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.

The Role of the English Teacher and Literac(y/ies) Education

What is an English Teacher? What should (s)he be?

As far as my question about the role of a teacher, I had a couple of conversations with professors, peers, and my mentor teacher in which the idea of student "need" came up. Professor X told us about some of the things that make life unpredictable from year to year--one year, you might have students who work independently and stay on task, for the most part. "Easy" students, generally speaking, to teach. And the following year, you might have a group of students that need a little bit more guidance, scaffolding, or support. This got me thinking about the odd phenomena of student need, and the role of a teacher. Later in the week, my MT (I'm just going to start abbreviating Mentor Teacher as MT because it makes my life much easier. Sorry, this abbreviation probably makes no sense to those of you who aren't pre-service teachers or involved in teacher ed), trying, I think, to be supportive when I perhaps sounded to her like I was doubting myself (who'd ever get the impression that I'd ever do that), said to me of her AP students, "Don't worry, they're good kids. You can't really mess them up." This made me think a minute. I mean, is there a distinction between "bad" kids and "good" kids, "smart" kids and "dumb" kids, students who struggle and those to whom learning comes with a fair degree of ease?

Certainly, all students, of all levels of academic and cognitive ability, all areas of interest, confidence, parental involvement, etc., need good teachers. But I think there's a reason that so few of my peers in my special education class have students in their classes with IEP's. I may be wrong about this--I've done no fact checking whatsoever, and no asking of professors or others in my program--but I suspect that student teachers/interns generally get placed in fairly high-level classes--honors and AP classes. I suspect there are two reasons for this--one is that teachers of AP students perhaps feel more confident that we can't "mess their students up," but I think the main reason is that most student-teachers are placed in classes with teachers who are generally considered to be expert teachers, teachers with a fair amount of experience and who demonstrate competence.

But, wait a minute, if you're reading carefully, you'll notice that there's something a little funny about what I just wrote. The AP kids are the one who student teachers are qualified to teach, because regardless of how much we might stumble, we won't mess up their learning, because they're independent learners. (This is not me making truth statements, but just restating the hypothetical logic that I suspect, perhaps wrongly so, goes into our placement decisions) We also end up in these placements because the teachers are experts who we can sort of apprentice, who have a lot of desirable skills. Have you caught the drift of what I'm suggesting yet

If not, let me be explicit. In my experience, in my placement now and in the high school I attended as a student, the vet teachers, the real "expert" teachers, taught the AP, honors, and academic sections. The new teachers taught the on-level students, or the "vocational" track students. Again, I don't have the studies/research to back me up here, but it seems to me that the best teachers in the biz might be teaching to the students who, supposedly, need them the least. Of course, I'm not suggesting that AP students don't need good teachers. Certainly, I think they do, which is why I worry so much about failing them, not being the teacher they deserve me to be. But don't struggling students, students with IEP's, students with low levels of parental involvement, students from low-SES homes, single-parent homes, working-parent homes--don't they need strong teachers even more? Perhaps they don't. But I do know one thing for nearly certain. Most of the "lower-level" classes at my placement tend to be a lot larger. And the same was true in high school. And, as far as I know, that's a pretty typical pattern to see in urban low-SES schools (again, no research to back that up, so don't take it for truth--I'm basing this on my experience and what I remember hearing, not always the most reliable sources, and they certainly wouldn't stand up to peer review). At the very least, planning for large classes is a big struggle that, in itself, requires expert maneuvering. My point in all of this--and I know I'm slow at getting to it; I told you, I had a LOT of time to think while I was brooding last week and cheering this week and blogging neither week--is that I'm trying to decide where I belong once I finish my program at Pitt. I was thinking, really, truly thinking about teaching at an urban school in NYC for the first couple of years, at least, of my career. My reasoning was that I suspected there was a higher need for talented, committed educators in those schools (and at that time, I still saw myself as potentially talented. Now, I may be revising that idea. I still think I can do it--teach well, that is--but it may take a lot more work than I anticipated) and I had a duty to go to the schools where the need was highest. This, perhaps, is an incredibly, incredibly arrogant thing to think--as if I'm going to spend two years in a school in the Bronx and suddenly the students will realize that they have value and will become scholars and grow up to be congress(wo)men, all thanks to my self-sacrifice. Maybe it is arrogance, but I think it's important for me to work with students who other educators don't want to work with. Maybe it's a misguided feeling--I can't really fully articulate a rationale for it, but I feel that it's important for me to do it, and maybe that's enough, but maybe it isn't. Anyways, regardless of my motives, last week, when I was feeling lower than a bow-legged caterpillar, I was certain that I wasn't qualified to work in an urban school--I was sure that I didn't have the "with-it-ness" (or is it spelled withitness?), the classroom management skills, the rapport-building-skills, the experience with "difficult" students to teach in an urban school. But then, something funny (not in the "hahaha" way, but in the "oh-my-word" way) occurred to me--urban schools are the ones with the job openings, the ones where we, entry-level teachers, are often told we may have to work for a couple of years to gain experience before getting the jobs we "really" want. Shouldn't we be sending our best teachers to our "high-need" students and leaving the ones that "you can't mess up" to the rookies? I don't know how much of my reasoning here is solid logic with facts to back it up and how much is my cynicism coming across, but I know the job I'm going to get as an entry-level professional will not be working with "good" "independent" learners--they're a reward for dealing with the tough kids for enough years, it seems.

Anyways, what this weird little aside comes down to is simply this: I don't know what the role of a teacher is/should be, and I don't know how much that changes based on the "neediness" of a particular group of students. And I don't know if it's even fair to think of urban schools as "high need" schools. Who are we to think they need us? (Those pronouns aren't plural because I have a group in mind, but mostly because I don't want to think of myself as the only arrogant starry-eyed educator to feel this way) Do they, or don't they? Do low test scores mean high need? Are students failing just because they're not doing well academically? Bob Fecho wrote about students in his "urban" school in Philly, which served a largely black and Carribean student body, refusing to "play the game" of standardized tests. (Sorry, I don't have the book with me right this second to give a full citation) I don't know if that can be generalized to all "high-need, low SES, urban" schools, but I know in my placement, many of the students with below basic scores on their PSSA pretests seem smart and engaging enough to me, but they don't want to play the game of school. Is it clear, I wonder, what I mean by that? These students demand authenticity, transparency about purpose. If they're doing worksheets just for the sake of completing a packet and covering a unit, they don't buy it, and they don't care. And then they don't do well, and so teachers give them lower level work. Then, they care even less. And I can't blame them. Is it my job to make them care? (The answer to this question may be different between my pre-service year and my first year teaching)

It all comes down to what English classes should look like, and this was another question I had. A lot of my students don't care about English, because it's hard for them--many of them have learning disabilities that make reading really hard for them--and the purpose isn't clear, so it doesn't seem to be worth the effort it takes. I wish they saw words the way I do. I love words so much, because I use them in so many ways, and I see how much they empower me--they put me in dialogue with experts in Education, many of whom I'll never be able to meet, they help to expose me to so many different world views and cultural perspectives that inform my own and help me see the richness of the world, they help me express myself, understand how I'm feeling when I miss my fiance who's living in NYC but also can't bear the thought of going in to a class I know I don't understand, they help me tell others about my struggles with my teacher prep program and seek insight into my career trajectory, and they help me see through political speeches, media bias, and so much other crap that gets thrown at me daily from all sides (for example, I'm at y brother's house right now, on his computer, totally inside, with the TV off, and I can spot 5 advertisements from where I'm sitting) This awareness gives me power. I want them to have the power of words, too!

But they're not getting it by filling out worksheet packets. Or by not filling out worksheet packets while their teacher shakes her head.

The Purpose of English Class: The Power of Literac(y/ies)

I don't know what the students think the purpose of English class is. I don't know what my placement school or my MT think the purpose of English class is. But I know what the purpose is for me. Making students strong, strong, strong. Showing them how to determine what was influencing the author of a text--living in a racist, sexist society, for example, and either incorporating those assumptions into their texts or pushing against them. Talking to them about how we can read a book to think about history--not the facts of history, but an artifact of a cultural moment. Teaching them to read the world around them with a critical eye. Teaching them how to advocate for themselves, how to actively oppose unfairness without needing violence. I want them so badly to know the power of writing in their own voice, dialoging with themselves through writing to understand themselves. I care so much about English and so much about students. But is this really what English classes are for? Is that what my MT's classroom does? I don't think so. Maybe I'm wrong. About a lot of things I've written here. But I know it's possible to gain autonomy and power from literacy, because I've read parts of Malcolm X's biography, and I've read Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and I've read Virginia Woolf and Luce Irigary and Gloria Anzaldua (forgive the absence of accent marks, I have no idea how to insert them in a blog post. Why can't html cooperate with word processing software keyboard shortcuts?) and so many others who say such brilliant things that people get to read and talk about only because they're written.

These students aren't reading these things, though. So is this a canon war I'm fighting? Or is it a pedagogical one? Or is the "war" a figment of my imagination, and, really, an overreaction to a fairly good education system. (Sir Ken Robinson doesn't seem to think so http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U ) But what do I do about that?

Let's say we can buy my premise that English classrooms are about empowering students with literac(y/ies) skills ( I just got Reading, Writing and Rising Up and Teaching for Joy and Justice, 2 books by Linda Christensen, at the recommendation of a very smart peer/colleague of mine, we'll call her Catherine, and I suspect, though I haven't read them yet, that they may support this premise, as well. She spoke--Linda Christensen, not Catherine--at the PCTELA conference I wrote about last time, and she dealt with this idea a bit) and that my presumption that AP kids are fairly independent learners with a pretty sophisticated repertoire of literacy skills, and that the students not in AP classes--the students in my MT's remedial reading class, for example, with IEP's and low-SES backgrounds, who live in foster homes and haven't been "good at school" in a very long time--aren't getting access to those literacies, which leaves them, in some ways, disempowered. Oughtn't someone step in, and say, "enough, quit cheating these kids out of a fair chance in a game that is, in a lot of ways, fixed against them." Okay, so that's a grossly oversimplified way to think about it, but it conveys the general sense of frustration I feel when I try to negotiate the sophisticated "best practices" I'm learning from Pitt with the students at my placement who just need me to make sure I don't mess up too badly, and with my prospective job options--what I feel I ought to do, would like to do, but don't know if I can do vs. what I think I probably could do but don't feel "called" to do. I know the notion of being "called" to work in an urban school sounds so, again, condescending, and I don't mean it to be. I don't know, perhaps my attitude isn't the right one, and I'd be inauthentic and not confident enough and wouldn't be successful in an urban school as a result of these types of thoughts exactly. But who's going to teach in the cities, then? New teachers waiting for the jobs they really want to open up?

Sorry, this entry really must be laborious to read. It's what I'm thinking right now--back and forth, back and forth, highs and lows, highs and lows--which must be torturous to read--assuming anyone's bothering to read by this point--but maybe it'll put you in my shoes a little. No linear path of logic to follow. Just trying to navigate a minefield of thoughts and doubts and questions without losing all my limbs before getting to the other side.

But, since I'm into the topic of what English classes should look like, I might as well move on to my arch frenemy for the year--unit planning!