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!

Might the Fear of Teaching be the Beginning of (Teacherly) Wisdom?

Okay, so I've been thinking a lot about everything I've talked about and thought about so far, and what I've identified as my (perhaps trite and simplistic) understanding of my obstacles to becoming a worthwhile educator is fear.

I had a student this week say some things that made me afraid--not afraid for me, really, but for him, and for the other students in the class who interact with him. And this really drove home for me some of the real challenges I'm going to face as a teacher. But this isn't the extent of it.

Let me go over some of the fears I have, going into teaching:

1.) The fear of inadequacy. I'm sure we all feel this from time to time, whether we're student-teachers or veteran educators. But it's a paralyzing fear, nonetheless. Sometimes, when I'm planning a lesson I'll be presenting in my placement, I'm almost paralyzed with fear. Concerns run through my mind: Is this topic going to be relevant to students? Will it help them meet their educational goals, whatever those might be? Will it help them to become more critical consumers of the world around them? Is it pedagogically sound? Is it internally consistent? Will it be accessible to students--not over their heads, but not too simple for them, either? Will I be able to implement it well? Am I expert enough in the content to be able to field any questions students might have? Can I give directions clearly? Are my estimates of the instructional time for each activity close approximations? Am I going to be running out of time, especially if I have to take time to manage behavior issues? Will I even be effectively prepared to handle behavior issues at all?

2.) The fear of unethical or ideologically questionable motives. I often, for my own sake, try to articulate why I want to be a teacher, what kind of teacher I want to be, and why. And I come up with extensive lists--Because I love reading and writing and, as an adolescent, found them to empower me in a way that, probably, nothing else could have, and I want to share the power and connectedness of the written word with students; Because I'm concerned about social inequities that exist in our society and I want to make our nation's youth aware of them, in an effort to create a critical and responsible generation of citizens; Because I believe that an English classroom should be so much more than what it too often seems to be--a place to learn formulaic rules about language and composition that are often archaic and usually function as tools to keep some people in power and most people marginalized...I want to be the kind of teacher who pushes students, and demands a great deal from them, but who also appreciates their contexts and perspectives; the kind of teacher who wants to work with the "challenging" students, because they're too often marginalized and deserve to have their perspectives heard and understood; the kind of teacher who is passionate about every single skill set or text she teaches, and who wants to share that passion with students.

Of course, whether or not I'm the caliber of person necessary to become this type of educator, and whether or not my preservice year is preparing me for this goes back to the fear of inadequacy. But my fear here is that these motives, these goals, are just the ones I tell myself I have, and, in reality, I fell into teaching some other way and have simply justified it to myself. Perhaps I felt there was little else I was qualified to do with a B. A. in English, since the challenging life of the professional writer is fairly intimidating. Perhaps the idea of having summers off to pursue further education in English was a factor, too. It's so hard for me to tell what considerations came first. And is my desire to work with marginalized students, particularly those in low-SES urban settings a misplaced sense of superiority, like I'm some savior figure that can come in and save these unfortunate students? I struggle with this consideration, in particular, because of another fear.

3. The fear of too-high aspirations--though I don't know if that's really a good way of putting it. Is it right for me to (believe that I) want to teach to marginalized, struggling students? Or does my desire to do this type of work come from a belief that they need extra help, my help? For what? To become upwardly socially mobile? I don't think this is the goal of education, but is it not my students' (present and future) goal? If it is, shouldn't it be my goal? Or would saying something like "you need to learn to read and write well so you can go to college and get good jobs" (which is not what I believe, I don't think, but is perhaps what many students and parents, and certainly several educators and policy-makers might say) just de-value where the students come from? And can I even say that students "come from" a place, or does that generalize in a harmful way, and blind me to students' individual situations? In any case, what it comes down to is, am I aiming to work with "at risk" youth because I think they need my help? If so, isn't that a horrible, condescending thing to think? And won't that attitude, even on a subconscious level, make me a bad teacher? But what's the alternative? Teach students whose social status is more "like mine?" As if that's an option, ethically or just realistically? And how do I uncover prejudices I might have, combat them, and still function as a good educator? Can I even do this (see #1, the fear of inadequacy)

4. The fear of saying the wrong thing(s). This fear is closely related to #3. How do you show that you genuinely care about students, respect them as individuals--many of them as adults, care about their contexts and their perspectives, but still manage their behavior, ask them to do things that they don't necessarily care about or want to do, or that might be useless or even harmful to them? Should I be asking them to do things they don't see the value in? Is it my job to make them see the value in a task? What if they don't buy into my explanation of its importance? How do I create rigorous expectations for my students while still validating their literacies, experiences, and interests? How do I push back on students thoughts and statements without seeming confrontational or authoritative? And maybe the biggest challenge of all: how do I make my students successful students and citizens whilst simultaneously making them totally critical consumers of the world around them? How do I prepare them for PSSA's while still allowing them the space to challenge the test makers and the school administrators and the policy makers? How do I prepare them to enter the work force and negotiate job seeking skills while teaching them to interrogate the validity of corporate rhetoric or media images? If I do only one and neglect the other, I'll be doing my students and society a disservice. That's a lot of pressure, and those stakes seem pretty high to me.

This is just a beginning. I'm also afraid of living in an urban area, of dealing with the low pay and the tons of work that go with being a teacher. If I get a job in an urban school, I'm going, I know, to be terribly afraid every time I walk from the train station to the school, because of the neighborhood it's in. Right or wrong, I know I'll be afraid. And, supposing I get a job teaching high school english in Newark, for instance, and I walk in to a classroom of 25-35 on-level 10th or 11th grade students. I'm going to be afraid. No matter how much I tell myself to be confident, I know I'm going to start out being afraid. How can I manage a classroom like that? Will the students respect me? Will I come across as uppity, or worse? AM I uppity or worse? Can I teach those students effectively? Without being overwhelmed by the difference between their lives and mine--a difference that would be shocking based on the different setting alone? Will I make unfair assumptions? Will I say something really horrible and offensive to a student without realizing it? Will I get mugged on my way to the train station?

These are fears that I wish I didn't have, that I know might be based on a whole slew of factors, ranging from my own ignorance to seriously valid concerns. The hard part is drawing the lines to determine which fears are founded and which are unfounded. But regardless of all that, I think that I sort of came to a conclusion today: what's important isn't whether or not I have these fears--I can't control that. What's important is how I deal with them. Like I said, this might come across as trite and oversimplified, but as long as I acknowledge the fears I have, which I tried to do here, and press on, trying to do what I think it the best I can do in spite of my fears, I think I'm on ethical and responsible ground. And I know I'm going to mess up. Professor X has assured me that all research suggests I'll mess up over and over and over again my first year in particular. And that's REALLY hard to acknowledge, because students don't deserve to be impeded by their novice teachers' mess-ups. But there's no way around it. It's going to happen. All I can do is try to be real with myself and my peers about that, and learn as much as I can, and try as hard as I can. And I have to figure out how to balance different priorities, which will take time.

But anyways, I feel like now that I've named my fears (some of them) I have a little more power over the trajectory of my life and career. And I don't think being afraid makes me a bad teacher (at this point, teacher candidate). On the other hand, I think, to be paralyzed by fear, or to try to avoid certain settings, discussions, or experiences because I'm frightened, would kill me in the proverbial crib. Being an English teacher is risky business, and I'm realizing that, and hopefully learning to deal with that realization.

Obstacles: Self-Doubt, Discouragement, the Whole Bit

(Note: I posted 3 entries today, in backward chronological order. I wrote one, but it was far too long to be one post, so I broke it into 3 parts--this is part 1, the entry about the purpose of (English) teachers and literacy education is part 2, and the entry about my struggles with unit/lesson planning is part 3. Just FYI. But each entry, obviously, stands alone, too)

Well, I've avoided the blog successfully for altogether too long now. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that last week was very discouraging--between a workload from my classes that I thought I'd never be able to manage and co-teaching (which really ended up meaning my mentor teacher teaching while I pretty much stood there) a lesson on complex and compound sentences, I started to lose heart.

Another reason is that this week has been insanely busy and phenomenal. I did a lot of work with a special ed teacher at my placement, which was really useful and enlightening. I planned a lesson on writing in which I got to write to the prompt students are using, model my writing and revision process, and do a peer revision workshop all four periods out of the day. And I got a lot of work out of the way for my Pitt classes, which was a relief. In short, this week, I felt like superwoman, and last week, I guess I felt a little bit more like...oh, I don't know, Eeore, or some other negative-Nancy with a bad self image and a lack of motivation.

I'm saying this to offer explanation for my long break in writing--boy, would Penny Kittle be cross with me! What a far cry from writing every day!--and to give a sense of how pre-student-teaching feels to me, right now, just after finishing week 8 of classes. I mean, I've gone through it all so far--feeling like I'm the best possible teacher candidate in the universe, feeling like I'm not qualified to work with the public at all, much less teach high school students, feeling like the workload I'm presented with through my program is physically impossible to manage, feeling like I can complete all of my work for Pitt, go to work on the weekend, and still have free time to do whatever I want--In short, I've contradicted myself more in the past two weeks than I have probably at any other time in my life. For the first time in my life, I feel like I might really be struggling to learn something. I'm not supposed to be bad at things! At least not things that have to do with school! But, here I am, questioning my ability to become a real, true, quality educator.

And I don't know, really, why that is. No one's telling me that I'm not teacher material. Actually, many of my professors, my Mentor teacher, my University supervisor--she's a retired English teacher who acts as something of a liaison between the University and my placement and makes sure I'm meeting the requirements of both institutions to the greatest possible extent--all are telling me that I'm doing well, that there's a good teacher in the making buried somewhere inside of me for sure. But why don't I feel it?

One of my professors--we'll call her Professor X, just because I think it's fun to use code names--told me that many studies have found that the pedagogy and the strategies and techniques, all the wisdom and knowledge we're accumulating from the zillion-and-a-half researchers and professors and vet teachers that we're reading, whose names I can hardly keep strait, all the feedback we're getting from the phenomenal educators at the University of Pittsburgh, all this training won't really make a difference until our second year of teaching. I don't mean to put words in her mouth, or in the mouths of the researchers who did the study. She wasn't talking about us specifically. She just said that the studies showed that to be the case for the majority of the novice teachers they studied. Still, it's a hard thing to hear. Part of me wants to declare, "No way! Not me! I'm the exception! I'll use understanding-by-design Smagorinsky-modeled inquiry-based units from the beginning of my first day! I'll be building literacy communities from the get-go! There's no way I'll let my students go a whole year without the quality instruction they deserve!" But the truth of the matter is, I know that would be a total lie. I can't even guarantee I'm using best practices in my mentor teacher's classroom, with what feels like (usually) the entire University of Pittsburgh to support me. But it's such a disheartening thing to think I'm going to make a ton of mistakes this semester and next, and not give students the quality of education they deserve. And to think that I might get a job in a real school, with my own classroom and my own students and even--dream upon dreams!--my own curriculum, and I might still spend a whole year floundering around, trying to get my teacher legs, trying to figure out how to do what I'm getting paid to do, what my students are COUNTING on me, DEPENDING on me to do, is totally terrifying and depressing. And what about me that year? It's stressful enough to think I'm not a good teacher after doing it part-time for 8 weeks. If I have to look in the mirror after being a full-time teacher-of-record in a classroom for 6 months, and say, "you know, I still don't really understand this whole teaching thing," I don't know if I'll be able to look at myself at all!

Professor X, if you're reading this, please don't despair! I bear you no ill will for telling me this information--in fact, I'm glad to know it! In my view, knowledge gives you power, and having knowledge, even when it's depressing, discouraging, not-what-I-want-to-hear knowledge, at least I have an idea of what I may have to deal with.

But, in thinking about myself as a teacher, pre-service teacher, future teacher, or whatever, there were a few questions that came to my mind as far as what matters to me, to making me a good teacher, etc.