Blog #6: Supporting Diverse Learners

 

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Wow, this week’s readings were so great. I feel like these readings, in some ways for the first time in this initial semester of our licensure program, are delving into the biggest challenges of becoming a “good” teacher: teaching across difference and the relationship between identity and the classroom. These topics are so vital, and so often it is really difficult to make adequate space for these conversations in our daily lives and in our workplaces. I entered this field because I want to be a part of transformative school culture, where students and teachers actually work together to combat the systems of oppression that often guide our school spaces. I believe in the power within communities to work against oppressive schemas and change the tracking that occurs, but it takes real engagement with one another in a way that can feel uncomfortable and, especially for those of marginalized identities, can be unsafe unless we are careful and intentional about making everyone a part of the process of preparing that sharing space. I am very interested in what it would look like to co-create schools where engaging with our issues of identity is an integral part of our community. I believe that this is a strength of some of the most successful schools.

I appreciate Lenters’ assertion that ongoing literacy instruction, choice of text, and respect for students’ “out-of-school literacy” can help our students remain engaged in the effort to improve literacy. As she notes, interest and identity are vital to students ownership of their learning. Students who enjoy school time will be more motivated – they will enjoy school time more if they feel their teachers actually know them. Students need to be able to see themselves in the physical parts of school – in the books, in the classrooms, in the mirror the teacher is holding up for them as they teach about society and how it works.  If the mirror a teacher holds up for students reflects whiteness & dominant culture, how does that affect students’ ability & desire to learn – both for white and non-white students? How does lumping students together into groups without context affect their ability to feel they belong to the community? How will we honor different Discourses, ways of speaking, acting, and behaving in the world, as equal to and not less than the dominant Discourse?

Recognizing and celebrating our students’ differences is an important step, but part of that process has to be about our own self-reflections on who we are, and what we bring to the classroom as the teacher. I am an individual who is situated within a culture, a context and a history. It’s going to be very different for me as a White woman to teach James Baldwin & Ralph Ellison texts than it is going to be for a Black woman, or a Hmong-American man. So this part of the process of understanding identity is for me to do on my own, and with allies in my learning process, before I get into the classroom and to continue to do as I engage with students. I think it’s also helpful, once the skills have been learned and practiced, for the classroom to be a space for honesty and dialogue about racial and cultural differences, and the differences between individual beliefs, stereotypes, cultural expectations, and prejudices. Every teacher has to decide where they are at in their process, but I think everyone has the responsibility as a member of our vastly diverse world to be a steward to our students in helping them learn to have these conversations respectfully and responsibly. We can be powerful models for our students, and they can be powerful models for us as well.

To tie this back to reading in the content areas more specifically, a phrase in the Alvermann chapter caught my eye: we as teachers will be “cultural brokers,” who, like journalists and news anchors, both set and disseminate the “power code.” The “power code” is the accepted & necessary language with which we access power through education, work, and navigating the dominant culture. Our students need this information to “succeed” in the dominant culture. But I think this week’s readings are pointing out that the “power code” is definitely not the only code our students need to be successful, to feel grounded in themselves and in their community, and to feel that they belong to something greater than themselves that is worth working for. Teaching the “power code” isn’t enough – our students deserve more than that, and we do too.

Blog #5: Assessment

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Working with standardized testing is one of the things I perceive will be a big challenge for me as I begin my teaching career. While I understand the necessity and even productivity of assessing students in school, our readings this week confirmed my belief that standardized tests are often not the best way to assess a student’s reading proficiency and comprehension. I learned a lot this week about assessment, including:

--Thinking about the term “differentiation” as it applies to reading level, and learning the terms “frustration level,”  “instructional level,” and independent level”

--A reminder that levels aren’t an absolute indicator of a text’s difficulty, or a student’s ability

--Considering the value of assessing reading subskills to get a deeper sense of student’s ability, and respond as their teacher accordingly

--Types of IRIs including CRIs and cloze procedures

Before doing these assessment-oriented readings, my thoughts regarding “testing” were mostly negative: worry, discomfort, confusion, even fear. However, after learning about the different assessment possibilities in the course materials, I feel a lot more prepared to engage with testing. I have an awareness about ways in which I can assess my students’ reading levels, and use those results to create activities that fall within their Zone of Proximal Development. I understand better that tests don’t have to look like “tests,” if that makes sense. There can be differentiation, individualization, and a structure that uses testing to really improve classroom learning.

I will be honest that I still feel wary of standardized testing, and worried about how to engage with that topic in a positive way as I begin my first teaching job at a new school, with new colleagues, superiors, and parents to contend with. Standardized testing is a hot button issue in our society. People have a lot of strong opinions about it, including me. And yet, I will be responsible for administering these tests to my students. How can I live my values in this complicated situation?

Blog #4: Reading Fluency

Hudson, Lane, & Pullen contend that fluent reading is comprised of 3 elements: "accurate reading of a connected text at a conversational rate with appropriate prosody or expression” (Hudson, Lane, & Pullen 2005, p. 702). The word "prosody" is new for me, and is described as the music of oral language (Hudson, Lane, & Pullen 2005, p. 704). It's a really cool concept that I certainly identify with as someone who has done theater and vocal performance. It embodies an intuitive sense that words have a "feel" to them depending on the surrounding context, and that meaning can be better communicated and understood when prosody is fluent. According to this article, there are several ways to increase reading fluency. Teachers should:

--Model fluent oral reading

--Direct instruction of fluent reading skills

--Provide materials for independent reading

--Repeated readings of progressively difficult text

--Cue phrase boundaries (foster prosody)

When I look at this list of ways to actively encourage reading fluency in students, I think back to the examples of this in my own learning as a child. The image that immediately came to mind for me is laying in bed while my father read "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain. I was read to throughout my childhood on a daily basis. When I recall instances of reading in our house, I don't remember feeling these moments were prescriptive, pedagogical, or even planned -- reading was an enjoyable part of daily life for my parents, my sister and I. My parents modeled this behavior on their own by reading novels, nonfiction books, and the newspaper. They read to us daily and it was ingrained as an enjoyable way to spend time together. This is still present in my life, even though I don't have kids yet. My partner and I often take the time to read aloud to each other for fun (we're currently back to an old favorite, Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone). Reading has always been a part of my life -- it's even a part of my ancestry & my heritage.

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I bring this personal story to the blog because I think it displays the incredible privilege I have experienced to be descended from readers. This has always made reading enjoyable and easy for me in many ways. However, I think it also points to the fact that from a young age, I developed reading fluency -- reading is, in a sense, a "native language" for me. Many students do not grow up with reading as an ingrained, natural part of their experience of language, and this is an extremely important thing for me to remember as a teacher of "reading privilege." It's certainly not as easy to learn a second language as it is a first one, and I think those of us with "reading privilege" don't take into account what it truly means to learn this "second" language in a purposeful context. It's why we need to focus on strategies to truly transform students' reading fluency, instead of assuming that this is a skill that will eventually come naturally to all.

Blog #3: Vocabulary & Academic Language

If I were to ask you to conjure up an image of a "Francophile," what would pop into your mind? Let me give you a second... Great. Is it a mustachio'd man wearing a beret and a striped boatneck, "J'aime Paris" bag with a baguette sticking out of it on his shoulder, in front of the Eiffel Tower coming to mind? Let's try this again with the term "logophile," a lover of words. What image comes up now? Is it a white four-eyed librarian hunched over a stack of books, looking at a dictionary with a magnifying glass?

I think many students assume that someone who loves words is their stereotype of a "smart nerd." Just like people's assumption of a Francophile, there is a specific set of characteristics that people assume are needed to love something. I am a Francophile who doesn't know much about Paris and has a comparatively deep knowledge base about other Francophone parts of the world. Similarly, students wouldn't necessarily think of Jay-Z as a typical logophile, when in reality the first step of becoming a rapper is being vocabulary-obsessed.

The logophile himself. Image from www.socialarchiteks.com

I hope you'll excuse my extended metaphor, and I hope it helps to elucidate my belief that helping students learn to love words is really about helping them see themselves as word-lovers, despite their preconceived notion of a logophile.  The goal of Graves' "balanced strategies" approach to vocabulary instruction is that students “receive detailed knowledge about the [learning] strategies, they learn how to actually use them, and they learn when to use them” (Graves 2006, p. 93). But even more importantly, students need the space to develop a curiosity about words and how they work. Once the motivation is in place, a balanced strategies approach can help them stick with word learning and even make it fun. I think Graves would refer to this as adopting a personal approach to reading unknown words -- the experience of choosing a strategy to learn a new word, and learning it yourself (Graves 2006, p. 92).

In reading our assignments for this topic, I was especially interested to think about the concept of "adopting a personal approach" when applied to the challenge of teaching ESL students unknown words. For ESL learners, a new word is a completely new concept without an attached label to guide their understanding (Graves 2006, p. 83). It's even easier for ESL learners to "tune out" from new vocabulary if they aren't able to make a personal connection to the classroom learning that  is occurring. Graves outlines his idea that for ESL learners, word strategies are even more pertinent and vital to vocabulary acquisition. Using class time to focus on strategies so that students can engage themselves in the learning of unknown words gives them the ability to foster their own future learning, and ultimately to feel excited about trying new vocabulary because they know they have the tools to acquire it.


Source:
Graves, Michael. (2006) The Vocabulary Book: Learning and Instruction. New York, New York: Teachers College Press.