disciplinary classrooms and teachers make decisions about classroom practices in interaction with students and in the context of the secondary school as an institution" (98).  Teachers also bring their own ideas about the appropriate practices within their disciplines.  Additionally, the very division of secondary school learning into subject areas and the organization and structure of the physical space of the classroom implies that knowledge is different in different disciplines.  This ultimately creates more of a disconnect within the mind of students; they don't see how the disciplines are interconnected.

So back to that Flipped Learning seminar that I mentioned earlier.  There was was school model that was presented that was quite revolutionary.  Although secondary students did have different subject areas to work through, their schedule was flexible and very student-centered.  Classes were not provided at set times with a group of students and a teacher at the front of the room, rather content was made available through different stations and students chose what they would work on at a given time on any given day (very similar to the Montessori method).  Teachers would roam around the different stations, offering guidance, answering questions on content, helping students to manage their time, etc...  The structure of the school itself also broke the secondary education mold.  The layout was a large room with individual desktop computer stations in one area, there was another area with comfortable seating for individual or group work, there was another station with table for group meetings or work, and yet another area with private study rooms.  Of course, there were several electrical outlets at all of the stations so that students could plug in their laptops or tablets as needed.  There was even another station that was a gym equipped with treadmills and elliptical machines that would allow students to exercise while reading a book (or read from a tablet).  In this kind of an environment, it is easy to see how "the knowledge, belief, and practices" (98) of teachers and students is completely turned on its head and re-imagining how the content areas teach literacy is facilitated by the physical learning space.

I believe Moje is right when she asserts that not only does literacy need to be taught in the content areas, but we also need to work to transform how we approach secondary education.  Our world is changing, our students are changing, and formal education needs to change along with them.

Moje: Foregrounding the Disciplines in Secondary Literacy Teaching and Learning: A Call for Change

In Moje’s (2008) article, she calls for disciplinary literacy strategies to be used at the secondary level. I agree with this approach to some extent. I think that students should learn how to think like scientists, historians, mathematicians, etc. so that they understand how to think critically from different perspectives. However, I fear that in some ways this approach only deepens the bias that school systems have towards producing scholars. As Ken Robinson describes in his Ted Talk, “How Schools Kill Creativity”, the whole purpose of the public education system seems to be to produce university professors, and a lot of talented and creative people are steered away from pursuing their interests because their abilities do not align with what is valued by public education. The reality is that the majority of the students that study these subjects will not become academic experts in these various disciplines. They will have jobs in which they have to draw from different skills across a variety of disciplines. I think that more than anything, the barriers of specific disciplines need to be broken down so that students understand that work and life is often not divided into school subjects.

Along these lines, I wholeheartedly agree with Moje’s suggestion that subject area teachers should not “ignore the powerful ways that young people already use to negotiate multiple discourse communities and literacies in their lives” (103). As technology transforms the way that students are engaging in discourse with one another, teachers should focus on how students can apply their knowledge of nontraditional literacies like social media to the classroom. Having students use their technological skills appropriately in a more professional setting will help them to gain valuable skills for the workplace, as many companies use social media in powerful ways to communicate messages. For example, writing a tweet about theme in a Language Arts class could help students with the skill of narrowing down information to include only the most important and relevant words to get a message across clearly. This is exactly what companies would do to send a message about a new promotion to their customers. Overall, students should be practicing culturally relevant literacies and understanding the connections between the various disciplines and how all of them are applicable to the skills they may need in the job market. 

Fisher & Frey

For this blog entry I will be discussing  "Implementing a School-wide Literacy Framework: Improving Achievement in an Urban Elementary School" by Douglass Fisher and Nancy Frey. It was enlightening to read about the Rosa Parks Elementary School and how they transformed their school by implementing a school wide literacy approach. The Principal allowed the teachers to abandon the scripted literacy curriculum to create a plan that would work for their school. They wanted to implement a plan that everyone believed in and everyone followed. Initially, they drafted their core beliefs about literacy. They believed learning is social, conversations are critical for learning, reading writing, and oral language instruction must be integrated, learners require a gradual increase in responsibility. They then proceeded to develop an instructional framework that supported their core beliefs about literacy. Once this was established they needed a school wide plan to on-board teachers effectively. They created focused professional developments, learning communities, and peer coaching to ensure their teachers were adequately prepared to implement the framework created. This carefully constructed method worked for Rosa Parks Elementary School. Their plan was most beneficial because they created consistency across grades that kids become familiar with. 

What I learned most from reading this was change needs to be implemented from within. In our current school system, the ETO has tried to implement some of the practices discussed in this article, such as an instructional framework, professional developments, learning communities, peer coaches, but we are not seeing the same results as Rosa Parks Elementary. I believe we are not seeing the same results because change comes from within a school. The first thing Rosa Parks Elementary school did was sit down and clarified their core beliefs about literacy. Their beliefs did not come from an external group of people imposing  beliefs on the school. After clarifying their core beliefs and what worked best for children, they were able to create an instructional framework that worked for their school. Because everything came from in-house conversations, they were able to take ownership over it, they created their own professional developments, and their professional learning communities were geared towards their needs, and what their school needed to propel their literacy plan forward. In our district it is very hard for us as teachers to implement the ETO's plan with fidelity when we do not share their beliefs, and what they think is best for children does not always work for our students. In order for us to see the same results Rosa Parks Elementary school is seeing we need to create a plan that works for our teachers and our students. We need to come together as a school and define our core beliefs about literacy and what works best for our students. From there we can create an instructional framework we believe in. I believe when teachers have autonomy they can create great things that they are more likely implement with fidelity. Additionally, teachers will constantly work on improving the plan to fit the needs of their school.