CORE CLASS: Fecho Ch. 1-3 Response

Teaching for the Students:  Habits of Heart, Mind, and Practice in the Engaged Classroom (2011) 

by Bob Fecho

In the first chapter of the aforementioned title, Fecho states, "Every learner and his or her teacher should have an honest sense of the range of the student's abilities" (12).  Although he made a few key points in the first chapter of the book, this point really resonated with me.  As a high school English teacher for almost a decade, I can honestly say that it is not necessarily the work that my students do in class that shows me what the range of their abilities are, it is the personal connection I make with them throughout the year.  Sometimes the opportunity to connect with my students is facilitated by an assignment, but if I take an honest look at my classroom, those opportunities are rare.  Despite my efforts to be creative (and more recently, student-centered) the reality is that I teach in an environment where learning and assessing follow a mostly traditional model.  I have experimented with a blended flipped classroom model this year and moved away from the traditional lecture-read text-discuss-assess model, but no matter how creative I am, my students are still assessed traditionally.  Quizzes and tests focus on their deficiencies:  how many facts they remembered correctly or how well they were able to structure an analytical argument on a text based on our class discussions.  Admittedly, I don't have the power to eliminate traditional methods of assessment in my classroom, but after pondering this key point I am beginning to think that perhaps I could place less importance on them somehow, perhaps I could afford more rich opportunities for assessment that would allow my students to develop proficiency by using their hidden strengths, rather than punishing them for their deficiencies.

In Fecho's second chapter, he examines what he deems as the three key elements of the dialogical classroom:  inquiry, critique, and dialogue.  When discussing dialogue, he states that "As a teacher, I need to be open to response that counters, challenges, or even offends my own" (24).  Personally, although I try my best to do this, I find it one of the most challenging aspects of teaching.  Fecho provides an example of a student who made a misogynistic comment during a discussion of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.  He mentions not using his authority to "banish such talk and thus banish dialogue(24)" and instead "humbly acknowledging the student response through a more dialogical response(25)", but he doesn't provide any specifics about how he accomplished this in this particular instance.  He makes an excellent point that banishment would "drive ideas underground where they wouldn't be turned over, examined, and perhaps reconsidered (24)" and I wholeheartedly agree with him, but I am left wondering exactly how to avoid doing just that.  I feel that this point is crucial in trying to develop and manage a successful dialogical classroom, but after reading this chapter I feel unprepared to handle a situation such as the one above in the manner in which he prescribes.  It is my hope that perhaps he will address this issue in more detail in later chapters.

On page 32, Fecho asserts, "Unless learners are engaged in the process, assessment is largely monological and, significantly for this chapter interactional.  It is mostly something done to the disempowered."  To me, this point related to the first key point I discussed.  In order to build a truly transactional classroom, traditional assessment must be reexamined and redesigned. Moreover, students should be empowered in this process of reworking assessments so that rather than being one-sided and punitive, the assessment of knowledge can be a dialogue that offers "supportive feedback, raises intriguing questions, and sets realistic goals while engaging teachers and learners simultaneously" (33).  Without changing the way we assess our students, we can't truly transform our classrooms into a generative environment.