Literacy for the iGeneration

This week I gave the students time to workshop their grants. I don’t think I did a very good job. I didn’t give them a specific task. I know better than that, but it’s been a rough week (for personal reasons), so I guess I won’t beat myself up too badly for that. Their grants are due on April 1. There are a lot of really good ideas that I’m interested in seeing. What I’m wondering about is the quality of writing and completeness. Well, I’ll give them feedback and they’ll have time to revise if necessary.

We spent a far amount of time on assessing student writing. First I explained the protocol to the students, then I did it two different ways. In the first class, I did the fishbowl with me facilitating the group, then after modeling, I sent the students off to assess writing in their groups. It turns out that more than half of the students didn’t bring in any writing. This despite the fact that I had it posted in the syllabus and on the wiki for several weeks. Some said, well my SBE doesn’t do any writing. I had told them that if that wasn’t the case to figure out a way to get some writing (by asking to try it with the students). But nope. Nothing. I’m displeased. But we punted. The groups that didn’t have any writing I told to work on their grants. In the second group (the smaller class) more of the students brought in writing whichw was great. I also worked it differently. I first modeled it in a fishbowl, then had other students come in an fishbowl it. We continued to fishbowl it the whole time. As time went on, the students seemed more comfortable with the protocol, but they really weren’t pulling anything out of the writing. I tried to keep my mouth shut, but wasn’t always successful. I’m especially bothered by the focus on surface features. Few of the students seemed able to analyze the cognitive work going on or the abilities the students are bringing to the classroom. Maybe I’m expecting too much. The bottom line is that I’m going to have to do a better job scaffolding that in the future. One thing for sure, I’m going to share Milroy & Milroy’s historical research on the complaint tradition.

I was really disturbed by the low energy and interest level of the students, so on Thursday I asked the students for their feedback. We spent a long time on it. As usual there were a handful of students who contributed a lot and a few who said absolutely nothing. That’s discouraging. I’m really discouraged with some of the math students. I feel as if I’m jumping through hoops to provide materials related to their content area, but I feel as if I just can’t win.

What keeps me going is that there are enough students who are engaged and interested and willing and wanting to try things out.

Anyway, the student feedback was really helpful even if it was just a small vocal group. I did also collect index cards with feedback from everyone, so that’s really helpful. At least I get to hear the quieter people that way. I really want to hear everyone’s ideas.

So, I have some ideas for the rest of the semester. There is only one class next week. Three students will be co-teaching a lesson. Then I’ll be at AERA. I do have an online discussion forum set up on this blog. For April I’ll be having the students create lesson plans with materials I find. I have lots of things that I want to share with the students in terms of writing activities. I backed off on a lot of what I had originally planned because I wanted to be responsive to their needs, but now I think I’m going to go back to some of those plans. They also requested time spent on talk about the cert exams and behavior/classroom management. So we’ll do that as well. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll keep trying and I hope the students will too.

Finally, in the second class, three students taught a lesson using the materials on WWI that I gave them. I selected their lesson from all the ones that were handed in because it did the best job of drawing on English, Social Studies, and Math to support the overall issues raised within the text. The students, however, struggled a bit when it came to actually delivering the lesson. It wasn’t as integrated as it appeared on paper, and the students didn’t do as much with the text as they could have. The good part was that following the lesson they discussed what went well and what changes they would make if they did it again, and they were able to identify areas they could have improved. So that is good and that is really what I want them to achieve. I’m really not looking for perfect lessons (as if there is such as thing). What I’m really looking for is the ability to reflect on their teaching and use that to improve their teaching. Maybe I need to do a minilesson reflexivity and praxis. Hmm.