The reason I did this was to provide a way in to talking about the last two sets of reading we did as well as provide support for the essay. After all, two of the subquestions really were intensively linked to the last two sets of reading.

I gave the students a heuristic for thinking about the essay question. It was an outline that broke down the essay questions and provided a strategy for using the texts for attacking that question. I was of two minds regarding that heuristic. It felt in many respects too prescriptive, yet I realize that this is the first graduate class for many of my students and they have not yet developed the skills for tackling a dense question like this. I have to remind myself that in many respects I am still dealing with undergraduate type of thinking. It is a tough balance between providing support and being an enabler. After all, I can’t write the essay for them.

The essay serves as a formative assessment to see if there are still gaps in the students’ understandings, but it is also a writing to learn activity. By writing this essay the students are really forced to think through these ideas and to make connections. They come out on the other side with a much deeper understanding of the issues than they had before writing the essay. But it is a painful experience.

It’s painful for me too because I feel as if no matter how much support I give, it’s never enough.

One thing I’m going to do next time not give the students the heuristic all at once. They tended to focus on the first subquestion and had to be prompted to move on to the second and third subquestions. But was important for them to do so, because that’s where they would be talking about the new readings. So next time I’m going to do this almost as a progressive problem based learning activity. I’ll give them the first subquestion, then after a set period of time, give them the second, and so on.

During the second half of class I did a minilecture where I just recapped the readings we’ve done thus far. Nothing exciting, but hopefully it served to remind the students of the different texts.

We ended with writers’ workshop. I provided a model for how to synthesize readings and then had them work in groups to create a synthesis of some of the readings. Each group was able to create a synthesis, so I’m hoping to see that in the paper.

I need to continue reminding myself that this is an induction course and that I’m trying to move them toward thinking as literacy professionals. Yes, the content is important, but more than anything it’s the ways of thinking I want to see developed.

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.

This week we started out by thinking about visualization, drawing, clustering, and other forms of writing that support student learning. The math preservice teachers also looked at how visual modes of representation and language issues can contribute to student misunderstanding of a problem or process. I’m really liking the Kenney book. The readings are pretty straight forward, so I’m not wanting to spend a lot of time on them. The big thing I really want students to get is that while the strategy books may read a bit like cookbooks, they need to be thought about more deeply. So to get at that I asked the students to examine one strategy closely and think about the cognitive work that occurs when a student are engaged in that strategy.

We then moved on to some writing stuff. I had asked the students to bring in several paragraphs that identified an issue they were seeing in school. We had started that last class. I wanted them to analyze the event. We then used that to learn how to outline from the paragraph as a way to check our writing, and then to summarize from the outline. From there I had students brainstorm what’s on their minds, and then do a Know/What I want to know/How I’m going to figure it out chart. We went over some of the issues, but I’m refusing to supply answers. Part of the reason is, I don’t have all the answers. The other reason is that I want students to learn how to seek answers on their own. So they came up with a list of ideas of where to find out information. I also introduced them to the idea of professional journals and asked them to find a journal article that addresses their concern, read it, summarize it, and bring it in next week. I also asked them to start trying out strategies in their field placement as they can and bring it back to class to report.

Now that I think about it, I realize I’ve got several things going on that need to be brought to closure. 1) we need to bring closure on the writing they’ve been doing. 2) we need to return to their goals set at the beginning of the semester 3) we need to move ahead on the issues they brought up. My task for next week is to address these three pieces coherently while continuing to share literacy strategies. Is it time to go back to theory? Finally, I want them to move more and more to independence and taking over the course. How to do this in a systematic way that won’t cause too much stress. I think I have my work cut out for me. Stay tuned!