Getting the thoughts to flow...

Dear space internet,

The readings this week have been focusing on ways to encourage student thinking and learning. In chapter 8 of Bomer's "Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's Classroom", he talks about using purposeful conversation to help students learn.

His argument is that almost all learning is done through a communication of thoughts and ideas (whether it be a transmission or collaborative communication). As I was reading through this chapter I was thinking of the kind of communications I have seen or used in my classrooms, both as a student and as a teacher. There certainly was a lot of collaborative work done when I was a student. But I went to a more traditional school. From what I remember, a lot of what I learned was done in a lecture format. However, we would often have time to work together on in-class exercises and collaboratively learn there.

In my teaching classes, though, there seems to be an emphasis on more collaborative learning. While I will agree that I can be good, I have also seen instances where it completely backfires. It's very possible that you could end up with students teaching/talking about the wrong thing. If this happens, then it becomes very counter-productive. I believe, if anything, collaboration needs to be carefully monitored and teachers need to know when to step in. It can become very risky if you let someone learning a task go off and try to do that task on their own without any supervision. I'm just not sure how to manage such a task like that.


Chapter 9 focuses on using writing to generate thinking. Writing can be used as a way to help students think about thinking (metacognition), prepare for a discussion, enhance their reading, strengthen their skills in writing, and much more. The most difficult thing about this that I do not yet know is how to do is implement it into a classroom. I would like to do more writing exercises in the classroom I am interning at, but they begin every class with a 20 minute "books or blogs" activity. While here they are getting 20 minutes to do some kind of writing, I have noticed that a lot of my students don't use this time to read or write. With their smartphones they will  get onto social media sites like facebook, twitter, etc. and use this 20 minute chunk of time in a way that probably wasn't intended to be used.

I believe that activities like this need to be focused as well... maybe I am worried about letting students have their own freedom (especially the younger students, for they seem to shirk responsibility). How do I implement these very new ideas into a classroom, especially classes that are not academically motivated? I want to have collaborative learning, and I want to teach students writing, but even when I try these suggested ideas in my own classes, I get maybe a 50% success rate...

Dear Fandom,

So the topic of this week is on developing readers.

But it isn't just about teaching students to read.


It covered a topic that I hadn't much thought about before... As teachers, we have a responsibility to teach students more than just how to read.

Consider this: A student reads a very complex text aloud to you, but when you ask her what the text is about, she has absolutely no clue; then we keep handing her complex books and having her read them with absolutely no understanding. Teaching students more than just reciting lines on a page is part of our responsibility. It was a difficult concept for me to imagine about because I generally am able to understand what I read. What is it like for students who are not? I can't imagine how hard this is for students.

The readings talked about our role in helping students develop their own interpretations as well. I think of this as being important because before they can generate their own interpretations, they must be able to understand what they are trying to interpret. In this case, it's a related issue.


If we are to do all of this, we need to teach kids a complex series of skills in order to learn about what they are doing.
The girls colored their room red, white and blue.
1.) How to think (What does this all mean)
2.) How to understand what they are reading (Colors, Girls, paint, action)
3.) What does it mean [interpretation]? (Did the girls paint their room red with white and blue colors together? Three separate colors? How can this sentence be interpreted?)

Reading is much more complicated than I have given thought too. I need more time to brood on this.

The need to create lifelong readers...

Dear sentient internet space being,

The topic of this week is on creating lifelong readers. I myself am not a typical avid, enthusiastic reading English teacher. In fact, I quite rarely do any real reading of books. It's unfortunate, because as a child, I read all the time. I have great memories of reading as a kid. My mother would read to me before bed time. I would read exciting stories on the bus. I would read at home. My mom commented to me how much I used to read.

Until she said that comment, I never really considered how much I wasn't reading anymore.

Consider this quote:
"Adolescents are quick to judge things in school as related or unrelated to their lives. Often things associated with school literacy are not seen as relevant by adolescents. As a consequence, teens are more likely to reject school tasks and reading along with them. Our youths need to see literacy as personally relevant and having substance for their lives" (Kasten and Wilfong 657).

I've studied literature for high school teachers of English in quite a bit of depth, and my class then was very critical of the type of stuff we were reading. Everything we read in the "classical canon" was written by dead white men. Now I don't mean to dismiss them for their merit. I certainly appreciate reading them and am glad I did, but only years later in hindsight.

Does that mean it was successful? Well, I certainly did have realized the value of it, but I am no longer a frequent bookworm. Is it possible that in being forced to read these texts in middle school and high school I lost my interest in picking up a book?

The arguments in favor of the classic canon of books read in school say that the books are important for establishing a national "American" culture, and "for people to be able to engage in important common cultural conversations (Hirsch, 1988)."

There was a study conducted by Ivey and Johnston that gave students flexibility on what they wanted to read, rather than just have collective, whole group reading assignments. The study had them intensively engage with the reading they selected. Studies found that even though students were reading different books most students eventually read books their peers had read, even when there were only 2 or 3 copies of a book. Students just not reading the books at the same time. They did, however, engage in those important common cultural conversations over the books they read (272).

^^I'm really intrigued by this idea. Imagine that a classmate is reading a book and you hear just how good or bad it is from a personal account. The ability to tell you how excited it made you might drive other students to read that same book just to be able to catch up with their peers. Imagine the options that are available to you when you hear about seven or eight different books being read by your peers, and what it means to have a kind of knowledge that others in the class may not yet have. This is a unit lesson that I really want to try implementing my own classroom.

There is an important need to not kill the love of reading in our students.
Now, READ!

On critical literacy...

Dear everyone,

The definition of critical literacy has been a bit unclear to me. My friend and I came to the conclusion that critical literacy was applying social justice to what we read. But Bomer and Bomer point do a fine job of defining what critical literacy is.
"When we notice something about particular values like fairness, social justice, and power relationships in something we read, we are applying knowledge gained from other reading we've done, from conversations we've had, and from the media to which we've been exposed. We also are testing the book's assumptions agains the concepts, discourses, and communities of our experiences."

I quite like the definition provided above as it shows how readers, students and teachers alike, bring their own values into the reading. Because people have different experiences, they bring different things to the book.

Part of our readings also discuss interpretations and critiques of text. "Interpretations draw on a bundle of moral, social, and emotional concepts (Bomer and Bomer 27)." The only thing I might question is: when are interpretations stretched too far? Is there a point where an interpretation can be wrong if it is so far out "there." Is there a limit to how much a student can interpret something? From a social justice standpoint, all experiences would be valid and worth measure. But what about the text itself? My belief is that so long as there is evidence within the text to support it, an interpretation can be valid. If there is no evidence, the interpretation is "weak." Various critiques claim only the author's interpretation matters. Others state that only the reader's interpretation matters. There is a third group yet (of which you will find me a part of) that says it's somewhere in between-- that both the reader's and the author's interpretations are equally important.

Reading text through a social justice lens:
Much of the reading talked about the kind of topics that will come up when critically reading and evaluating the text. Representation. Gender. Justice. Power. Silence. Diversity. Class. Language. Culture. The kind of topics that will be discussed will largely have to do with what you are reading. It is important to diversify the kind of texts being read in a classroom in order to model a variety of discussions within the social justice framework. Can you really expect to talk about LGBTQ sexuality in a text where sexual identity is not even mentioned? Diversity is the key to developing students' critical literacy.