Half Way to Real Teacher-hood: Where I'm Headed

So, taking into consideration all of the questions--both theoretical and practical, both general to education and specific to my own placement and practice; what I've written about in my final reflections for various courses at Pitt and what I've written in my blog along the way--I'm looking ahead to my semester of full-time student-teaching and trying to take into consideration what I've learned from my experiences thus far.

All I know for sure is that I'll start teaching lessons regularly around the middle of January, right after students finish a unit on symbolism and Romanticism using The Scarlet Letter. The content I need to cover is as follows:

1.) A unit on Naturalism, with Ethan Frome as the central text.
2.) A unit on PSSA/SAT/AP test prep with The Great Gatsby as the central text.
3.) A research-paper writing unit in which students write the first draft of their senior research paper. The paper must be 8-10 pages, and should be on a "hot topic" in students' field.
4.) A unit on McCarthyism/Cold War Literature using The Crucible as the central text.
5.) A unit focused on A Separate Peace
6.) Students should be using the critical lenses that we've learned so far (Psychoanalytic, Marxist, Feminist, Architypical) and should learn more (Formalist, New Historicist).
7.) Students have a vocabulary goal for the end of the year, so I need to incorporate frequent lessons building student vocabulary and vocabulary decoding skills.
8.) In my Reading Improvement class, I hope to introduce weekly "book talks" to help them with their independent reading book reports for next semester.

I'm working on ways to do these units creatively and well, but it's not as easy as one might think. Right now, I'm using winter break (what remains of it) to re-read the books I'll be using as central unit texts (The Scarlet Letter, Ethan Frome, The Great Gatsby, The Crucible, and A Separate Peace). I'm really looking to think about critical lenses, as well as the vocabulary goals the students have, in planning each unit I'll be teaching, but I'm not sure exactly how to approach that, and what other texts I can bring in with each novel--probably only about two short stories/poems that are thematically related to the book topics, or are related as far as the time in which they were written.

For Ethan Frome, I think I want students to be thinking about the critical lenses they've learned so far (Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism), but I also want to introduce them to Formalism and New Historicism. And though I think a Marxist of Feminist reading would fit well with the book, the resource I have provides materials/scaffolds only for Formalist, Feminist, and Mythological/Archetypical readings. I really wanted my students to think about labor, isolation, and modernity, and I was thinking of pairing it with Tillie Olson's "I Want you Women up North to Know," so students could see the labor behind modernization, and so they could read some American lit that represents a part of America other than that North of Pennsylvania (so far they've been pretty stuck in New England, and that won't be changing much in the upcoming semester). Although the time periods are different, it touches (perhaps, though perhaps I'm wrong...) on similar themes.

I was also thinking of pairing it with "The Yellow Wallpaper," a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman that was published closer to the same time as Ethan Frome and deals with some of the same themes of women and psychology or medicine. In "The Yellow Wallpaper," a women who apparently suffers from something akin to postpartum depression and is being subjected to the "rest cure" for "hysterical" women. It would be a good place to introduce students to the idea of hysteria, popular attitudes towards middle-class and upper-class women at the turn of the twentieth century, and the emphasis on the passivity of women; I might also use clips from Sweeney Todd, to show students a more modern interpretation to early-twentieth-century attitudes towards women/"madness." (The latter text has only just occurred to me, and, so, requires some more thought). Of course, which direction I go with the text/its fellow texts depends on what my goal for the unit is, and I suppose a student investigation of social class and modernity might wait until they're reading Gatsby, so an investigation of early-twentieth-century understandings of women and illness might be better suited for this text. Perhaps I can focus students on a feminist reading and hold off on other critical lenses until we read other texts?

As far as Gatsby is concerned, I'm sort of at a loss as to the direction I might take it. We're using the book and the accompanying resources in which the school district has invested to prepare students for the PSSA's and, in my case, the SAT's and the AP test. This means a heavy emphasis on using PSSA-modeled assessments. I'm frustrated by this, but I think I have a plan of attack. The materials we have provide PSSA-modeled assessments for each chapter, and a final assessment that is 100 questions long that students are to go through at the end of the book. My plan--if my MT agrees to it, of course--is to administer the first two chapter tests early (after students have read the first 2 chapters, of course), find the skills that students are not doing well with--vocabulary, inferences, etc--and teach lessons on those skills separately, test students intermittently, tracking their progress on each of the skills I'm targeting, and see how they improve. Then, I'll see if those improvements are reflected on the final assessment. I'm sure I can come up with some fun non-PSSA-test-question activities to help students build skills in decoding vocabulary, characterization, inferences, etc. I'd also like to have a unit focus other than "test prep," and I'd like to have students thinking about social class in a book that I think it's super important to deal with, but we'll see what happens with that...

For A Separate Peace, I won't be introducing the book, another teacher in the department will be introducing students to the text, so I'll have to be somewhat flexible, but I really want students to think about masculinity. Since we'll have spent so much time talking about Feminism and how women are depicted in American lit, it will be important and refreshing, I think, to investigate how men/boys are depicted and what social expectations for boys/men are/were. Not sure what texts to pair with this one yet...

As far as The Crucible, I haven't finished the play yet (I know, it's crazy that I've gone this long without reading it), but the resources I have for critical lenses suggest Feminist, Psychoanalytic, and Mythological/Archetypical (the same lenses they suggest for reading The Scarlet Letter, incidentally), and my MT says she typically reads the text allegorically, to think about McCarthyism. So I hope to do something fun with that. It's much later in the semester, and I probably won't be teaching it, so I haven't given it much thought yet.

What I'm really excited about is the role I'll get to play in students' research papers. They have no assigned topic except that they must research "a hot topic in their field," which I don't know that I care for, since, at 16, I didn't know what my "field" would be with any certainty, but I think it's meant to link to their senior projects. Anyways, I have tons of ideas for this unit (I wish I could just skip over Ethan Frome and just get students started on research right away!), but I'm still not sure about the cohesion of it all. I want to use the writing workshop type model, start students off journaling about possible topics, working with partners or small groups to select a topic, do research, compile a preliminary list of outside sources they might wish to use, which they'll turn in to me so I can guide their research to credible sources (I'll have a lesson, or at least a mini-lesson on distinguishing credible sources). Then I'll ask students to come up with some sort of organizational structure--sub-sections, an outline, an abstract, or something--then a rough draft which they'll peer-review in pairs or small groups, at which point I really want to hold individual writing conferences, and then a final draft. I'm still shaky on how well all of these steps will go, how much I'll have to prepare students for each step, etc, but I'm really excited to get started with it.

As for the vocabulary goal, I want to touch on it frequently--maybe weekly?--because I think it isn't separate from the unit goals I have for the books/texts students will be working with. I plan to start out by pulling vocabulary words that I think students will need to know from Ethan Frome, then asking students what the words mean, and going through the steps of determining the definition [prefixes, suffixes, roots, context clues, and, finally, if all else fails, the OED (Oxford English dictionary)], but I don't want to be the one continually responsible for finding the vocabulary words. I think it would be far more authentic if students brought in words they didn't know and talked us through how they determined the definitions. I want to make sure students actually do this, though, so I'll have to come up with some sort of accountability measure--points, a grade, etc--and I'll also have to pick out words for each chapter, as well, so that if students don't touch on a word, I can see if it's because they already know the word, or because they couldn't easily find the meaning, or just because they didn't get to it. I'm wondering how to do this most effectively--each student assigned a chapter? All students must find at least 1 or 2 words a chapter? Groups of students for each section?--but I think it'll be a good, unit-goal-related, effective strategy for teaching vocab (better than a worksheet, at least).

And as for the Reading Improvement students who I've hardly interacted with this semester (because my MT doesn't think they'll respond well to me, since they've bonded with her), I'll be starting out by introducing book talks. I plan on giving the first one, maybe asking my MT to give one, but I really want students to be center stage for this activity. This may not be easy, because the students have an independent reading assignment each 1/2 of the year, and many students didn't do their independent reading, or waited until the last possible minute to do it. Now, the students are struggling readers, so that certainly plays a part. But I know they read--we all do, in today's society, in one way or another. I just have to figure out how to get them talking about their reading.

I was thinking about starting out by giving a book talk about Maus or some graphic novel, so I can get students thinking about alternative texts and keep them from getting stuck in the "school reading" mindset. I don't know if I want to open up the option to talk about movies, in part because I already know they're watching movies, and they can write and talk about movies in other assignments, perhaps, but for the purposes of this activity, I want them thinking about reading written words. However, I was thinking about letting them use songs. I'd ask them to bring a written copy of the lyrics for me and all their peers, and then I'd let them play it (songs would have to be school-appropriate, of course) and talk about why they like it. I'd use this as a first step to getting them talking about texts they read and that are important to them, but then I'd ask them to also talk about books specifically in later book talks, I think--mainly because they can't do their independent reading book report on a movie or a song, but can do it on a literary book, YA book, or graphic novel.

Anyways, these are the ideas I'm working with for my upcoming units. If anyone has suggestions for how to teach vocab, test prep, or research skills effectively, or ideas for unit foci for the various books I'll be teaching, or ideas for texts that would pair well with these books, I'd really love to hear your ideas. If I've said anything that I want to try that you think absolutely WON'T work, I'd love to hear that, too, before I try it and it blows up in my face.

I think there will be a shift in my blog posts at this point. I'll still talk about theory and pedagogy, I imagine, but I'll also be a lot more concerned with my practice, how to make lessons/units work, how to adjust when they don't work, etc.

Half Way to Real Teacher-hood: Where I've Been

I suppose I've been neglecting this blog of late, but that's not to say that I've been doing any less reflecting on teaching, theory, practice, etc. (See the last three blog posts, which are final reflections for various classes I've been taking this semester). However, I wanted to take this opportunity to look back on the last semester, summarize what I've done in my placement, and think ahead to what I'll be asked to do starting in January.

The first lesson I taught was one meant to open a unit on the Enlightenment. I asked students to do something of a think-pair-share to brainstorm ideas they had about what the Enlightenment was, and what factors in American society led up to the Enlightenment. From this lesson, I can see the beginning of a pattern that later emerged in my teaching lab, when I planned lessons for my peers. I LOVE think-pair-share. Even without intending to, I've noticed that I frequently model a large portion of my lessons around this pattern. For those of you who don't know, think-pair-share activities involve students first thinking about the answer to a problem, a question, or knowledge they have about a subject, character, author, or book. They first think/write individually on the topic, then share what they've written with a partner or small group, then we have a whole-class discussion, that can either function as something of a debate/discussion, or might be a place to accumulate the knowledge of all groups and appropriate it as class knowledge. This sequence of activities seems really natural to me and, as I've said, frequently finds its way into my lesson plans.

That said, I need to also really focus on ensuring that this model fits my lesson well. For example, for the activity I did with students about the Enlightenment, it may not be the best model. I relied on student comfort and ease at recalling knowledge related to the Enlightenment without sufficiently front loading them--as the video I took of my enactment of the lesson makes clear, there were many students who weren't sure about what/when the Enlightenment actually was; I asked them to hypothesize what social forces might be at work during the Enlightenment based on what they'd read about the Puritans and what they knew about the founding fathers and the American Revolution, but I still feel there may have been a better way to familiarize students with Enlightenment thought (probably something like the activities I did to introduce Literary Criticism/critical lenses to students, which I'll get to shortly)

The next couple of lessons I taught were introducing and facilitating a paper students wrote around the idea of social contracts. Students had generally studied social contract theory and had examined the Declaration of Independence as an example of a social contract, which they had briefly contrasted with the social contract theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. For this unit, I designed the writing prompts students used to compose their own social contracts. I (attempted to) differentiate(d) the prompts, so students had the option to engage more closely with the texts/thinkers we'd examined in class, write about their school community, or write about their own personal beliefs about society more creatively. I also was able to work with my MT to design a rubric, co-design a grammar lesson to help students enhance their writing quality and sentence complexity, and plan and enact a peer revision lesson in which I modeled the type of feedback we expected students to give one another and then gave them a clearly guided worksheet to help modeled after the rubric to focus their feedback on the aspects of the papers that would be graded for.

I felt really good about my involvement in this unit. I prepared students for the activity by asking them to imagine the types of protections, rights, and restrictions they felt were most important for the welfare of society and that they would enact if they were in charge of designing the social contract by which society was governed. Interestingly, though I intended this activity to be something of a process drama, it ended up falling into the think-pair-share model as well. I then introduced students to the three options that they had for their writing project.

From this unit, I learned that (at least in my estimation) I have a particular talent for designing and facilitating student writing projects. I had a lot of fun writing the prompts, working with my MT to design the rubric and working on student writing by introducing complex sentences and peer revision. I would love to work with student writing much more (and I'll get the chance to, since I'm in charge of students' research paper unit, which I'll describe in greater detail later). I feel like this is the area I'm most comfortable (probably due to my special proclivity for writing, and my experience at the Penn State writing center) and where I sense the most possibilities for creative instruction.

I did learn some things, though, that I think will inform my future writing instruction. I actually used this unit, and the peer revision lesson in particular, for my teaching writing class, where I showed a clip of my modeling activity (I modeled the type of feedback I expected to see students giving to one another with a paragraph I quickly wrote up and commented on) and got some feedback about how I could improve the lesson/unit/student writing generally. After spending some time thinking about it and the advice of my peers, I think I would expand the time I spent introducing the prompts to students, spending several minutes introducing each option and leaving plenty of time for student questions, and perhaps even assigning an exit ticket that asks students to write a summary of what they think they might write in response to the assignment, and asks them to write any questions they have about the assignment.

I would also check in with (formatively assess) students more frequently and more fully --for this unit, I checked in half way through the process to ensure they had a rough draft, but I only checked for completion, I didn't read over the drafts in enough detail, so some student responses to the prompt were off topic and didn't reflect the student learning re: social contracts that they were meant to. Furthermore, I want to work with student participation in peer revision sessions more, so that I can help students be better readers of each others' compositions; I want students to be able to catch a peer's off-topic paper before it's turned in, for instance, which didn't happen this time.

The final unit in which I participated heavily was one on critical lenses/literary criticism. I introduced students to the concept of literary criticism via a PowerPoint presentation, and then had students work in groups to jigsaw psychoanalytic literary theory and marxist literary theory, as applied to Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" and Emerson's "Self Reliance." The way it worked (for those of you who aren't familiar with jigsaw, especially) was that students were divided up into groups (2 groups in my smaller classes, 4 in my large class) and one group (or two, in the case of my large 8th period class) viewed and took notes on a presentation about marxist literary theory, then completed a worksheet that guided students through a marxist reading of "Civil Disobedience," in which students determined whether or not Thoreau's disobedience constituted a Marxist-style revolution. They viewed the presentation one day, took notes on the theory, and came up with the essential vocabulary and key tenants of the theory, and the next day they worked with their group members to go through the "Civil Disobedience" worksheet. The other group(s) viewed a presentation on psychoanalytic literary theory one day and completed a worksheet that guided them through a psychoanalytic reading of "Self Reliance," which asked the students to assign an aspect of Freud's model of personality (ego, superego, id) to the author of the text and use quotes from the text to justify their reading. Then, each student was paired up with a partner from another group, so that they taught their partner about their theory. In this way, students learned about one theory as part of a group, then were introduced to the other theory by a student from the other group, so all students were introduced to both theories.

In the end, I feel really good about this lesson; my expertise was valuable, because I went from group to group to field questions, clarify points about the theories, question students' readings of the texts they were dealing with, etc. However, students were the ones responsible for guiding their own learning. It was a really student-centered few lessons, and I feel like students worked much harder to understand the theories than they would have if they hadn't been responsible for teaching them to a peer later. I'd like to use jigsaw-like activities more in the future, and I'd like to keep using literary criticism, and introduce students to feminist, new historical, formalist, and post-colonial theories in the future as well, with similar types of activities. I was so impressed with the sophisticated readings of texts that the activities produced.

So I think, all in all, looking back on what I've done with my classes this semester, I've got some really strong material to work with for next semester. It promises to be really tough, though, because obviously I haven't been prepared for every type of lesson or assignment I might have to assign or teach, so, though I've learned a lot from where I've been, there's still a lot to think about with regard to where I'm headed this upcoming semester But, based on the sheer length of this entry, I'm going to save the details of my upcoming semester, ideas, challenges, and questions for another post. We'll see what the future holds; I'm nervous and terrified, but also excited and really looking forward to learning a lot!

Final Reflection for my Lesson Planning Class

Over the course of the semester, the difficulties and complexities of lesson planning and enactment have become much plainer to me. I feel as though I’ve learned a great deal about myself as a teacher-to-be through planning lessons for books on a variety of levels.

Mainly, this class revealed to me that being a good teacher and achieving learning goals is about more than just planning strong or thoughtful lessons. Although some of my lessons could have been more fully planned, I feel that planning is one of my strong suits. However, enacting a plan is much more challenging. It’s not like writing and then presenting a speech; lesson planning and enacting is so much more difficult, because a plan has to be detailed enough that every minute is used purposefully, but it must also be flexible because student engagement is critical to learning, and you can’t plan for what students are going to say, what questions they’re going to have, etc.

Even so, I feel that the most well-planned lesson I taught this semester was my Kite Runner lesson. I designed handouts and carefully selected graphic organizers that would focus on student thinking about the book. Perhaps the reason I planned this lesson so well was that I was so interested in the book and was fairly excited about the unit focus we’d selected, though most of my peers took it in a different direction than I had imagined. I saw the unit as an examination of the ways the personal and the political worked together in the lives of the characters in the book, but most of the “external conflicts” we talked about were just interpersonal conflicts. I don’t know if this discrepancy was due to my failure to understand exactly what the unit goal had been, or just my different way of interpreting it, or if the unit focus we selected wasn’t clear enough to guide the lessons. Regardless, I think if I were teaching the book/unit in a real classroom, I would do more to draw students’ attention to the political as well as the personal influences that shape each character’s behavior, and perhaps have students think about the ways personal and political conflicts drive their lives.

I think that my two weakest lessons were my Out of the Dust and my The Glory Field lessons. Again, this may be because I was less enthusiastic about the texts and unit foci, or because I was less knowledgeable about the cognitive abilities of the students who would be reading this book—namely junior high students. I never enacted my Glory Field lesson, but I think I would like to re-do my Out of the Dust lesson and perhaps provide a little bit more direction. I was trying to approach the unit focus, looking at place in writing, while being true to the content of my section, which focused more on people. I tried to draw students’ attention to the ways in which objects or symbols in the spaces in the book stood in for people, but I think I did a poor job of explaining this. If I were to go back, I think I would spend more time modeling what I was trying to get at, as several of my peers suggested after viewing the lesson.

I suppose these lessons exemplify what my weaknesses in planning were at the beginning of the semester, because I was really uncomfortable modeling or spending extended periods of time talking. I feel like students should be doing as much of the thinking and talking as possible in a lesson, but it’s hard for me to remember that students, especially middle school students, would need some guidance—they need me to direct their thinking in some ways, and to show them what the type of thinking I’m looking for might look like. I understand the importance of giving additional guidance now, but I still struggle with how much and how frequent that guidance should be. This is because what I see as my greatest weakness in lesson planning now is continual formative assessment. I always have students working on something—usually working in groups, completing worksheets that guide their thinking about the question at hand, or just responding to questions, but how do I collect data about student learning, as the teacher, throughout the lesson?

It was good for me to see how my peers worked out some of these problems themselves, too. As I mentioned, they often interpreted unit foci differently than I did, so it was worthwhile to see the range of possibilities available to me. But what was perhaps more helpful was the opportunity to see the ways some of my peers, who do work with younger student, took up the tasks of planning for the books aimed at younger students. One of my peers in particular seems to me like she will be really good at engaging her 9th graders in ways I would struggle with. Her bingo game, for example, was a great tool to use to motivate younger students, and to formatively assess their understanding of literary concepts. And although I think One of my peers’ visualization activity could have been better executed, the idea of a visual representation of a reading was a really interesting one, and one that could help me track students’ understandings of the passages they’re reading, while they thought about their understandings as well.

Also, reading Peter Smagorinsky was, of course, a really useful guide in unit planning. The type of conceptual units he describes, and the process for planning them, was really a challenging one to work with throughout the semester, but any time I was stuck trying to plan a lesson, I thought back to “okay, what’s their unit assessment going to be? And how can I prepare them for that? And what activities can I do to support that learning?” and while I wasn’t always successful, and it didn’t always make the lesson planning any easier, it did make it more purposeful and thoughtful.

Because I was able to return to Smagorinsky when planning my lessons, I think that typically I was successful in planning lesson sequences that supported learning goals. Whether the ways the lessons actually played out actually supported the learning goals was a different story. Sometimes an activity that seemed so structured in my head—like having students compare groups in TKR and think about the conflicts between the groups—didn’t play out that way in the lesson, probably because, given the slightly different direction of my unit focus from my peers’, I didn’t adequately activate students’ prior knowledge—they weren’t primed to think in the way I was asking them to think. This is why I’ve come to think that the “thinking through a lesson” portion of the Pitt lesson plan can be useful, though I’m not always able to anticipate the difficulties that students would have (as in the case of TKR). But, to work on this, I need to work on formative assessment, so I’m always checking in to see if student learning is happening as planned and, if not, adjusting my instruction to ensure that it does.


1.) I think that my greatest strengths as far as lesson planning are, as I mentioned, coming up with activities that are meant to specifically support the learning goals I set for the lesson. In my TKR lesson, I directed student thinking to the conflicts at play in the novel. In my Out of the Dust lesson, having students look through the text for specific objects that related to characters worked well to direct their thinking about people and place early in the text. And in my Curious Incident lesson, guiding students to examine representations of normalcy in the media and then compare and contrast them with the text worked well to prepare students to think critically about representations of normalcy. Each of these lesson sequences could have been more perfectly executed, but the plan, I think, was well-suited to the goals I’d set.

2.) However, with regard to areas in which I still need to grow, two come to mind. The first is in my ability to come up with motivating activity. I almost always start students out with a quick write, which I think can sometimes be motivating, but when done over and over again, can probably become routine, thoughtless, and dull. So I need to work on motivating activities, which I really struggle with. The other area in which I can continue to grow is formative assessment. It’s not enough to collect exit tickets at the end of class to see if students “get it.” I need to have spaces in my lesson where I can reliably check for understanding and monitor student learning, and students can be made aware of their own learning, as well.

3.) If I had to select only two goals for my development in planning lessons for the Spring, they would be, I suppose, to come up with a greater variety of ways to get students situated in English class than just doing quick writes, and to create a space and a means for formative assessment to happen throughout my lessons rather than just at the end of class.

Philosophy of Writing Instruction

Here is the link to a screencast presentation of my philosophy of writing instruction.

These are the sources from which I used in presenting my philosophy of writing:

Graham, S., & Perin, D. (2007). Writing Next: effective strategies to improve writing of adolescents in middle and high school. Carnegie Corporation of New York.
This report details the author's meta-analysis of writing research, isolating 11 research-backed practices that, if used in middle and high school classrooms, have been shown to improve student writing.

Kittle, P. (2008). Write beside them: risk, voice, and clarity in high school writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Ms. Kittle describes the ways in which she has used writing workshops in her classroom. She details each step in the writing process, and the way she models the process for student by "writ[ing] beside them," demonstrating the steps a writer goes through in crafting a piece. She also talks about her use of published works as models of PRODUCT, vs. her modeling of PROCESS. She also details the importance of transparency in writing instruction, explaining why each step is important for her writing instruction.

Murphy, C., & Sherwood, S. (2008). The St. Martin's sourcebook for writing tutors (3rd ed.). Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's.
A handbook for peer tutors in a University writing center. This book focuses on inquiry-based peer revision sessions in which students working on their writing cite their own areas of strength and weakness and guide the peer revision session as much as possible. Tutors use questions rather than statements to guide writers to consider specific effects and points in their work.

Smagorinsky, P., Johannessen, L., Kahn, E., & McCann, T. (2010). The dynamics of writing instruction: a structured process approach for middle and high school. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Smagorinsky and colleagues explain possible ways to teach various common genres of school writing in effective ways that focus on a "structured process approach," in which students are able to develop their own writing through their own writing style, but have the necessary scaffolding to do so successfully.

Final Reflection for my Course on Litearature and Media

Question: How do we reflect on our practices as critical educators of literature, language, and media?

Reflection: Over the course of the semester, we’ve been bombarded with mental stimuli from all directions, and we’ve been asked to reflect on the practices and genres we’ve been learning about as we’ve been learning, and to reflect on the feedback we’ve been receiving as we’ve been receiving it. In Lit and Media in particular, we’ve been learning briefly about tons of potential literacy practices and genres of media, and we’ve been reflecting on how we might teach them or use them in our own classrooms. However, the question of how we reflect on our practices is one that perhaps hasn’t been sufficiently addressed. Given the frequency with which we’re asked to reflect on our practices, the question of how best to do that merits some consideration.

Deborah Appleman (2010) described the process she went through when reflecting on her role as a reading teacher, so in that sense, she might serve as a model. When we read her text at the very beginning of the semester, I thought about what my role as an English teacher might be, and it made sense that teaching students to read—words, pictures, videos, or any number of texts—was most certainly a part of my role; Appleman made perfect sense. However, reflecting on my own practice proves more difficult.

In the “Classroom Connections” activities I completed for this class, I dealt with reflecting on my own practice as well. How had the strategies I implemented met the goals I had set out for them? Where did they fall short? Why did they fulfill the goals they were meant to, or fall short? I suppose these are good beginnings to reflections on my practice, but there’s a missing step, it seems, and it’s one I’ve danced around all semester, we’ve talked about in class to some extent, and I’m only now coming to any sort of an answer to: Why did I set the goals I set for the practice in the first place?

Dealing with this question, I think, is of critical importance, because how we set the goals of our classes is at the heart of our pedagogical identity. If I see my classroom as one in which I train students to be capable employees or prepared college students or master test takers, my instructional goals are going to be very different than if I see my classroom as a space for open inquiry and criticism of the social forces behind the texts we’re studying. My classroom, I hope, will fall into this latter category. But at what level should I stop reflecting?

In the other classes in this program, we read Peter Smagorinsky’s texts about unit planning—setting instructional goals, planning how best to assess those goals, determining learning goals for lessons that will prepare students for their assessment, and planning activities that will meet the learning goals of the lesson, so that students are sufficiently scaffolded to complete their unit assessment successfully. Much of our reflection in Lit and Media--our discussions of different genres or critical lenses, for example—has been on these levels. Some of the texts we’ve read have offered practical suggestions or sample lessons, while others have expounded upon the importance of various genres in the curriculum, the larger social issues the genres can speak to, etc.

When reflecting on our practice, then, should we be focusing on whether our learning goals were aligned with our assessments? Should we be focusing on ensuring that our goals for student learning match up with the pedagogies/ideologies we’ve established about the role of English Education in student lives, in our school communities, or in society at large? Or should we be reflecting on the validity of the pedagogy/ideology that guides our classroom, critically examining the assumptions we make every day about our students, our discipline, our world, and ourselves?

Like so many other questions we’ve raised this semester, I don’t claim to have a final answer to this question. As I’ve mentioned, the authors we’ve read this semester have dealt, really, with all of these levels of reflection, and I’m sure that each of them is important. But trying to balance all of them, reflect on all of them at any given time, at least at this stage in our teaching careers, can be totally overwhelming, at least for me. So is there a balance to be struck? I think that, most likely, this balance varies from educator to educator, from classroom to classroom, and from year to year and even day to day. But I also know that only once I started thinking about my role, my goals as an educator, I became more engaged and more motivated. Once I began reflecting on my own motives and reasons for the goals I’ve set as an educator and the role I see myself playing, I became excited again about the empowering possibilities of literacies, and that level of reflection motivated me when reflecting on my success or failure at managing behavior in a classroom or aligning formative assessments with learning goals had me totally bogged down.

And our inquiry discussions in class, at times, have addressed these questions. When we talk about the role of “dangerous” texts like Do The Right Thing, or of “dangerous” topics like violence, sexuality, race, or religion, we’ve been talking around how we see our role as educators, or the role of an English classroom, or the English teacher.

So, how do we reflect on our practices as critical educators of literature, language, and media? Again, I don’t think this class has brought me to a single conclusion, but it has highlighted the importance of reflection on a number of levels. Without “meta-reflection,” reflection on the ideology/ies behind the rationales, though, I think something is missing. It is at this level that I ought to begin, I think, to understand why I set the unit goals, or lesson-level learning goals that I set, or why I select the genres or texts that I select. This level of awareness will, if I can maintain it, make me a more responsible, and more accountable educator, and for this reason, this level of reflection is a necessary step in my reflection on my practice.