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.

Where're we Headed?

Today, and this week, I've been troubled by questions about curriculum. And this is another one of those now-familiar tales of the disparity between what I'm learning at Pitt and what I'm seeing at my placement. Trying to negotiate this disparity is beginning to seem like an unavoidable but quite challenging center to my preservice teacher training.

Let me start with a brief discussion of what I'm learning at Pitt. It all sounds really great and reasonable and smart and consistent, and I think I really like it so far. As far as planning/curriculum, we're learning how to plan unity using backward design. Basically, the unit (perhaps even the course) is guided by an investigative question like "What is a nation?" or "What is/are the American dream(s)?" Thinking about that guiding question, you plan your summative assessment for the course/unit, and you plan activities and texts for engagement that will help students to investigate the question guiding the unit/course. Each lesson, too, has learning goals of its own that help students work towards the unit question, and formative assessments that work towards the summative assessment. (broadly and simply: formative=assessment as you go, summative=assessment when you're done, though they're perhaps significantly more complex than these simple definitions can account for). So you might use three texts that describe three different versions of the American dream, ask students to articulate/critique/discuss the representations as you go, then ask them to describe their idea of the American dream, in comparison with the representations in the text.

(I think you can also work on particular skills through the unit, too, like crafting persuasive writing, so you would incorporate different elements of persuasive writing into the activities you use for each text, maybe you'd stage a debate between characters from one+ texts, and then as a unit assessment, you'd ask students to persuade you (or each other, or someone else) that their American dream is somehow best. We haven't explicitly worked on this aspect of unit planning yet, but I suspect it might be coming)

According to my mentor teacher, what I'm doing at Pitt and what my placement school tries to do is called understanding by design, or backward planning. However, what my placement is doing is somewhat different. Their units, instead of being focused on guiding questions, are built around state standards that are selected to go along w/ each unit. Each grade has a standard curriculum that the departments developed in conjunction with the textbook, and they go through each of the state standards and select texts/textbook activities that address those standards and structure their units in this way. My mentor teacher explained that this type of unit planning is, indeed, "teaching to the test," but that because the school I'm placed in has failed to make annual yearly progress for so many consecutive years, she says that they have little option but to teach to the test, because students need to pass the test, and if they're not passing, teachers need to be able to demonstrate that they taught from a standards-based, aligned curriculum so that they cannot be held accountable for students' failure on the tests.

That's not to say that my Pitt classes don't ask us to incorporate PA state standards. Every lesson plan we do addresses at least one, usually more, state standards, but we don't plan "to the standards," we more like plan with the standards "in mind," addressing them as we address the strategies and the investigative questions we're trying to cover.

To be honest, attempting to negotiate these two perhaps-similar-but-significantly-different approaches to unit planning is fairly exhausting and stressful. I totally understand my mentor teacher's and my placement school's attitude, even though I really don't agree with it. In our accountability-obsessed educational climate, it's really easy to become focused on covering the broad range of topics on the test--teachers and administrators understand that their schools and their jobs depend on test scores, so naturally that's what ends up being emphasized. Even if a noble, self-sacrificing teacher were to say, "Forget the tests, I'm going to educate my students the best way I know how, and if I'm successful, they will be able to do well on the tests." She's not doing her students any favors if her lack of an "aligned" curriculum gets her fired when the school fails to make AYP, and she's not around to self-sacrifice for pedagogical ideals any more, anyways. So I see this in part as a real problem with standards-based assessment. My mentor teacher told me it comes down to a choice; "You either dig an inch deep and a mile wide and try and cover as many texts as possible and use all the strategies and standards, or you dig a mile deep and an inch wide and really deeply and richly investigate a few texts/standards." The suggestion was not only that the former was preferable, but that it was the school's only option in this educational climate.

My classes and professors at Pitt, I'm sure, would not want me to be discouraged in this way. They would ask me--I think--to construct curricular units that are inquiry-driven and student- (or learning-) centered, but that also addressed state standards as I went. And I know there are ways in which this is possible--we've seen them done, in the examples our theorists lay out for us. But many of the preservice teachers in my program, as well as the teachers I've interacted with at my placement, are stuck with pre-fabricated one-size-fits-all curricula that prescribe texts to use and skills to use with those texts and activities/resources that work to achieve those standards/skills. I know that even within the tightest curricula, there's room for modifying activities, texts, etc to account for unique groups of students etc, but I think that requires even more creativity than planning one's own unit does, because it requires a lot of delicate work and tremendous insight and knowledge. I don't know that I even feel prepared to create my own units--I'm not even half-way through the program, so I'm sure the skills will come, but the fact remains that, at this point, I can't imagine planning units that are effective and inquiry based and not prescriptive and restrictive--much less to preform the exponentially more challenging task of trying to fit a pre-fabricated unit to fit my needs and, most importantly, the needs of my very different students.

This challenge, which I'll certainly have to face in the future as an entry-level teacher, says nothing of the challenge I currently face. How do I fit my lessons into my mentor teacher's curriculum? She simply doesn't use a lot of the strategies Pitt is asking me to use; can I ask her to when we're co-planning lessons? Or would that be totally an imposition on the unit she's designing with a very particular and calculated goal in mind? Will the shape of the class totally change when I "take over" in the Spring? Is that fair to the students, who will suffer from whip lash, being jostled from a class structured based on one pedagogical approach to one with a seemingly totally different approach? Will it adversely affect the school, or my mentor teacher, by robbing them of their overtly and explicitly "aligned curriculum?" I'm already running into issues, because the couple of small activities that I've conducted that, in my classroom, would be the foundation for building a unity, have been basically treated as tangents, footnotes, asides from the class, which is taught totally differently. Already, after only a couple of lessons, there's a disconnect between "her" classroom and "my" classroom (which, obviously, is still her classroom, but is also, in a way, Pitt's classroom, because Pitt is the institution telling me what to do/implement at my placement). Are the students already suffering? How much will they suffer over the course of the year?

I'm really at a loss about this. Even planning a unit based on a guiding question seems potentially overly-limiting to me, so planning within a prescribed curriculum seems that much more limiting and frustrating, and being asked to modify that prescribed curriculum to meet the standards Pitt is setting for a high-leverage-practice-based classroom is even that much more challenging. What do I do? I feel like I have no authority over ANY of these competing forces, so how do I work them all together for my good as a developing teacher and for her/my students' good?

Super challenging stuff that I am REALLY struggling with! Would LOVE feedback on these issues!

Seeing Lots of Teachers!

Wow! Only 3 weeks into keeping this blog, and I'm already playing catch up for last week! I'll put up two posts today to cover my last two days at my placement, and, from now on, I'll be sure to stay on schedule as much as humanly possible!

So, for my observation on 14 September 2011:

This observation was a really nice opportunity for me to observe a range of teachers. When I say "a range," I mean I was able to observe teachers with a wide variety of teaching styles and pedagogies, teaching to a wide variety of grade- and presumed ability-levels. This experience really got me thinking about how we define "good" teachers--and "good" students, for that matter.

What was interesting to me was that, regardless of grade level, teacher, or students' perceived ability level, instructional strategies didn't vary greatly. True, teachers had severe or mild strategies for behavior/classroom management, spoke with varying tones of voices, referred to students in different ways, covered different activities and different texts. But, for all of that, the dominant pedagogy remained, at least from my vantage point, roughly the same. Perhaps the subtle differences I saw were more significant, and reflected really significant philosophical differences. I'm not saying by any means that my perception is perfect. But, it seemed to me that the school culture is one that I've yet to fully understand. I want to preface this by saying that not every single teacher I observed today fits this characterization equally, or to a great degree at all. But it seems to be a trend that I'm trying to understand.

To me, students are meaning makers, and they should be working really hard in school--maybe close to as hard as the teachers--to understand their readings on a really deep level, to understand how composing helps them to make meaning out of texts in their lives, etc. But it seemed to me that the teachers at my placement think a little bit differently. I haven't interviewed them about their pedagogies--perhaps that would be a good project to undertake--so I hope I'm not mischaracterizing them here. But it seems that they perceive English to be a static subject that one can obtain knowledge of through an understanding of literary devices and prescribed composition structures such as the five paragraph essay. And this could be a valid pedagogy--it's not one that I find very useful for me, and it's not one that my graduate program seems to promote, but it's certainly--again, as I perceive things--a dominant model in many schools, perhaps due in part to NCLB and policies emphasizing standards and accountability.

But this leads me, too, to question my perception. My placement has a curriculum that was decided upon at the beginning of the school year, and all teachers in the specific grade level must follow the curriculum. Perhaps this accounts for the prescriptiveness of many teachers methods.

My question, then, is what am I doing? What I envisioned today to be about, for me, is finding where I fit in a spectrum of teacher identities. I don't think I found it. I did find people whose demeanors are similar to mine, but none who I could tell from the lessons I observed thought like I do.

Does this mean that all the stuff I'm learning, that I find so compelling right now, is unattainable pie-in-the-sky ivory tower theory that has no practical applications? I've read studies that seem to say that this isn't the case, but that seems to be what I'm seeing, so what do I trust? The empirical observations I'm making and the things I hear teachers saying at my placement--and at the placements where my peers are student-teaching as well? Or the data and research I'm getting from my classes, that I want to believe in but that, based on what I'm actually seeing in the "real world" seems like there has to be something they're not telling us. For example, in a school where the curriculum is prescribed, is there any teacher autonomy? If not, why am I learning how to make choices about unit planning and text choices? On the off chance that I get into one of these "magic schools" that people write about these strategies working in?

I'm not trying to be cynical or pessimistic here. Quite the contrary! I'm super hopeful about developing my "praxis." But I'm struggling about how I'm supposed to be doing that in a classroom that's not my own, with a curriculum that some text book developer made up in an office somewhere, with no knowledge of my school district or my mentor teacher or my students or me.

And what about teachers who have lost hope? I've seen them, and I've heard of them, too. They look at the work we're doing at Pitt and call it "the new educational trend that will be replaced in five years by something else." They stick with the material they've been teaching and the materials they've been using because they feel its proven itself. Should I believe that to be true? That a "tried and true" approach/curriculum/writing format can exist? Should I be challenging that? How? When? Now, as a student-teacher? When I get my own classroom? Not until I have tenure? And what if I do find out, in five years, that I've been doing it "wrong" all along, even though I feel its been working for my students?

The teachers I'm talking about care about their students, and their students' test scores, college prospects, futures. I get the sense that they worry that experimenting with new strategies that they're not familiar with, and might not be good at, is a detriment to their students education, because students become guinea pigs, in a sense, having the effectiveness of a new strategy tested on them. And what if the theory WAS wrong on this one, for this student/class/school? So I understand their adherence to standard, test-prep focused curriculum, even if I'm learning alternatives that make much more sense to me, and I think will be more effective and help students more.

How do I negotiate this? And re: all the questions I just asked about when it's okay to try and shake things up a bit? Do I just hope for a job at a progressive school? Or does that defeat the purpose entirely, because then MY particular knowledge/training won't be required to help those students?

I hope it doesn't seem like I'm putting other teachers, with other pedagogies, down in any way. Like I said, I totally understand the pressures on them from all directions to do things in a certain way. But I'm afraid. I think I'm afraid that there's no place in my placement, and perhaps in today's US education system, for the teacher I think I'm becoming. What should I do?

I'd really REALLY love some feedback on this question from anyone with ideas, or anyone who is feeling some of the same things. Thanks so much for reading this one!