o To
what extent were you were expected to follow a scripted curriculum, or add your
own ideas to a curriculum that already exists, or create a unit that is
entirely new?
My unit consisted of teaching the Language
Arts portion of Reading Street for two weeks. Because my school is required to
teach RS with fidelity, my MT already had established a consistent routine for
abiding by this requirement, which I considered to be divided into two distinct
parts. The first consisted of daily spelling and conventions learning and
involved a lot of worksheets in class or as homework. The second part was the
writing assignment, which was introduced early in the week then small amounts
of class time are given over the next two weeks until it is due. What I was
required to follow exactly as my MT was the pace, content, and routine that the
first part of Language Arts was usually taught in, and in regards to the second
part I had a little more room for creativity. So while I needed to keep the
topic, expectations, and grading rubric for the writing assignment given by RS,
I was able to introduce the unit in any way, and include whatever instruction I
wanted without the RS script. It did not leave a lot of room, but enough for
some creativity.
o What
was unproblematic and/or challenging about planning a unit in this context?
At first I felt stressed from the amount
of required spelling and conventions work I needed to fit in, and also how
rigid my MT was about when they needed to be introduced. I also did not have an
opportunity to observe much of Reading Street being taught prior to my unit so
it was not clear to me exactly what the purpose was of all of the worksheets,
how they were being given, or which one’s needed to be completed in-class and
which one’s were homework. After several days of confusion by me leading up to
the unit (and more focused time observing), I became more prepared to mimic the
routine on my own. After a while, I did not feel the need to prepare in advance
so much because everything was such a routine that it kind of discouraged
individual thought anyway, so it was a nice break.
o What
obstacles did you face? How did you overcome them?
One obstacle that I did not foresee was
the vastly different times my students would finish their poems. Some were
nearly finished the same day it was assigned and other did not even have a
start on the day before it was due. What I needed to do was keep the timeline
for due dates consistent for the class as a whole, then I selected students who
were ahead in the writing process and paired them with each other to revise and
edit. As more students neared the revising stage of writing their poem, a big
gap started to develop in the class between students nearing the completion of
their poem and those who had yet to start. I could not afford extensive time to
meet with these students because my core practice was conferencing and I wanted
to meet with as many students each day. As I met with and discovered more and
more strong poetry writers in the class, I recruited them to help their
classmates brainstorm. I was impressed with the helper students’ conviction to help and not just write the poem for the
focus student. They listened to topic ideas and helped brainstorm rhyming
words.
o How
did working on developing your ‘core practice’ influence the types of learning opportunities
you were able to offer your students?
I believe that conferencing with students
was a much needed boost in students prewriting. A lot of students have
difficulty starting the writing process and meeting with me forced them in a
way to think hard early in the deadline. As some students became discouragingly
behind in keeping with benchmarks, I could pair them up with a supportive
classmate who would help them succeed. I think that while many students did not
meet all requirements for the assignment, many would have been further away
without conferencing with me.
o What
dilemmas (if any) did you face and how did you manage them? Consider issues that
may relate to developing your professional identity, developing strong teacher-
student relationships, constructing relevant curriculum, or assessing students
in meaningful and productive ways.
The most difficult part of the unit was
grading students’ poetry. I have never felt so conflicted. While I knew that my
students’ grades were so diluted by participation work that one failed
assignment would not impact their overall grade so much, I also knew that the
letter grade given on top of the assignment could devastate the child. I did
not want to give bad grades, but the truth was that many of the poems did not
fit the criteria, or they were not fifth grade quality. What was most
conflicting was the fact that I did not agree with RS expectations. It made
poetry so structured and inaccessible; I felt like in my demands I was ruining
poetry forever for these students. One student cried—not from sadness, but out
of frustration. I think she really thought hers was acceptable even after she
disregarded all of the advice I gave and suggestions we talked about. My MT
assured me that many of the poems she had read from the class did not meet the
required standard, and that made me feel a little better, but for the most part
I just felt mad at Reading Street for taking what should have been a fun unit,
and making it a chore.
o What
enabled you to be successful?
I do not feel very successful after that
experience. I do not think all of my students had the same chance to succeed
given Reading Street’s expectations, and I really do not think it was
responsible to hold me accountable for enforcing those unrealistic and
unnecessarily narrow standards of acceptableness in poetry. I hope I have not
ruined their creativity.
o Did
the unit proceed as you expected? Why or why not?
The unit did proceed as I expected. I
think that is the beauty of Reading Street is once you’re in a routine, it’s
pretty easy to stick with it. As far as the poetry unit, however, it went very
much the opposite of how I envisioned it. At first, I imagine freedom to be
creative, and then I was told to stick with the guidelines so the more I
started to think about the “must dos” I lost sight of the fun things I had
planned, like a “coffee shop reading” of their poetry. I’m lucky the time was
created on day on for me to read some poetry to the class—they really liked
that. I think they liked hearing each other’s poems too. I hope they like the
poetry book.
o What
surprises or “aha moments” did you experience?
For a long time I could not see the
connection between the writing assignment and the rest of what RS was teaching
for the weeks encompassing my writing unit. We were focusing on spelling words
with same ending sounds that were spelled differently, and the conventions were
verbs. I could not really see how a poetry unit really related especially when
the story for the week had absolutely no connection. Eventually I did figure
out a way to make the verbs relevant to the poetry (and without RS help!).
Because the required topic for my students’ poems was to write about an event,
I knew that things would be happening (or
should be) in their poems meaning lots of verbs. On the day their poems were
due, I had students circle the verbs in their poems as an assessment of what
they had learned about conventions. I thought this was genius considering my MT
was not requiring any assessment of this knowledge.
o What
do you still need to learn about teaching in this target area, about your
developing your ‘core practice’ and about teaching literacy in general?
I think that there is more than one way to
teach Reading Street with fidelity—at least the language arts portion if not
all. With any basal program, I think there is a lot of room for me to learn
about how to implement the required content in an effective an interesting way.
It can’t be impossible. Because there is more RS material than is humanly
possible to include in a year’s worth of teaching, someone is making the call on
what is worthwhile to include and what is not. I want to become more informed
and objective about making that call. If I eventually work in a school with no
required basal, then I look forward to learning how I can take the most
effective parts of a structured curriculum and elaborate on it with my own
creativity and growing teaching philosophy.
More core practice of conferencing could
definitely be developed more. I had high hopes of establishing a method of
charting their progress, but they quickly advanced to different stages of the writing
process so I missed key benchmarks to meet with them. More distracting was how
highly motivated students wanted to share with me their poem every after every revision
they made. I grew to the point that only the students who did not actually require
my assistance were monopolizing my time. Finally I had to set these students
loose on each other and get them to conference with peers.
As for teaching literacy in general, I
found that I had to relearn what I was about to teach. I had no idea there were
several types of verbs. So many that I do not even know the exact number. I
think I always felt I was inadequate at learning and remembering writing
conventions, and that is perhaps why I shied away from the subject and chose
math for my concentration. What I noticed about the two weeks of this lesson
was that I actually enjoyed learning about language arts, which was not the
case when I was first learning it as at an age appropriate time in my life. I
think I might like teaching reading and language arts in the future. I look
forward to developing a writing center in my future classroom, too, so I can
begin to implement all of the “fun” I think writing can be.
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