Literacy for the iGeneration

Whew. No wonder the last set of classes didn’t go as well as I had hoped. I guess I was trying to fit in too much. Admittedly though, the behavior management thing was brought up by the students, not me.

My goal was to have students use an article I found in Newsweek to develop lesson plans that fit with their content. I wanted them to experience how one text can be used across content areas. It was the article, How Math Warps Elections. I provided each content area group with a prompt to create a lesson specific to their area. For the math preservice teachers, I asked them to create a lesson that taught the students how to turn the text in the article into mathematical notation. I asked the social studies preservice teachers to create lesson to support teaching the electoral process being discussed, and the English preservice teachers to develop a lesson for teaching the rhetorical structure of the essay. I wasn’t particularly pleased with what the students came up with. The majority of them thought of simulations. They missed the idea of looking at the text and helping students make sense of the text. They just wanted to teach the concept. I don’t blame the students. I needed to do a better job of scaffolding the activity I guess. What it’s telling me is that the students still have quite a ways to go in terms of really understanding how to structure a lesson that teaches strategic thinking rather than just content. I think maybe I need to shift my teaching methods. A few of the students did come up with some strategic tools, but they still are operating at the level of generalities, and not really thinking of the nuts and bolts of teaching. Is it really realistic to expect preservice teachers to be thinking at that level? Do they have the classroom experience to understand what needs to be in a lesson. Does that come with time in the classroom.

I’ve come to realize that I’m really not teaching literacy strategies, I’m teaching thinking strategies. Literacy is a way into those thinking strategies. It’s about engaging in the world of ideas.

After they came up with their pseudolessons, I asked them to use either the cohesion links strategy or the academic language strategy from the 50 Strategies for ELL book. I’m not pleased with that book. I’ve been searching and searching for a decent text to use for helping content area teachers support second language learners and I haven’t found one yet. I’ll keep looking. It was interesting though that in their blogs, the students wrote all sorts of positive things, yet when it came to applying the strategies to the lessons they had developed, they struggled. There was even one student (a very bright young woman) who was visibly angry at the task. She just didn’t get it. The other interesting thing is that when I ask students to try these strategies, they fall back into the “what do you want” mindset. I need to work harder to move them back into the mindset of being teachers and not students.

I ended the class with looking at their one paragraph descriptions of an event they have seen in their field placements. I asked them to analyze their writing using cohesion links to identify any patterns they may have and then to rewrite it to make it clearer. I did that as a way to teach a revision strategy. I didn’t go much beyond that though, and now that I think about it, I need to revisit it or at least have the students debrief about revision. Not quite sure how yet.

I then asked them to exchange paragraphs, select one, and use that as a basis for role playing via written communication. That didn’t go as smoothly as I had hoped – there was a fair amount of talking and the written conversation was pretty superficial, but it was a start. We then discussed the issues. That’s where the behavior management piece came up.

I’m not quite sure what to do with that. I understand that’s a big issue that preservice and novice teachers have to deal with. I know I was very poorly prepared for behavior management issues. We get repeatedly told, and I repeatedly hear, that behavior isn’t an issue in an engaging class, but I think that’s a simplistic answer. As I expressed to the students (and I admitted this is the cynic in me), a large part of the problem is due to the system. We are set up to be antagonistic. It’s an us versus them situation. It’s a miracle that schools work at all and really is a testament to the inherent goodness of the students.

I don’t want to drop the issue, because it’s obviously one that’s important to the students, but at the same time I don’t want to turn my class into a behavior management class. I’m considering making some adjustments to the upcoming grant writing activity and fold in a research aspect.

Five weeks in and things are complicated.