Category Archives: Reading Response

“Process Paper and Evaluation”

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In their chapter “Thinking Through Assessment,” Brenner, Pearson, and Reif offer many valuable suggestions for creating meaningful assessments- for students, teachers, parents, policy makers, taxpayers, everybody! The authors suggest that when students are being assessed, they are looking to answer the questions “How am I doing?” and “What shall I do next?”

One of their suggestions for making assessments useful for students is to include self-evaluations. When I read this, I was instantly reminded of my experience with self-evaluations in high school. My senior year, I took a philosophy class that assigned a short paper every week. Along with the paper, we were required to fill out self-evaluation forms. They were printed on bright yellow paper, and always contained the same list of questions, things like- “Rate your paper on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of clarity, argument, etc.” There weren’t any short answers or free responses. I can’t really remember the specific questions too well, but I do remember that I HATED filling them out. At the end of the form we had to write what we thought our grade should be, and then when we got the paper back, our teacher wrote what he thought the grade should be, and also corrected our ratings from 1 to 5 in terms of clarity, etc.

I think I had a pretty negative association with self-evaluation, the way I experienced it was never fulfilling for me. So when I saw Linda Reif’s example of a self-evaluation form for a paper I was very excited! She calls the self-evaluation “Process Paper (Background History of the Writing) and Evaluation”(p.269). I loved the questions she included- they really encouraged reflection on the writing process.  I especially liked the question, “What do you want me to know about the writing of this that I might now know just from reading it?” I think this question really opens up a door for student-teacher communication about writing. The question “How did you come up with the idea for this piece?” also invites students to share their thought process with the teacher.

I think this template is an awesome example of how to make self-evaluation meaningful and useful for students. I definitely want to use it with students in the future!

Thoughts on chapter 12

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Chapter 12, “Thinking Through Assessment” presents an issue that I consider at length in my senior thesis. I am writing about using school-community partnerships to aid struggling schools. A large portion of my research revolves around the efforts of a high school in a nearby school district to restructure in order to increase their accountability rating under No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. Unlike many schools that have failed to meet annual yearly progress standards, this school has embraced innovative learning strategies. Rather than implementing test preparation courses and extra study courses for students who failed previous state exams, teachers, administrators and teaching artists from a local nonprofit have collaborated to open up two Smaller Learning Communities (SLCs). Each SLC follows a student-centered, project-based learning approach that allows students to conduct their own projects while still adhering to state standards.
One of the teachers’ big issues had been trying to balance students’ needs with school and state needs. For example, one teacher mentioned to me that her students had not done well on a recent global history test, despite the fact that she could see them growing individually. Her students displayed more creativity, maturity, and better social skills than they had in the past, which she attributed to the small class sizes, individualized projects, and group work. The low test scores, however, were a big problem. Author David Pearson alludes to this when he points out that different “clients” have different expectations of assessments. School and state administrators want to see academic progress, and are not as impressed by enhanced social and personal skills.
While there is no easy strategy to go about this weird balancing act, there are certain ways that teachers can remain mindful to the needs of different players in the system. In response to the drop in test scores, for example the teacher in my case study had collaborated with two other fellow teachers to address potential problems with their curricula. Throughout the entire year, it seems that this process of group reflection and teacher collaboration has helped the teachers maintain an innovative, project-based curricula while still preparing students for success on state exams.

Disability Resources

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I really liked Patricia Dunn’s article “Re-Seeing (Dis)Ability: Ten Suggestions” because she argued that making curriculum more inclusive for students with disabilities is better for all students in the classroom. Her list of ten suggestions would definitely benefit all students because her recommendations are very general: using technology, using various types of assessment, having thoughtful discussions about disability, etc. I definitely agree with her suggestions because they echo a lot of what we have learned in class this semester. They are suggestions that would make the classroom more inclusive for students with all different identities, not just related to disability. Her suggestions recognize that all students have various strengths and interests that should be understood and valued in the classroom.

Still, I feel like students with serious learning disabilities would still need special accommodations in the classroom. Varying the types of assignments and assessments may not do enough to ensure that each student is getting the quality education that they deserve. I think Dunn’s ideas on more inclusive pedagogies must still be integrated with special needs programs to address students with more severe disabilities. I really don’t know anything about these types of programs and I would be curious to learn more.

Critical Discussion

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I really like the idea Dunn brings forth in the section “Use literary and other texts as a springboard for informed discussions of disability and ableism.” She talks about giving students reading that highlights ideas of self destructive view, stereotypes of the disabled and society’s misconceptions of the disabled. It is important for students to become “resisting readers”. This teaches them to be critical of everything they read and not accept one author’s opinion to be the only legitimate view. This made me think of a book that I have read called Should We Burn Babar?. In the book, Kohl argues that due to Babar’s messages of racism, sexism and the legitimization of colonialism, children should not be exposed to these books. However, Kohl did take the Babar books into a third grade classroom to have a critical discussion about the book series. After reading the books, he talked to the students about colonialism and other historical/social issues that come up in the book and how the author portrays these ideas as positive things. Even though these students are still very young, they were really effected by this lesson. The images of Babar as a clothed, upper class elephant, leaving behind his naked elephant friends and family members became a disturbing and uncomfortable image for the third graders to look at. Kohl’s conclusion in the introductory chapter was that this book should not be read to children. However, I think that his lesson in the third grade classroom is proof that these books can be used as an introduction to looking critically at literature. It is all up to the teacher to lead discussion and make sure that the students are receiving the right messages and using their own experience/knowledge to critique the author’s writing.

Breaking down barriers

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“In the same way stairs are a constructed barrier to buildings, there are constructed educational barriers in our classrooms and in our pedagogies. We can, and should, address those barriers too.” – Patricia Dunn, “Re-seeing (Dis)ability,” p. 16

I really liked this quote from Patricia’s Dunn’s article about rethinking disability. I thought the entire article was full of great suggestions about how to be a more inclusive and conscientious teacher. What I liked so much about this quote in particular was that it took the conversation about disability beyond the physical. I think many discussions about disability focus on the physical barriers students’ face, and fail to give adequate consideration to the other educational barriers they come up against. Breaking down physical barriers is often easier than breaking down the barriers in pedagogies. I really appreciated Dunn’s suggestions about broadening the definitions of reading and writing, creating diverse ways of assessing students, and using novels and stories with disabled characters to help students understand disability and break free from stereotypes.

Another important piece of Dunn’s article was her emphasis on using new technology to help break down barriers for students. This made me think a lot about my own experiences working with students. For the past four summers, I worked in a summer program for special needs students, and saw a lot of cool ways technology was used as a vehicle for communication. One non-verbal student used a touch-pad that allowed him to communicate when he was hungry, needed to go to the bathroom, wanted to play etc. It allowed him to communicate and express himself in a way he was otherwise unable to do. So cool!

I also loved Dunn’s comments about Universal Design:

“If accessibility were more a part of our cultural consciousness, if inclusiveness were something we didn’t always have to be reminded about, if disability were seen as a part of ‘normal’ life, our buildings and classrooms would not need so much expensive retrofitting and people wouldn’t need to have to ask not to be excluded. Buildings would be more usable by more people from the beginning, which is the main idea behind Universal Design.”

What a wonderful vision for the world!

 

 

 

Teachers as Friends

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What really came through to me in both of this week’s readings was the need for teachers to be more empathetic–the way a friend (or really any caring individual) acts. A friend gets to know you. As a corollary to that, a friend knows what your interests are and how you work best, and probably what you could be better at too. But a friend would never be rude and callous enough to just tell you what you’re bad at. If they did, they wouldn’t be your friend very long. Instead, knowing you and acknowledging your shortcomings, I think most friends usually try to help you slowly improve in your less-than-shining areas by helping you along and focusing on what you already have. Think about the first time you went to a school dance and you didn’t know how to dance and so you embarrassed yourself. Did your dance-savvy friend ridicule you? Make you feel lesser? No. Of course not. That’s not how friends behave. Friends work together. They’re in the same boat, both working for mutual benefit.

But all too often that’s just how teachers behave. Maybe not with such harsh terms as ridicule, but doesn’t the result often feel the same? Think back to the teachers you hated, and why. Did they roll their eyes when you asked a stupid question, almost as if you were an annoying underling who just couldn’t seem to get it right?

In my experience, the teachers who got the most respect from their students–and the ones who got the most hard, sincere work out of their students–were the ones who treated their students like equals and like people they sincerely cared about. And what’s most interesting to me is that it seems like if a teacher starts from this point, only good things can follow. It seemed to me that most of the points in Dunn’s article essentially stemmed out an attempt to be more compassionate towards disabled students; to empathize with them and see their perspectives and insights as valuable, the way a friend would.

Now of course this is overly simplistic (we clearly shouldn’t be too involved in students’ personal lives), but I just wanted to expand upon an insight Mitchell made because I think it’s a useful way of re-imagining the role of a teacher in the classroom and I think it’s a really useful perspective to start from.

 

Constructing a Positive Learning Environment

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After reading “Looking for a struggle: Exploring the emotions of a middle school reader” by Cheri Foster Triplett and “Re-Seeing (Dis)Ability: Ten Suggestions” by Patricia A. Dunn, I was struck by the similarities between the two articles. Dunn “challenges us to think about disability as socially constructed: that many barriers encountered by people with disabilities are not the ‘fault’ of their disability per se, but are rather a result of the ways they’re treated in society” (Dunn 14). Triplett’s case study demonstrates that we can conceptualize struggling readers in a similar manner. Literacy thus becomes a socially constructed phenomenon that is not the sole responsibility of the students, parents, or teacher, but rather the result of the interactions between these different social frameworks.

Thinking of literacy in this way really made me consider what a teacher can do to shape and manipulate the social environment of his or her classroom. Although Mitchell, the student from Triplett’s article, states that he enjoys classes when teachers appear to like what the are teaching, I do not think that just enjoying one’s subject matter is enough. Teachers need to actively foster an educational environment that accommodates all students. But how does one accomplish this task? Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer to that question. Part of me wants to say that educators must employ the Principles of Universal Design, get to know their students personally, and consistently validate and incorporate students’ funds of knowledge into the curriculum. However, I realize that saying is easier than implementing. These three teaching principles seem to be, in some incarnation or another, the solution for everything.

Although achieving a classroom that incorporates all these elements may be difficult, I think that the readings don’t indicate that educators need to be successful in all these respects. My take away is that, regardless of how this is accomplished, teachers have a duty to shift a student away from a negative perception of his or her abilities to be a student.  Perhaps Mitchell is right: if teachers construct a positive space for learning, then the finer points will follow.

Curb Cuts and Ramps

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Having read the Dunn article I just wanted to comment briefly on the idea of using technologies designed to make life easier for those with disabilities to benefit all students in the classroom.  The example of curb cuts and ramps being put in place in more and more locations in order to accommodate those using wheelchairs proved to be very enlightening.  It seems fairly mundane but one rarely considers that these changes put in place for those with disabilities have easily benefited everyone, from mothers with strollers to teenagers on skateboards.

It seems logical that disability technologies could be used in a similar way in the classroom, to both accommodate and involve students with disabilities and at the same time to benefit the learning of all students.  These technologies such as voice recognition technology and audio texts can accommodate disabled students while also widening the learned literacy of all students.  These technologies also force teachers to widen their view of what is considered reading and writing as well as what is considered student competency and achievement.  When teachers widen their views they are much more able to work towards the recognition and improvement of the abilities of all students.

Reading Response to Ray

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I think it was a few class sessions ago that we discussed what it means to read critically and how teachers should go about teaching students to do that. The complexity of these seemingly simple questions really puzzled me and left me thinking for quite some time afterward. For this reason, I found Ray’s piece on inquiry-based teaching really thought-provoking. I was at first somewhat reluctant to accept Ray’s notion of the efficacy of this method of teaching/learning. I thought it was a little bit risky as a pedagogical strategy and too loosely structured for comfort. But having gone through all of Ray’s explications and illustrations–as well as Skinner’s own model of inquiry-based learning in conjunction with critical media literacy strategies–of the ways that inquiry-based teaching can and does work in the classroom, I became convinced of the method’s power to help students learn critical reading and writing skills.
I was particularly drawn to Ray’s emphasis on immersion within well-written, real-world texts that, after all, are from and are representative of texts from the real world. Often times students encounter in the classroom oversimplified writing samples and models that have no resemblance to good, quality writing. Even the academic writing that college students encounter have no resemblance to the sort of writing that they are taught to learn as young students. Letting students figure out, roughly for themselves, what good writing looks like can be a powerful strategy that encourages deeper levels of examination and critical interrogation in reading. As Ray stresses over and again, students must not merely be taught so they can learn, but instead taught to learn how to learn.
I think there’s a lot of power in letting students learn through immersion. Of course, this method of teaching presents many challenges and risks. Clearly, it is much more difficult to improvise a lesson than come to class prepared with one. Furthermore, inquiry-based learning places a lot of pressure on the students themselves to be active agents in their own learning. But I think this is what this type of learning is all about: the challenge of and growth that spring from inquiry. If we judge students’ work on what they do correctly and what learning they’ve exhibited in their work, rather than on what they fail to do or include in their writing, teaching through inquiry can be an empowering strategy for both students and teachers alike.
What I found initially troubling was this idea that the curriculum is to be generated with the students and not all planned out beforehand. But what’s really poignant about this exercise is that teachers will gain instructional expertise from it, and content expertise will necessarily follow. No teacher can be an expert in everything s/he teaches, but any teacher can become an expert in teaching students how to learn. As Ray suggests, I believe that the key to critical reading, writing and thinking is rooted in this idea that process is infinitely more important than product.

Reading the World

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In Emily Skinner’s article “Writing Workshop Meets Critical Media Literacy: Using Magazines and Movies as Mentor Texts,” she writes about Teenage Addiction, an after-school writing club that uses popular media as a spring-board for critical writing projects. Skinner cites Freire and Macedo’s concept of “reading the world” as grounding philosophy for Teenage Addiction. “Reading the world” is described as “reading not only words (and images) in texts, but also critically interpreting the ideologies that underlie the words and images (p. 30). Skinner provides the example of Raquel’s project- looking at fashion magazines in a critical way. I thought this project was great because it harnessed the interest Raquel already had in fashion magazines and helped direct it toward critical thinking and literacy skills.

I think this idea of “reading the world” is really powerful! Showing students the connection between what they are reading, looking at, or watching and the wider world is not only inherently interesting, but also teaches an invaluable life skill. Katie Wood Ray’s article about “Exploring Inquiry as a Teaching Stance in the Writing Workshop” echoes these ideas- encouraging students to constantly ask question and search for hidden meanings in texts. I loved the idea of students writing Op-Eds!

It is incredibly beneficial for students to see the connection between things that they read and the world around them, and both of these articles do a great job of providing examples of how to help students realize the way the word reflects the world. This is important, because it both allows them to understand problems of the world, and allows them to develop the skills they will need to create change. I was reminded of this book by Linda Christensen (a Rethinking Schools publication) which includes essays, lesson ideas, and student writing that help show the connection between language arts and social justice: http://www.rethinkingschools.org/ProdDetails.asp?ID=0942961250