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.

Professional Development and Colleague Collaboration

Today, I went to the first professional conference of my career/life, the 2011 PCTELA (Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English and Language Arts), and it was generally a pretty great experience. I got a great deal out of the experience, but I think what stood out the most was the sense of community I got to experience, and the ideas I got to engage with.

Community: Stumbling Upon the Wealth of Professional Resources

We read a lot of theory in our English Education program, which is super important, I think, in guiding every single decision we make in our classrooms (I way our, though I haven't, really, the right to, yet, since I'm still only at my placement once a week, but hopefully you'll tolerate it from me, since being at the PCTELA conference today made me feel like I really am part of a community of professionals, even this early in my career/professional development!). And, of course, in our placements--my placement, at least--theory sort of becomes invisible. I'm often unsure of whether or not there is a theory backing any given choice my MT makes. That's not to say that there isn't, but if there is, I'm not always aware of it.

Being at the conference was interesting because it, perhaps, bridged the gap in some ways. I learned a lot about the different resources available to me as an emerging professional. Who knew there were SO MANY websites out there that cater specifically to English teachers!? I think I knew there were resources out there, but it's nice to have guidance from more expert professionals, because it's often really hard to tell what's a good resource, what's a mediocre one, and what's just downright bad, especially at this stage in my career, while I'm still cementing my own educational theory and philosophy.

And what was really great for me was the exposure to adolescent lit authors. Because I never really had a phase in my life when I read adolescent lit. I picked up the Harry Potter books in high school, and I read a few "adolescent" texts, like The Perks of Being a Wallflower and The Giver, but I'm not much of an educated consumer of adolescent lit texts. So it was really helpful to hear from some people who are respected in the field, and get an idea of what good adolescent lit might look like. I'm already picking some up from my classes, where we've been reading some texts, geared at adolescents, that I've found just beautiful.

Ideas that Made me Stop and Think

In addition to just being blown away by the exponential growth in the pool of resources at my disposal, I also got to hear some really great educators/authors speak on some intellectually provocative topics.

Communities in our Classrooms

They got me thinking about a couple of things. One is how we can establish community in our classrooms. I think my program at Pitt was trying to address this when they asked us to create and enact a lesson in our classroom that promotes literacy community, though I wasn't really sure exactly what that was supposed to mean, and maybe I'm still not quite sure. But in any case, the idea is that in order for our students to do really compelling, inquiry-based, intellectually stimulating and personally relevant work, they have to feel safe in the classroom, trust the instructor and trust each other.

The question is, naturally, how do we get them to that point? And what Ms. Christensen said was basically that it doesn't happen over night. You don't walk into your first day with a group of 30 students, hand them an "I am a scholar" pledge and expect them to be on board with you and trust you implicitly. She suggested that you provide them with a space to share and engage with their personal experiences, but also not force them to go there if they're not ready. She gave me a lot of good ideas, and she also reminded me not to fret--my students at McKeesport don't seem to fully trust me yet, but I'm only there 1 day/week this semester, and I'm only student-teaching--because it takes time and work, and it'll come, if I try, and if I'm trustworthy enough. And I think I'm making progress already!

What's Appropriate in Young Adult Lit (and/or in the English Classroom)?

The other really relevant topic at hand was that of the "appropriate content" for young adult literature. We've (the other English Ed students and our profs) talked a lot in our classes at Pitt about what texts are suitable for us to incorporate in our curricula, and which are too "dangerous." I have to admit, some of these concerns came to my mind, too, when we read James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and talked about whether or not we might teach the book in our placements, for example. I thought, "this might offend some students, some parents. It might be perceived as racially charged."

But recently, I've been questioning the notion of a dangerous text. There were times and places in the world when education actually was "dangerous," for various people. People have suffered really severe consequences for reading certain texts, for writing or speaking on a certain topic in a certain way. Bringing a book that brings up topics of racism into an English classroom, for example, is NOT dangerous in the same way.

We should be able to ask our students to critique the books we read as representations of the world(s) from which they come, and not as absolute truths. And, anyways, we don't read To Kill a Mockingbird or Oedipus or Romeo and Juliet as texts containing some absolute truth. Some parents would probably not be comfortable with their students reading about a teenage girl who meets a guy who kills her cousin and then plans to elope with him before killing herself, if it were written in a contemporary setting.

Anyways, the topic came up twice today, and just reinforced what I'm coming to believe. Maybe it's because of the age of my students, or maybe it's part of my developing philosophy of education, but I'm now sure that mature topics have a place in YA lit. Ms. Christensen talked about something Sherman Alexie said in his article "Why the Best Kids Books are Written in Blood." ( http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/06/09/why-the-best-kids-books-are-written-in-blood/ )

Our students have mature experiences. They are "young adults," and we call them that because they've had enough life experiences to qualify as approaching adulthood. A lot of them have experienced death and hardship and they're maturing sexually and emotionally--they're not only ready for these books, they need them.

Mr. Crutcher talked a lot about this, too. If we're going to validate YA experiences--in the way that we need to if we're to create a community of learners--we have to present them authentically. Otherwise, they'll know that we're sheltering them, they'll feel like they're "playing school." But if we present books to them that are written to them and for them, that describe things as they "really" are, then school stops being a game, and they can feel like they're really learning something, something tangible and real. It's fine to teach Shakespeare, but teach Alexie, too, and teach what the students are reading, and teach it in a way that students can access and can construct their own meaning through.

These are just sort of tentative thoughts; I can't speak definitively for young adults and say what they expect from books, or what they expect from English classes. But these are my suspicions.

In any case, whether I've formed lasting opinions, or I'm just working my way through my thoughts, it was really great to engage some provocative ideas, and it was really great to think and learn alongside some vet teachers from all different districts and grade levels. It was a really valuable experience, and I can't wait to go to more and more of these things as I become a vet teacher myself!

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!