I wish I had done a better job of responding to comments. There were a lot of really good ones made, and I did read them and think about them and use them to inform instruction. They are incredibly helpful to me. I know asking students to comment on the blog is “one more task,” but it has become an incredibly meaningful one for me.

I really appreciated Kayleigh’s comment about how much the annotations ended up helping her. That’s exactly what the intent of that assignment is. Thank you for sharing that. I know it can be an onerous assignment at times, and I am glad everyone hung in there.

Another comment I really  appreciated was made a few weeks back by Michelle — about five minutes of phatic conversation at the beginning of class. She’s absolutely right, and honestly I intended to do that (I did it on the second night of class), but it got lost in the shuffle of everything else. So thank you for reminding me of that. I will make sure I do that in the diversity class next semester and when I teach 620 again.

There were so many other helpful comments as well in terms of order of events in class, pacing, etc. I may not have explicitly addressed each of those throughout the semester, but I did read and think about each one. My task in the future is to make my response to those comments more explicit in order to let my students know that yes, I am listening and responding.

I’m going to be making changes to the “terms and people to know” assignment. I’m not convinced of the utility of that assignment. The intent was to build a shared glossary for students to refer to when writing. I didn’t make that explicit enough. I’m also going to be making changes to the “wiki page” posting assignment. Once again it was intended to support the students as writers and to create a shared text. I don’t think we achieved that. Those are two things I have to think about more. Maybe some day I’ll get it right and teach the perfect class.

I am looking forward to the final essays and meeting with individuals. As people have commented, it was a tough, but rewarding semester.

We started off by doing a little writer’s workshop. I wanted the students to share their learning from writing the essay and to identify elements of what makes a good essay. Interestingly, the students identified the issues that I found were the potholes students struck in their writing. That was reassuring. I’m working from memory here. The elements identified were transitions, clear thesis, authorial voice, and appropriate/professional language. The thing I want to stress, and I didn’t talk about it last night, is that these issues of form are integral to content. It’s impossible to separate form from content. Gaining control of these elements also helps one gain control of the content. By using transitions, one is showing the connection between ideas, by using professional language appropriately, one is demonstrating an understanding of that language. And of course, being to write a clear thesis demonstrates an understanding of how all the multiple pieces in an essay are linked together. It’s what makes a piece of writing cohesive. In an academic piece of writing, the thesis is explicit whereas in a literary piece it may very well be implicit. So understanding the genre is part of the picture as well. The thing that really strikes me is that by writing the essay, the students are also engaging in the theory as explicated by Olson.

We also spent some time talking about the texts. I gave some guiding questions, but I’m not sure they were effective. The discussions I listened in on weren’t as deep as previous discussions. The whole group discussion however was quite interesting. I admit, I kind of took over, but as I explained to the class this is a topic I feel passionately about.

I find it interesting how introducing critical literacy brings up the concern of “fitting it into the curriculum” even though we’ve just spent 8 weeks talking about the role of oral language in literacy acquisition and the difference between acquisition and learning, and sociocultural theory and how learning is through participation. Yet, when we come to critical literacy, resistance and fear and mandates appear. It shows me that even though  theories can be talked about, it’s not integrated into the ways of thinking yet. But it’s developmental. At least the ideas and questions and struggles are out there. I was really serious when I said, baby steps. It takes time to be the kind of teacher we want to be and there are so many forces pushing back at us. I get those pressures too. But rather than giving in to the pressures, critical literacy gives us a way to respond to and push back. It’s a way to subvert the system.

Again, I didn’t talk about it last night (I can only say so much), but as a former English teacher, I believe that any text can and should be taught critically. So even though I’m no fan of the western canon of literature, if I were “forced” to teach it, I would do so critically. The question I would ask is, why do we read these pieces of literature? Whose voices and experiences are represented in this literature? What perspectives on life do these pieces of literature lead us to? What responses can we give to these pieces of literature? These types of questions all support the ELA standards and by engaging in these questions the students would be well prepared for the ELA exam – yet we would be engaging in important questions. Heck, we could even analyze the ELA exam critically as part of test prep. Hmmm, maybe it would be fun to get back into English education.

Granted, critical theory is scary. It may bring up things that people don’t necessarily like to talk about. It forces us to uncover our own assumptions and believes let alone what the text says (or doesn’t say). The same with media literacy. Frankly, the term media literacy bugs me. I didn’t talk about that either. It’s a dated term. If we have an expanded definition of literacy, then “media” or multimodalities is automatically part of that. It’s something to think about in terms of updating the syllabus.

We spent the last half of class on the literacy artifact review. I gave an overview of what the institutional (read NCATE) requirements are for the assignment, but then let the students go. My intent is for the students to begin to build an understanding of the new literacies and critical literacy through engagement in the literacies. It goes back to the acquisition versus learning thing. We can talk and read about it, but to really understand it and know it, you have to experience it. I know it makes a lot of the students concerned/scared/confused because there aren’t strict guidelines and directions. But that’s the thing with the new literacies – the rules are being formed and the rules are being formed by social interaction. It’s Jenkins and Lankshear & Knobel and…

I’ve got midsemesteritis too. I’m discouraged and frustrated by the institution of school. I love teaching and learning, but I hate the institutionalization of those processes. We’ve lost the joy and the excitment of discovery. I want it back. I’m hoping some of that will be found as students create their literacy artifact review.

We didn’t get that much time to discuss the readings, but I think it was enough in that it really was a review. What we didn’t get to do was spend any time getting started on the literacy artifact review. But, we will definitely spend time next week on it. I have the computer lab blocked out for half the class.

I just started reading the essays and hope to be done by next class. It takes time. I can’t do more than a few a day, otherwise they all start blurring together. I insist on giving each essay full attention. I refuse to devolve into the type of reading we did when I was an ELA teacher evaluating a 300 ELA 11 exams in an afternoon. The students put so much energy into their writing, I need to honor that writing with my attention and quality feedback. And that takes time and energy.

I have so much to do this week. I feel as if things are spinning out of control again. Time to rein things in.

After the orientation, we did a brief intro activity to the movie. We brainstormed aspects of our own dialects. It was fun, but I’m not sure it was a good use of time. I’m unclear as to what the learning outcome was for that activity. We then watched the movie American Tongues. Unfortunately we didn’t really have time to discuss the movie. There are things said in there that really need to be discussed in some depth. We need to explore the attitudes and belief systems that are embedded in the way we view different accents and dialects. We did start doing that after the movie when we had everyone revisit their anticipation guide and discuss any shifting ideas, but then we moved into discussing the midterm paper (which is stressing people out).

We began working on the midterm paper by breaking down the question and asking students to begin brainstorming which authors they could use to answer each section of the paper.

Then it was on to the prereading for next week.

Once again we got caught in rushing through the material.

So next week, I promise, we’ll be spending lots of time discussing the readings and the movie. The two classes really go together – one is about linguistic variation and one is about cultural variation – but you really can’t separate the two. So I’m ok with the fact that we’ll discuss the two together. AND for those of you stressing about the essay, these two weeks of readings (and the movie) will help you answer big sections of the essay. Which leads me to the next promise. We’ll be spending lots of time in class workshopping the essay.

I also want to make it really clear that the essay is a FORMATIVE assessment. I use it to see if there are areas that we need to revisit. If an essay reveals that a student is missing an key understanding, we’ll revisit it and the student will have the opportunity to rewrite the essay (see the syllabus for details).

Also, I’m really pleased with the way the annotations have developed. They also serve as a formative assessment, but it’s also a learning tool. As we write an annotation, it forces us to really distill the article to it’s most essential pieces. And that brings about clarity of understanding. So it’s writing to learn. They really are what Bean calls “microthemes.” I’m also seeing the annotations as a way to develop professional voice as well. Strong annotations carry an authoritative voice. They say “I know what I’m talking about.” I want my students to have that confidence. It’s wonderful to see it come about.

One last thing. I know people are also stressing about the literacy artifact review presentation. We’re setting that aside for the time being in order to focus on the essay. I don’t like doing too many things at once. I’ve learned that when I do that, the quality of learning suffers. So we’ll return to it in a few weeks and will really concentrate on it. There will be class time devoted to it. Please, just hang on to your notes and don’t worry.

Thanks also for the comments last week. They are really helpful. I’m so glad that the Olson piece made sense after discussion. I will definitely keep it as a reading next time I teach the class. I’m also thrilled that everyone is coming to see themselves as able to take on a difficult reading and not give up.

We started out by wrapping up our overview of the history of literacy research by doing the museum walk.  Everybody pretty much included the same thing on their posters. Next time I’ll have them hang them on different walls though to encourage more moving around. I did quite a bit of leading conversation around the histories trying to pull out what patterns the students saw in the histories and making the links to the theories. I felt as if I was leading a bit too much. I should have asked the question before the students went to view the posters. But, I think in general the activity served its purpose. Based on the wiki postings, the students do have the gist of how reading research developed over 50 years and how it informs our current understandings of literacy acquisition and learning.

We then moved into a word sort activity. I’ve done the word sort before but differently. In the past, each small group was given a stack of words and asked to categorize. Then we’d compare what the different groups had. I didn’t want to do that since we had already done a similar thing with the museum walk. Last week Kathy had talked about doing a time line silently with cards, so I adapted that idea to the word sort. Each student was given two cards and asked to place them on the wall. They could move other cards if they needed to. They easily placed the cards related to Halliday’s functions of language (which I think we need to talk about more). The systems of language identified by Kucer were also placed easily. A few cards were troublesome though (such as deep structure and surface structure). So I talked about that a bit. Again, I felt a bit leading, but there are things I wanted to bring out. What I liked about the activity though is that it did reveal places where student understanding was still a bit shaky. What I was uncomfortable with is that at times I felt I put students on the spot. But they responded well – and honestly – so I appreciated that.

I think the class is coming together well as a community. I see a growing level of trust and comfort among the students. I’m hoping they’re feeling comfortable taking risks with their thinking.

I then gave the students 20 minutes to start their literacy artifact review project. We arranged the groups (after a few false starts) and I randomly assigned eras based on Alexander & Fox’s article. I just had them brainstorm a list of in school texts that would have been in use during that era and then apply Halliday’s functions of language and Freebody & Luke’s reader roles (just text user & text participant) to those texts. The activity was intended to just get them started. We’ll be spending more time between now and the actual date of the presentations (which Kathy Broikou and I moved back in the syllabus).

I intentionally didn’t spend any time on writing workshop this week. The annotations are developing well. It’ll be interesting to see what the batch with Olson’s article looks like. As one of the authors pointed out, when faced with a cognitively difficult task, the last skill learned is the first one lost. So, I’m wondering if the quality of the annotations will be less strong given the difficulty of the Olson text.

Which brings me to the next thing we did in class. We spent an hour discussing the readings – Olson & Kucer in particular.  I had originally planned a more structured activity for the discussion, but after Kathy and I talked, I decided to back off on that and just give one guiding question along with the suggestion to use the chart handed out at the beginning of the semester to hold their thinking.

The conversation was good. The Olson reading was difficult, so I had I to do a little bit of clarification. But for the most part the students did get the gist of it. In the future, I’m going to remove the Dyson & Bloome articles and just have them read Olson & Gee. At first I wondered if the Olson article was redundant of the Kucer chapter, but after discussing it with several of the groups, I realized it’s not. They are complementary. The Olson article operates at a more abstract level and the Kucer chapter gets into the nitty-gritty. What I think will help in the future though is if I instruct the students to read the Kucer chapter first, then read the Olson article. And maybe even accompany the Olson article with a “comprehension constructor.

We prepared for next week by doing an anticipation guide. Kathy and I removed the Goodman article from next week’s assignment and moved it to October 27th. There was some confusion about when the annotation for Goodman was due. I hope I clarified that the draft annotation should be brought to class on the 27th. Same as always.

Class ended with the students writing a theoretical understanding they were gaining from this class and the connection to practice they were making on sticky notes and posting them as they left. I’m going to type those out and hand them out next week. The connections being made are great.

In overview, I was pleased with last night’s class. It was good to slow down and dig in.

Now onward.

The first part of class was designed to revisit last week’s readings on the readin processes, but do so in a way that connected to this week’s readings on historical perspectives on reading. We focused on four areas of reading research in particular – phonics, fluency, comprehension, word study. I selected those as the focus because those are the areas getting most attention in education (particularly childhood) because of the National Reading Panel. I struggle in part because I feel these articles are more or less “informational” and don’t require a lot of discussion to get through. I am seeking ways to engage students in the information and to apply the information to what they are doing in their other classes and in their teaching. I don’t think we got there yet. That’s something we need to return to next week.

After moving through a series of questions I set up to move through the readings, we spent some time workshopping the annotations. I showed two annotations that I thought were particularly well done. There are several approaches to teaching writing. One is showing examples that are imperfect and then doing the revising. Another is showing exemplary work and talking about what makes them exemplary. I chose the latter. What was nice is that I was able to use student work. I have some strong writers in this class.

That took pretty much half the class. I let time get away from me a little bit because I allowed myself to become engaged in conversation with a few students. I need to keep a better watch on time and to move the groups along in a timely fashion. I like talking with my students, hearing their concerns, questions, and just learning who they are as people. It helps me as a teacher. But at the same time, whilst I’m conversing with one or two students, I don’t want the other’s languishing. I’m very aware of that.

During the second half of class, I had the students spend time in their expert groups discussing their chapters, and then we moved into jigsaw groups to teach one another about the chapters and to put together a timeline. We weren’t able to finish that activity, so that’s going to be the first thing we do next week. We also need to spend time discussing how the research we read relates to the other classes and to our teaching. I also plan to do an activity to reinforce the learning about the specific reading processes that are discussed in the readings.

For me, the class flew by. I hope it did for the students as well. I just have to keep reminding myself that this is a survey class and the best we can do is introduce the students to these concepts and hope that they’ll be able to dig into them more deeply in their methods classes as a way to make sense of why it is that they do what they do.

Anyway, last night’s class was a “Willie Wonka” moment. Those of you who might remember the version with Gene Wilder might remember what I’m talking about. He’s taking the kids and their parents around the factory and says, “so much time; so little to do — no reverse that.”  Well that’s the way I felt last night.

As an instructor, one of my biggest challenges is that there is so much I want to share within a limited amount of time. I have to remind myself that I’ve spent ten years directly and intensely studying this literacy stuff, and that I’m continuing to learn and develop understandings. That’s one of the reasons why I love teaching this class. I learn every time.

Last night though felt disconnected and without closure. There is so much we didn’t get to. I’m not sure how useful the activities (House, Poultry, Di Tri Berresse) were. Let me know.

Part of the problem is that the material in Kucer is pretty much just informational. In my mind there’s not a whole lot to discuss about it. It’s more a matter of pulling out what the reading processes are from his text. I thought the activity of mapping it onto the 4 reader roles would do that. We will be returning to that, because we didn’t have enough time to really do it well and more importantly to talk about it.

I felt at the end as if I was flying at a crazy speed.

We didn’t do reader’s workshop, and we also didn’t get enough time to workshop the annotations. That said, however, I’m pleased with what I’ve read so far. The annotations are showing an understanding of the texts and connections are being made. Most of my comments will be along the craft of writing. I love helping students move toward developing a strong professional voice.

I also read the comments to last week’s class. They were very helpful. I’m thrilled that so many people took the time to comment. One of the dominant themes was the power of being able to collaborate, yet some people wanted some more direct instruction. It’s always a tough line to walk. I’ll continue working on the balance.

There’s a lot to do for next week too. And we cut it down a lot! We’ve got to solidify our understandings of the literacy processes, what it has to do with student learning and where students struggle, and then take a look at specific processes through a historical lens.

So little to do, so much time — no reverse that.

What I’m less satisfied in (and this is an ongoing problem not isolated to this class) is the “sharing out” of group discussion. I’m not convinced that it’s a productive use of time. What I need to get better at doing is using the sharing out as a trigger or springboard for whole group discussion. I ended up doing a lot of the talking during that section of class. Maybe that’s ok. Afterall, it is my job to help pull all these things together.

I also did a couple of “minilectures.” I’m not convinced of the value of them either. The first one was a return to forms of social thought that I introduced with the in-class readings last week. I very quickly went over interpretivism and positivism and introduced critical theory and postmodernism. I drew on what Dr. Arndt gave me from Danforth & Taff. My intent was to connect it in particular to Larson & Marsh and their discussion of the two primary approaches to teaching (traditional/transformational). I’m not sure if I accomplished that. I did in my mind, but I’m not sure if I helped the students make the connection. The other minilecture was to go over that traditional/transformational approach to teaching. Again, same doubts about the teaching effectiveness. My self-doubts point to the weakness of lecture based teaching. Even when you do it for a short period of time, there are no assurances that the students are making sense of it. Sure, I could quiz them, but that would only show me that they can regurgitate. It wouldn’t show understanding. But listening in on their conversations did show me what they got out of the readings. I’m hoping the annotations will demonstrate that too.

Speaking of which, we did a quick workshop on the annotations. I modeled revision to an annotation written by one of the students (thanks!). The annotation was strong to begin with, and my revisions were meant to help develop an academic voice. I’m looking forward to receiving the revised annotations. My gut feeling is that they’re going to be good.

I also introduced the two main readings for next week. Before class I was struggling to select a prereading strategy that would be most effective for introducing the texts. I didn’t really come up with one I liked, so I fell back on looking at the headings and using them to guide one’s reading and questioning. But, as I was introducing the Kucer chapter, I realized that Daniels & Zemelman’s “Guidearama” would be a good strategy. It really turned out to be what I was doing orally. I quickly introduced the Freebody & Luke article, but didn’t do much with it. Ah, the tyranny of time.

I asked students to end class by introducing them (very superficially) to Mill’s concept of intellectual craftsmanship and “the file.” I need to do more with that. Time was too short to really reflect. But at least it’s a start. I’ve decided it’s how I want to end every class.

I’m looking forward to seeing comments on this blog and what people post on the wiki (I hope everyone is able to get on now). There are things I’m changing with that next time I teach this course too. Indeed, every time through a course is a learning experience for me.

I invite students to post additional questions about the course using the comments function of this blog.

After break we moved into reader’s and writer’s workshop. I gave the students a vocabulary self-awareness chart and they dutifully began filling it out. I didn’t give them time to complete the whole chart – again the tyranny of the clock – but at least they had a chance to begin thinking about those terms and concepts and know to keep an eye out for those terms as they read the assigned texts for this week. We then moved in to taking a look at the Gee chapter “What is Literacy” and I did a think-aloud protocol and interactive reading of the first page where he defines D/discourse. I did this to  raise student awareness of how academic articles are often about definition (that chapter in particular), and also how to work their way through a dense article.

After reading Gee, we moved on to reading about positivism and interpretivism. We’ll return to those concepts next week. The purpose of reading those two pieces was to gain a sense of how to write annotations. We did the positivism one as a whole group and then the interpretivism piece in small groups. Based on the feedback provided by the students’ exit tickets it was time well spent. I’m not thrilled with those two excerpts, but to date, they are the most succinct definitions of the terms that I’ve found. We need to do more discussion about those concepts though and link it more clearly to literacy and the material we’re going to be studying this semester and into the rest of the program.

We didn’t get a chance to do the discussion on “what is literacy.” I really like having that discussion the first night of class before they do their reading because it gives me a base line of what the students already know. But we’ll adjust. We’ll have that discussion next week after they do their readings. I’m wishing now that I had had them do a quick opinionnaire or anticipation guide. I think that would have gotten at the prior knowledge/misconceptions piece without a lengthy discussion. I will do that next time I teach the course. (and this type of realization is why I believe it is so important to take a few minutes to reflect after teaching and most importantly to write it down somewhere so it doesn’t get lost).

So that was the night. In some ways I feel we didn’t get a heck of a lot done, but in other respects I think we did. We began to build a learning community, I began to get a sense of individual personalities and learning needs, and I hope the students began to get a sense of my expectations and who I am as an instructor.

Just to clarify what the assignments are for next week:

• Read
  • Larson & Marsh chapter 1 – write an annotation
  • Gee “what is literacy” – write an annotation
  • assigned pages of Jenkins et al – no annotation required
  • one of the “Your Choice” articles – write an annotation

• Bring those annotations to class. I will not be collecting them, but you will be using them as part of your discussion.
• Someone in your group should go to the class wiki, go to your group page, and try it. You do not have to post a summary of your discussion because we didn’t do much discussion last night.
  • To access the wiki, go to the email you received from pbwiki notifying you of your invitation to join.
  • Click on the link and enter the required information, including a password of your choice.
  • That should take you in.
    • If you no longer have that email, go to mypbwiki.com
    • Go through the sign-in
    • You’ll get a message that you have a verification pending
    • Request a new verification
    • Go to your email and use the link from the new verification.
    • NOTE: YOU MAY HAVE TO GO TO THE SJFC SPAM FILTER TO FIND YOUR VERIFICATION. SOMETIMES IT GETS SENT THERE.
• Consider adding/revising material on the “Terms and People to know” page of the wiki.
• Consider commenting on this blog post. If you have any questions, here’s a good forum for asking. To comment scroll to the end of this post. You’ll have to scroll past the blogroll stuff (those are links you might want to check out sometime). Click on the link that says either “no comments yet” if you are the first person to comment or “comments” if someone else has commented.

If you have problems getting into the wiki, come to class 15 minutes early next week and I’ll work with you to get you in.

The purpose of this blog for this semester is to reflect on my practice and to provide my students with a place to see my thinking about the course and to respond to that thinking. I am requiring my Nature & Acquisition of Literacy students to read this blog and to respond to it a certain number of times each semester. Each comment must occur in a different week. Multiple postings made within a week will only be counted once.

Hope to model reflective practice and to possibly open up space for conversation beyond the classroom.

We’ll see how it goes. If anything I’ll have an ongoing record of what went on in class so that I can refer to it in the future.