This I Believe resource for week 6

Browse This I Believe topics by theme- lots of great examples of personal responses to global problems

http://thisibelieve.org/themes/

My first take on Critical Literacy

I want to extend Heffernan's article into my own teaching life by trying to talk more about the Critical Literacy lesson I created.

In my lesson, the teacher presents a situation of a social problem or social ill. The teacher presents this as something they see as a problem that they can find a solution for, but teacher does not present solution. The teacher asks students for ways teacher can possibly solve this problem within their own means. The class then listens to a TIB podcast about an individual solution to a large social problem. The teacher asks students to identify another large problem. The teacher really probes- why is this a problem? Why does this make you angry? After having them write them/call them out for the class, the teacher assigns 1 social problem to each table, asking them to find a solution that the students could actually do to counter that problem. The students share out solutions, teacher facilitates feedback and discussion and then the class listens to another podcast example.

This is my first attempt at creating a hard-hitting, take-on-real-world-issues lesson. I first thought of this idea a while ago as a way of beginning a conversation with students about the realities of the world. Then, through our work in the program and listening to teachers, I wondered if maybe these lessons weren’t necessary because students may already be aware of these realities- the world is not fair being the biggest one. However, when I’m planning this with my classroom in mind, I realize how difficult taking this on will be- I have students who are dealing with divorce, death, eating disorders, suicide, gun violence, parental abandonment, along with all the usual problems teens have to deal with. I also have students who really have no idea about how harsh the world can actually be. This wide swath of experience is a good thing in the long run, but it means that students will have very different reactions to this lesson.

This lesson is my way of creating access to solutions for inescapable real world problems. I’m trying to follow Janks’ model of Domination, Access, Diversity and Design from “A synthesis for critical literacy education”, with special emphasis on the Design part. When students identify these problems, see a personal approach to these problems modeled by a “This I Believe” author, then brainstorm together a personal approach, I’m hoping they’ll realize there are ways to combat issues like poverty, racism and classism that are small and manageable. Hopefully, students will feel empowered to take on these societal ills after gaining these insights, and will address them in their TIB papers.

Grading: There's Got to Be a Better Way!

When we talk about grading, I think about my cooperating teacher's classroom. For my blog post this week, I want to focus on what I'm observing and how I see it. 

My Teacher, S, is very focused on grades. Although she presents many chances to revise grades and accepts late work from her struggling students, she still always grades with a number and a letter score. I’m not sure I would give students letter grades in middle school on everyday assignments; I can just picture students whose notebooks are covered with C’s and D’s and F’s feeling those letters. At the same time, I recognize the naïveté of this idea; they’re going to be graded like this in high school, they need to be prepared for it. I’m hoping to find that sweet spot between making students feel like their grades don’t define them and preparing them for the real world (not really…more like the bubble) of high school. What I really don’t want is to have students with a fixed mindset of “well, I’m an F student” in middle school. I plan on giving lots of chances for students to revise and correct, and making all kinds of exceptions for students who go out of their way to ask for a second chance. I’m a sucker for second chances. I am learning from S how to approach those students and offer those second chances if they’re unwilling or unsure of how to ask for them. S is great at reaching out to struggling kids; she makes sure they know all the ways they can bring their grades up. However, she definitely isn’t handing out A’s. I want to keep watching and learning.

A grading tactic of S’s that I know I will remember is her “correcting” window. She gives students 5 days to correct any wrong answers on quizzes or rewrite low-scoring assignments. When the students turn in the corrected copy, she will give them half points for whatever they made up (ie, they fixed 6 answers, they get 3 points added to their score). While I was originally going to do something very similar to this except awarding full points for corrections, I acknowledge the value in only awarding half- the students still got it wrong the first time, and they can’t change that. However, I’m struggling with this, because I also believe that students should be given second chances that recognize the effort and time they’re putting into the corrections and show that I appreciate that effort and time. I also think that it makes the grading system seem less intimidating, showing my students, hopefully, that grading isn’t some jail sentence or statement on who they are. They can change it. 

When I think further about how I want to grade when I become a teacher, I just keep thinking I want to do the opposite of what I experienced in school. Grading was stressful and final, and everyone was obsessed with grades. Your grades were a statement on your intelligence, plain and simple. I want my grading system to be so vastly different from that. I appreciate that, in many ways, it seems like Kirby agrees with me. Kirby points out that grading is too often a weird binary: graded work is stressful and judgmental, and nongraded work isn't worth spending time on. In order to counteract this, I need to be prepared to work with my students progressively away from this system towards something better. It will be a slow process, but important and worth it in the long run, because I can then place more emphasis on content and process, and students will feel more comfortable experimenting within assignments. It all starts, I believe, with using a student-centered holistic approach like Impression Marking, then having students create their own standards, then...I don't know where else! 

Here's some other useful ideas from Edutopia, including a great idea for a One in Four Rule

Examples of class blogs

I found a great page about how to set up a class blog on the Edublogs website. Here's the link to that page, including many examples of class blogs. I especially like this blog, called Making Waves in Sixth Grade. It's accessible and has lots of fun posts. Here's one I especially like:

Thoughts on Publishing

While reading Kirby this week, I was confronted with something I didn't want to think about as a teacher: publishing. Publishing has always seemed inaccessible; you publish novels or screenplays, or scholarly articles in scholarly journals. I got into teaching to stay away from publishing and scholarly journals. I had never considered using publishing in the classroom. However, what I read in Kirby changed my mind. 

Why publish student work? Well, why not? It's the final step in the writing process, and it means that someone besides the teacher will be able to read what the student has created. It gives the writing an existence outside of the school vacuum. "Skipping it (as traditional assignments often do) conveys the message that what we're doing with this writing in school doesn't much matter to real people"(206). In order to make the work real, and give it new sets of eyes, teachers should be publishing their students' work.

Kirby lists ways to publish, from small class displays to school-wide journals. There are some ideas of hers I like more than others, and some that I can picture being much easier to implement as a first year teacher. I definitely want to start a class blog. It's so easy to do, and would give students and the adults in their lives a chance to see their writing on a relatively secure spot of the internet (nothing on the web is ever completely secure; I have no illusions about that). I could start a Blogger for the class, have the students take turns being the blog's "curator" and making posts about what we've done each week, and then post bits and pieces of student's work. Kirby's got a great suggestion about what to pick out of students- "select good writing, even if it's only a sentence or two with a vivid image, an unusual twist, or the surprise of humor"(207). this way, all students will get a chance early on in the blog to get published. The class blog is an easy way to get kid's work seen by more than just me.
Another good idea, also incredibly easy, is the display board. Each room has a display board or two and I, as the teacher, get full control over it! (It's nice to have SOME control over something). I can see this being a perfect place to display student writing. For one, kids will feel acknowledged, knowing that I've read and appreciated their work. Two, they know their peers are looking at it too, hopefully boosting some confidence. 

Lastly, in Kirby, I loved this point he makes about why publishing student writing is important: "Human beings, not robots, produce writing" (206). It's a well-established fact that students don't have enough time for creativity in school, but producing writing is one of the most creative tasks. They need a place to be creative, to produce something unique and meaningful, that they might not be getting from the scan-tron tests in science or equations in math. Writing is a human activity, and it needs to be acknowledged as such, and teachers can easily celebrate this by publishing student work.

Additional resource for AAVE discussion

This is from the PBS program, "Do You Speak American?", showing a unique way to teach code-switching techniques

Language and Power

The Flynn article hit home for me because the issues he talk about are very important to me. I strongly believe that lack of awareness around linguistic competence and poor communication between teachers and students, especially between white teachers and students of color, is something contributing to the achievement gap in Minneapolis schools.

It can be hard for teachers who come from different background than their students to communicate. Sometimes, there is a language barrier, but more often it’s a coded language difference that creates tension. The biggest example of this is how AAVE (African American Vernacular English, also called Ebonics or Black Vernacular) is treated in the classroom. Among some communities of Black people, AAVE is the common language. AAVE is a form of English, but has its own set of vocabulary, syntax rules and grammar structures that distinguish it form SAE (Standard American English). Many white teachers do not know about the unique structures and rules of AAVE, they only know it as “improper”, or “not the right way to speak”. Students who speak AAVE are told, from a young age, that AAVE is “wrong”. Imagine being a 5 year old person and being told from your teacher that the way your brothers and sisters speak, the way your mother and father speak, the way your neighbors speak is wrong. This only serves to disengage the student or make them feel they are coming into school with a deficit of some kind. This may also influence how the teacher sees that student- “they don’t speak correctly”; already you have a deficit mindset regarding that child.

            What that teacher has done is called prescriptive grammar. In education, it’s the notion that one form of grammar is correct (Standard American English, usually) and should be upheld in the classroom. Not only is this a hegemonic and ethnocentric mindset, but it’s ignoring the needs of the student; it’s not meeting them where they’re at.

Prescriptive grammar can start affecting students when they’re very young, with pre-k students. Many times, teachers don’t even notice they’re doing it. It has long-reaching affects as well, some as bad as a permanent stuttering. I have perpetuated this prescriptive grammar myself when I was in the Summer Reads program through the Minnesota Literacy Council. The program prepared us well, and armed us with hundreds of vocabulary games and alphabet-learning activities. I started working at Hospitality House in North Minneapolis, and loved working with the K-2^nd graders every day. A big part of Summer Reads was literacy testing, and it was our job to correct words that were pronounced incorrectly. A few students pronounced “brother” like “bruvver”, which is correct in AAVE but incorrect in SAE. I made them read the word again, thinking that they had not comprehended the word. This only made them read slower and less fluently, with one child in particular becoming angry that I kept asking him to correct this one word. I had the best intentions, but I was set on the idea that what they were saying was not correct. In the process, I alienated some students who had the potential to be much more fluent readers if I had only acknowledged the alternate pronunciation of “brother” which was correct in the grammar they were used to.

            What is the solution? Teach all teachers about linguistic competence and the dangers of prescriptive grammar. This isn’t to say that teaching SAE is off the table, in fact, teaching SAE and its grammar rules are just as important, but instead of prescriptive grammar, frame it around descriptive grammar. Descriptive grammar is less about a right and wrong grammar binary and more about useful grammar rules. It’s also important that students learn SAE because of its position as the dominant form of communication in our world today. As Gloria Ladson Billings puts it, “My job is to make sure that they can use both languages, that they understand that their language is valid but that the demands placed upon them by others mean that they will constantly have to prove their worth. We spend a lot of time talking about language, what it means, how you can use it, and how it can be used against you” (Ladson-Billings, 82) Teachers can present SAE as a necessity, but not as “better” or “the only right way” to speak and write. Some teachers have found success in a “bilingual” approach, teaching students that SAE is actually their second language, even if English is a part of their first language. Charlotte Evans, a deaf educator, has used an approach similar to this with her students. She acknowledges that American Sign Language is their first language, and English writing is their second, and teaches with this in mind (Evans, 17). Lisa Delpit advocates for this dual-minded approach, imploring that speaking and writing in AAVE is not a deficit to any student, but actually a useful skill in the classroom. “Through winding back and forth through orality and literacy, the students begin to understand the stylistic differences between their own language and that of standard text” (Delpit, 62)

 In order to solve this problem that contributes to the achievement gap, teachers need to accept linguistic differences and stop teaching prescriptive grammar, especially in the case of AAVE. Teachers should be aware of important concepts like privilege, cultural capital and linguistic competence, and how they play out in a classroom where the students speak AAVE but the teacher is an SAE speaker. This awareness can hopefully spread beyond teachers to staff and other organizations that support literacy. What makes this so important is that usually teachers have the best intentions, but without this knowledge the teacher may end up negatively impacting the child, like I did.  This awareness may take some teachers a while to become used to, but it will be worth it for the new awareness they have that benefits their AAVE-speaking black students.

Delpit, Lisa. Other People's Children. 2nd ed. New York: New, 2006. Print.

Evans, Charlotte J. "Literacy Development in Deaf Students: Case Studies in Bilingual Teaching and Learning." American Annals of the Deaf 149.1 (2004): 17-27. Print.

Ladson-Billings, Gloria. The Dreamkeepers. San Fransisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994. Print.