Learning Letter Assignment

Within my time in English 493 I have learned some valuable lessons and teaching strategies that I will take with me as I advance onward in the Education program. Throughout this coarse we have talked about theories and concepts, presented about books, mini-lessons, and built unit plans. Within the 10 week course we have covered so much. 

For my book talk, I presented on To Kill a Mockingbird, which I was already reading for my practicum class. This was my first time reading this book and because of Chris Tovani’s lessons within her book, I wasn’t afraid to tell my students that. I was open to them about my reading techniques when I was their age and was able to connect with them on that level. By reading this book for the first time, I was able to pick up on more things than when I only read sparknotes. 

The mini lesson proved to be beneficial and kind of ridiculous. I hate making a 50 minute lecture in only 20 minutes. I feel rushed and then I get thrown off by keeping track of time. For my part of the lesson, I was in charge of the biography of Poe. My lesson was mainly lectured based with some peer interaction with the crossword puzzle, but overall I wish I had made it a little more challenging. 

The unit plan proved to be more difficult than I gave it credit for. I struggled with my lesson plans and connecting everything together to make it equal out to the final project. I learned that it is tough to make Romeo and Juliet a month long unit. I know in reality it would take at least a month and a half. It was beneficial to create this unit plan, so that I am able to get more organized and prepared for full time student teaching in the spring, when we really do read Romeo and Juliet. 

Within our discussion in class, I learned a lot about the many theories of teaching and how I can bring some of that to my own classroom. I have already taught my students how to be active readers, and to take notes when reading. This proved to be beneficial for them and they did so much better on their test because of it. Some discussions made me question the educational field. I would often debate whether or not we are putting too much thought into the aspect of teaching or if I am not putting enough into it. I know there is a lot to teach students, but the science and theories of teaching often make me feel overwhelmed. 

By reading the handouts and participating in discussion I have come to the conclusion that I do need to put more research within my classroom. I need to continue to read theories and teaching suggestions so that it will make me a more qualified and educated teacher. When we become teachers, learning doesn’t stop after graduation. It continues throughout our career. 

POE TPA

TPA Lesson Plan #1

 

1. Teacher Candidate	Katie Tiffany	Date Taught	Nov 19, 2014
Cooperating Teacher		School/District
2. Subject	English	Field Supervisor
3. Lesson Title/Focus	Poe Biography	5. Length of Lesson	20 minutes
4. Grade Level	Freshmen

 

6. Academic & Content Standards (GLEs/EARLs/Common Core)	CCSS.ELA-RL.9-10.2 Determine a central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refines by specific details: provide an objective summary of the text. CCSS.ELA-SL.9-10.1 Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions with diverse partners on grades 9-10 topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
7. Learning Objective(s)	Given Edgar Allan Poe’s biography students will identify importance events/people in his life and make connections in his literature by participating efficiently in popcorn reading and discussion.
8. Academic Language	In today’s lesson there will only be two academic language that will be presented. Students will rediscover or review what a biography is. The will do this by turning to a partner and discussing in their own words what they think a biography is. This then turns into discussion. Students will be presented with what proper discussion looks like. They will be reminded to stay on topic and to touch their nose when they are finished completing their discussion.

 

9. Assessment

The assessments that I will be doing will all be formative assessments. I will be assessing the partner discussion of biography. With a thumbs up for understanding, and thumbs down for missed, I will be able to assess if I need to go into depth about what a biography is for my students. This will then lead into the assessments of the notecards that will be given to the students at the end of class as a ticket out the door. I will read over the new fact that students learned about Edgar Allan Poe and address if any information was misconstrued the following day. My last assessment for this lesson will happen the following day when students turn in their crossword puzzle from the previous day as homework.  Within the crossword are terms that they can find within the biography. If there were any that they miss we will address that the next day to avoid any confusion.

 

10. Connections

This lesson will connect with the following lessons provided for the week. It is important to understand Edgar Allan Poe’s dark history in order to understand his works such as “The Raven” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” which we will be discussing within the week. Poe incorporates parts of his life into these stories and students will be able to make that background knowledge connection if they are introduced to Poe beforehand.

 

11. Instructional Strategies/Learning Tasks to Support Learning
Learning Tasks and Strategies Sequenced Instruction
Teacher’s Role At the beginning of class I will have my lesson objectives posted on the board in the front as well as the list of what we are doing in class for the day. I will ask a student to read the objective and the list. I will begin by telling the students we will be reading about Poe’s biography. I’ll ask the students to turn to their elbow partner and describe what a biography is in their own words. When discussion is all done I’ll ask the partner for a thumbs up/thumbs down response to whether or not their partner answered correctly. I will then hand out the Edgar Allan Poe biography. We will begin popcorn reading. After we are done reading I’ll ask that they students get together again with a partner and work on the crossword puzzle that I am handing out. We will work on this for the rest of class. Two minutes before class is over I will hand out notecards and ask that the students write down one new thing they learned about Poe as a ticket out the door. Once the bell has rang, students are free to leave.	Students’ Role Students will come into the classroom when the bell rings and have a seat in their assigned seats. They will take out a pencil. One students will read the objective and schedule that is posted on the white board in the front of the classroom. Once discussion has begun the students will discuss their definition of a biography. Once discussion is done students will put a thumbs up if their partner got the correct answer, thumbs down if they didn’t. They will be handed the Edgar Allan Poe biography and popcorn read as a big group. Once they have finished the reading Students will get back with their partners and start on the crossword puzzle that was given to them. Two minutes before class is done, students will be given a notecard. They are to write one new fact that they learned about Edgar Allan Poe. They are to hand that notecard to the teacher as they exit the classroom once the bell has rang.
Student Voice: I will provide my students with the learning targets and schedule for the day and have one student read it aloud to the classroom. I will have students give me thumbs up or thumbs down if their partner explained what a biography was correctly. And I will be assessing their tickets out the door about one new thing they learned about Edgar Allan Poe. Students will also provide voice through their crossword puzzle. If there is any confusion about words and/or parts of Edgar Allan Poe’s biography that the students did not understand, I will address them the next day in class.

 

12. Differentiated Instruction

In my classroom I have one IEP with hard of seeing. In order to accommodate this student I have them placed in the front of the room where they have access to the materials that I present to them up front. Also their Edgar Allan Poe handout has a bigger font on it then the other students. This lesson deals with auditory, visual, and tactile learners. Auditory learners will listen to other students read the biography aloud as we popcorn read. Auditory learners will also listen to the discussion of their peers as they discuss what a biography is. Visual learners are accommodated with a handout of Poe’s biography. This allows them to read and see what it is we are reading out loud. For the tactile learners we will be doing a crossword puzzle. Students are to find the terms within the biography and match them to the hints i have given them and place the correct word in the spaces provided. For the students who are having trouble understanding the material they can come in during break or before/after school to ask me questions.

 

13. Resources and Materials

Poe’s Biography http://www.poemuseum.org/life.php worksheet Edgar Allan Poe crossword puzzle pencils notecards

 

14. Management and Safety Issues

One problem that we have in the classroom is students talking as the teacher is talking. So if disruptive talking takes place in the classroom I will stop talking till the students understands that they are being disruptive. They already know that this is the signal for quit being disruptive. Some students also have a hard time staying focused on the writing task and choosing not to write during class. If this happens I will quietly talk to the student and let him know if he doesn’t write in class it will be homework, and that I am being gracious to give them time in class to write so that they don’t have to do homework. Students also have an issue about getting up and walking around before the bell has rang if we are done with instruction. I will ask the students to sit down. If they don’t cooperate I will have them stay a second for every time I have to say sit down.

 

15. Parent & Community Connections

At Mead High School they use an online program that allows students and parents to see their grades, what is being assigned, and what they are missing for the class. The students also have in their possession a syllabus that their parents can reference as to what we are doing in the classroom. If there is any problems or concerns the parents have access to my cooperating teacher’s email and phone number.

To Kill A Mockingbird Handout

Background: Scout Finch lives with her brother, Jem, and their widowed father, Atticus, in the sleepy Alabama town of Maycomb. Maycomb is suffering through the Great Depression, but Atticus is a prominent lawyer and the Finch family is reasonably well off in comparison to the rest of society. One summer, Jem and Scout befriend a boy named Dill, who has come to live in their neighborhood for the summer, and the trio acts out stories together. Eventually, Dill becomes fascinated with the spooky house on their street called the Radley Place. The house is owned by Mr. Nathan Radley, whose brother, Arthur (nicknamed Boo), has lived there for years without venturing outside.

Scout goes to school for the first time that fall and detests it. She and Jem find gifts apparently left for them in a knothole of a tree on the Radley property. Dill returns the following summer, and he, Scout, and Jem begin to act out the story of Boo Radley. Atticus puts a stop to their antics, urging the children to try to see life from another person’s perspective before making judgments. But, on Dill’s last night in Maycomb for the summer, the three sneak onto the Radley property, where Nathan Radley shoots at them. Jem loses his pants in the ensuing escape. When he returns for them, he finds them mended and hung over the fence. The next winter, Jem and Scout find more presents in the tree, presumably left by the mysterious Boo. Nathan Radley eventually plugs the knothole with cement. Shortly thereafter, a fire breaks out in another neighbor’s house, and during the fire someone slips a blanket on Scout’s shoulders as she watches the blaze. Convinced that Boo did it, Jem tells Atticus about the mended pants and the presents.

To the consternation of Maycomb’s racist white community, Atticus agrees to defend a black man named Tom Robinson, who has been accused of raping a white woman. Because of Atticus’s decision, Jem and Scout are subjected to abuse from other children, even when they celebrate Christmas at the family compound on Finch’s Landing. Calpurnia, the Finches’ black cook, takes them to the local black church, where the warm and close-knit community largely embraces the children.

Atticus’s sister, Alexandra, comes to live with the Finches the next summer. Dill, who is supposed to live with his “new father” in another town, runs away and comes to Maycomb. Tom Robinson’s trial begins, and when the accused man is placed in the local jail, a mob gathers to lynch him. Atticus faces the mob down the night before the trial. Jem and Scout, who have sneaked out of the house, soon join him. Scout recognizes one of the men, and her polite questioning about his son shames him into dispersing the mob.

At the trial itself, the children sit in the “colored balcony” with the town’s black citizens. Atticus provides clear evidence that the accusers, Mayella Ewell and her father, Bob, are lying: in fact, Mayella propositioned Tom Robinson, was caught by her father, and then accused Tom of rape to cover her shame and guilt. Atticus provides impressive evidence that the marks on Mayella’s face are from wounds that her father inflicted; upon discovering her with Tom, he called her a whore and beat her. Yet, despite the significant evidence pointing to Tom’s innocence, the all-white jury convicts him. The innocent Tom later tries to escape from prison and is shot to death. In the aftermath of the trial, Jem’s faith in justice is badly shaken, and he lapses into hopelessness and doubt.

Despite the verdict, Bob Ewell feels that Atticus and the judge have made a fool out of him, and he vows revenge. He menaces Tom Robinson’s widow, tries to break into the judge’s house, and finally attacks Jem and Scout as they walk home from a Halloween party. Boo Radley intervenes, however, saving the children and stabbing Ewell fatally during the struggle. Boo carries the wounded Jem back to Atticus’s house, where the sheriff, in order to protect Boo, insists that Ewell tripped over a tree root and fell on his own knife. After sitting with Scout for a while, Boo disappears once more into the Radley house.

I chose this text because my freshmen English class at my school are reading it and I am reading it for the first time. When I was a student in high school I didn’t practice good reading skills, and I read sparknotes in order to get by. This text is very good for early high school students because it teaches this aspect of good and bad and how justice can be unfair. It is an easy to read text with themes that are evident and don’t require deep thinking. 

Obstacles- The only obstacle I see about this text is the rumor of Robinson raping Mayella and the act of racism. Maybe some parents might not want their child to discuss topic of rape and racism. On an administration side I see no problem to the text because there is good value lessons within this text that will make our students aware about the undercover racism that still lives in the U.S. Students will learn a great deal that the government has done it’s part in removing racism, now it is our part as human beings to stop it. Some teaching ideas: Racism- connecting with Emmett Till

My hero project- present about people they admire

Truth vs Rumor Tabloid Article- After analyzing the difference between what is said and what is known about Arthur Radley, students write a sensational, tabloid-style news article. Discuss what is known about Boo and what is Rumored about him. 

This is a text that you have to go deep into because there is so many themes and lessons to be learned about it, and I know as a student it is hard for them to follow. The first part of the book is short stories about Scout, Jem, and Dill and it isn’t until part two that they book really picks up. 

How Do I Get Beyond Acquiring Knowledge and Facts Within My Classroom?

What instantly caught my eye in Teaching Literature to Adolescents was the different notions of learning literature. In my classroom at Mead High School, my master teacher teaches only acquiring facts and knowledge. We are currently reading To Kill A Mockingbird, and the only assessment and learning we do has to do with specific characters, what is happening, and background facts about this idea of racism. We don’t give students an opportunity for the expression of individual open-ended responses. The quizzes are set up as a question and answer response based. The only way they can fail the quiz is if they did not read. After awhile this becomes boring and I can see my students getting bored as well with just lecture based instruction. The trouble I find is how do I make learning more adventurous for these kids so that they can create their own ideas and understanding about the text?

Every Monday and Wednesday my students have a journal entry that they are supposed to write and they have to use a “style file” to spice up their writing. Instead of actually evaluating their journals and reading what they wrote, we grade them upon whether they hit the required page limit and correctly used the style file. I find myself wanting to read their journals and find out more about my students, but due to time constraints and the burden of grading more and more pieces of work it becomes almost impossible. 

I understand my teacher is nervous to give more creativity to his students only because they are so resistant to actually reading the text as it is with an easy 10 point quiz every morning. To read mini essays about their understanding would be tedious and almost unattainable with 60+ freshmen English students and 50 mythology students. The class size makes it impossible to finish grading anything. So my thought process is such: I understand that there is more that I need to do for my students to broaden their education and give them a chance to actually evaluate the text, but how can I do that if they will not read? 

Who is Katie Brown?

Today in class we will be meeting with Washington State Teacher of the Year, Katie Brown. Katie Brown is a teacher at Shuksan Middle School in Bellingham Washington. She has been there for 11 years and two years ago transitioned into an ELL specialist. She has been working with families from all different cultures and built a community that  focus on learning the English language. Her work has improved all classrooms and students confidence has increased in the short two years. 

ELL strategies are important to understand in all classes. If a foreign student is struggling with the concept of English, they will struggle with all aspects of school and eventually give up and drop out. Because we want all students to succeed, we must learn to implement all the strategies of ELL teaching. We must make sure these students do not fall behind. 

Katie Brown’s blog is something that I will now keep tabs on because the information she presents is very powerful that all of us must be accountable for in our classrooms. Her main message within all these blog posts is about team work and working together to improve our schools and those struggling every day with the English language. You can tell just by the voice she puts within her blogs that this teacher really truly cares for her school, students, and community. She interacts with all the foreign families, implementing English in their lives. What I find most humble about this women is she is perfectly fine implementing her teachings as a teacher instead of moving up into the administrator position. She is a hands on kind of person who feels that she can impact these lives in the position that she is in.

Some questions that I have for Katie Brown is:
-Where do you get the time to teach these students English with the time frame and curriculum.
 -What advice do you have for us future teachers that we should take into consideration before finding a job?
-How are we to learn about ELL before jumping into the work force?

Readicide: How to Implement the Love of Reading Back Into Our Classrooms.

I simply love the definition of readicide. It is the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practice found in schools. Back in my days as a middle/high school student, I found myself hating reading. The text were too boring, and at an early stage of school I figured all I needed to do was listen to the lectures and I will ace the test. This is because teachers have felt the need to teach to the test so that they seem like they are doing an accurate job. I was never pushed to read for the love of it. That is what is still happening in our schools today. Students are learning at an early age that they despise any reading at all. We must save our schools and students from this habit because if we continue down this path we will have illiterate students who rely on others for the answers.

Kelly Gallagher believes that a way to get our students to love reading is by giving them interesting materials. I agree full heartedly that this will work because of my own personal experience. It wasn’t until senior year of high school that I became a reader. It was all thanks to The Great Gatsby. I don’t know what it was about the book that got me hooked onto reading. I found the 1920s fascinating. I love the aspect of new women, the American Dream, gangsters, bootleggers, etc. I loved Gatsby’s dream and admired that he did it all for love, even if it was a terrible reason. The fact remains that if we connect with our students and find out their interests we can give them books that they can enjoy that just might spark a light when it comes to reading. 

I do and don’t agree with this idea of flogging a book to death. I agree that we as teachers overanalyze books and take every little detail and make it into a lesson. This makes students resistant to read on their own because they believe that reading is to break it all down. I don’t agree on the aspect that if we don’t teach students to look at certain aspects of book and find the themes or the figurative language that authors use, then we are setting our students up to just read words. I am that way. I have trouble finding the themes or seeing a piece of literature and being able to analyze every aspect of it. We have to find the right balance of analyzing without tearing the book into shreds. 

TPA

General Reactions to TPA lesson plan:

Now that I am in my second quarter of the Education program, I have mixed feeling concerning the ed TPA. First of all why does lesson planning have to be so in depth and every second of your lesson plan to be planned out. I understand that for new teachers we have no idea what we are doing and it makes our lessons run move smoothly, but to do one lesson plan is so much work. It takes me a full day to sit down and really concentrate on my TPAs. I have to constantly take breaks because it is so mentally draining. New teachers are getting worn down by the constant work they are doing in just lesson planning. 

What in here seems valuable/worthwhile?

The part that I always find useful in the TPA is the assessment part. Figuring out in advance how you are assessing students learning is very crucial. You can’t wait until the last minute to decide how it will occur, the assessment is the center of your lessons. Also the part about differentiated instruction is important because not all students learn the same and some of them have special needs that need to be addressed. You have to distinguish how all your students will learn and how will you help those that need the extra help. 

What questions and concerns to you have about the TPA lesson plan?

The only concerns I have that it is always changing. Every time I look at the template there is something new. Once I am out of college, I will be forced to self teach the new lesson plan to me. This makes it hard to keep up and eventually I will give up on it all together because nothing will be the same as when I learned it. Already I am seeing some changes in the format and I am worried about the future of the TPA lesson plan. 

Useful exercise for beginning teachers

As I have already stated, this TPA lesson plan really gets new teachers to think in depth about their lesson plans. It gets you to look at ALL aspects of teaching and what your main goal is. Another useful thing about the TPA is that it is structured and keeps new teachers focus on what the lesson plan is. 

Problematic about the format?

The part about teacher involvement is always problematic only because it is so hard to find mature ways of telling the parents what is going on in class. Majority of schools have a grade book online that parents can always check. However, that doesn’t give parents a good idea on what the class is really doing. It’s silly to have parents sign off on students homework, we are trying to get them to be responsible for themselves. New teachers struggle to find ways to get parents involved and aware of what is being taught in their classrooms. 

I Read It, But I Don't Get It

Chris Tovani’s book I Read It, But I Don’t Get It” has shown me the light on how to get some of my students who are struggling with being able to comprehend a book. This book could not have entered my life at a better moment. In my freshmen English classes we are reading To Kill a Mockingbird. The test scores are sad to see. I begin to wonder while grading them, are my students lazy and not reading the book or are they not understanding what is happening. I have picked up some skills in this book that I am taking with me to my classroom and teaching to see if there is some way that I can improve their test scores. 

Within this book also I recognize some skills and activities that my English teachers have used in my educational years. The House activity that Mrs. Tovani used in her classroom is the same activity I was given to do when I was in high school. I remember vividly at looking at different points of views and perspective and highlighting certain information. However, that connection between reading and how to set purpose never clicked because my high school teacher never made that connection known. I was alway under the impression that it was just an activity we were doing. 

There is a question that I have about comprehending reading that was bugging me the whole time as I was reading. Is using background knowledge and experience the only way to get kids to comprehend their reading? Every chapter of this book had something more or less to do with this idea of using background knowledge. After a while it was repetitive and my eyes began to skim over that information because I felt like I had heard it a million times already. I understand it’s significance, and that it is very beneficial to the learning of how to really read. I just feel like there has to be another way for those privileged kinds who haven’t had enough experience  with hardship and lack street skills. 

One activity that I found that would be so much fun and beneficial to a classroom was the book sharing. I love the idea of allowing kids to go back and remember a book that had a lasting impression on them. It’s like going back in time and finding that love of reading. I always go back and read certain books over and over again because it made such an impact on me like The Great Gatsby. 

Social Justice in the English Classroom

NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) held a conference in December 2009 addressing this issue of social justice in the English classroom. They start out by stating that the Declaration of Independence states that we are all equals. We all know that this is completely false because of power, racialism, social class, and gender fairness. Their goal is to have the English classroom differ from the Declaration’s failure and gives tips on how to accomplish this within every English classroom. 

They define social justice into 7 categories:

1. A goal that evades easy definition 
2. A grounded theory
3. A stance/position 
4. A pedagogy   
5. A process 
6. A framework for research  
7. A promise

This website goes into these beliefs more deeply and activities that could benefit us (English teachers) into incorporating into our own classrooms. 

The belief that social justice as a pedagogy is an interesting topic that should be addressed. The first sentence instantly caught my attention. The document states that “Social justice pedagogy presupposes that all students are worthy of human dignity, that all are worthy of the same opportunities in education, that the contract they enter into in schools must honor their sociocultural advantages and disadvantages,that it must seek to offer the same educational, sociocultural , and psycho-emotional opportunities to each student in order to help them meet and obtain a basic threshold that is mutually beneficial to each party who enter in the school space.” Let’s unfold this lengthy sentence. What the NCTE is saying is that we need to treat all o our students equally no matter their background or socio-economic standing. Too many teachers give up on their troubled, or “poor” students because they don’t know how to handle them. I think if we just handles them like HUMAN BEINGS, teachers wouldn’t have such a big problem. We shouldn’t be giving up on the bad students, we should be focusing more of our attention on these students so that they can be equal to the achieving students. 

For example: In my second period classroom at Mead High School, there is a student who comes from a different cultural background and has a hard time grasping the fundamentals on English. Instead of disregarding him as hopeless and giving up on him, I have allowed myself to be there to help him and tutor him to better his English work. We are reading paragraphs allowed to the class, and after I saw how many errors were in his paper I took his out of the pile and returned it to him telling him I would come in early to help him fix his paper. If I would have just left it be, he would have been torn apart by his fellow classmates and he would have probably given up on even trying. We have to put in more effort for those less fortunate and help them catch up with the rest of the class otherwise we are letting our students and ourselves down. 

http://www.ncte.org/cee/positions/socialjustice

The Critical Pedagogy Reader

The Critical Pedagogy Reader addressed some ideas about education that I have never really thought about before. This article goes into a great deal about education and how to the educational researcher, school promotes student empowerment and reproduces dominant class interests. Personally when reading through these articles I just start to think that these people are thinking to far into education. Some of the information that was presented, however, makes sense when you really think about education and how it works. School should be a place that a student finds themselves, learn about how they learn, and how they want to perceive the world around them. Although the kids don’t relies it as they are in school but they are there to make a better life for themselves or at least have parents pushing for a better life. 

One thing I read in this article that I have definitely read before is about the macro learning and micro learning. When reading this part of the article I thought, “Macro sounds like a way better of teaching, why aren’t we just using that.” Then I realized how ridiculous that sounded because Micro is just as important for learning dates and and specific information about events. Even in English we have to teaching information about literature and the information about the time surrounding the literature. But majority of the time we are teaching literature we have to dig deep into making connections with reality and finding themes within the text. 

Another interesting topic I found in this text is the different types of knowledge. To the world there is just knowledge, but this text brings up three different types of knowledge presented in the classroom. Technical which is the science knowledge, practical which s analyzing social situations, and finally emancipatory which is understanding social relations are distorted and manipulated by power and privilege. The last one seemed pretty dark outlook on knowledge. However, all the information within the text was really beneficial to me as a future teacher. We must look at all aspects of education if we are to be apart of it. 

The Most Terrifying Reading Thus Far: "The Pedagogy of the Oppressed"

Freire’s chapter two of “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” is the most depressing reading I have done thus far on the aspect of banking-concept making teachers out to be the “narrators” and “oppressors” of knowledge. Reading this chapter made me furious that someone would put this out making ALL teachers look like control freaks. I agree that some teachers can be seen as dominating know it alls that only want to cram information into their students heads and treat them as if they are incompetent of knowledge. When in fact, teachers are constantly learning from their own students. 

Teachers aren’t cutting off student’s creativity. They are actually pushing students to be more creative and talk about things that they are passionate about. Freire makes teachers look like they are God and students as lowly people. Our goal as educators isn’t to belittle these kids, we are here to push them to the best that they can be. If our only job was to sit in front of them and lecture on and on about our vast knowledge about the world, we would be boring the students. Especially in today’s world, students don’t learn like that anymore. I can see back in the “old days” that this is how teachers taught. Today we have standards and we rely on our students to not only learn from us, but to also learn from their fellow classmates. 

Education has really taken a turn in today’s society. The standards that are in place right now are to use technology and learn from other texts so that they can make up their own responses and perspectives about the world. Our job as educators is to simply guide them so that they are ready for the “real world.” Freire does nothing but stereotype teachers as dictators and emotionless robots just trying to get through the day and oppress students so that they grow up with a pessimistic view of the world and of teachers. 

Response-Based Approach to Reading Literature

Judith A. Langer’s “A Response-Based Approach to Reading Literature” talks about The Center’s mission on how to improve the teaching and learning of literature. The reader-based theory is designed to take the literature that students are reading and give them room to use their own experiences and culture backgrounds to design their own interpretations. What I personally like about this approach is that they understand that there are multiple perspectives and not just one. Looking back on my high school days I only remember there ever being one right answer when it came to interpretations. The Center also relives it takes a couple of reads to fully understand a text and come up with deeper interpretations. The more students experience the more they will interpret. Also with more experience their point of view on an interpretation will change. 

As I was reading this article I came across a topic that I thoroughly enjoy as history minor. With literature students get to live through the history. It is one thing to give students a history background, but by giving them literature they are able to live through history with the characters. They get to read and experience the emotions of those characters. 

Another aspect of this article that I enjoyed from a teacher’s perspective is this idea of having multiple perspectives. This allows students to think openly and conclude their own understandings and perspectives and build upon that without having a teacher tell them their wrong only because they don’t have that in their lesson plans. Teachers need to be more flexible in their lesson plans and allow their students creativity to flow like water. As teachers we need to use our class time effectively, but we also have to allow class time to explore these possibilities instead of reading at home and recounting the information they remember. As a new teacher I tend to give give the information instead of allowing students to think and interpret their own thoughts. Langer tells us that we shouldn’t do that. We need to encourage their own interpretations with mature literary discussions. Discussion is a big part of the response-based approach and with that we must also keep in account how to successfully use discussion within the classroom. 

Common Core State Standards

The Common Core State Standards has created some controversy since it has been introduced. Older teachers wonder if it will even work. They are set in their mind set that this, like all other standards, will fail and disappear within a couple years. It’s hard to disagree with them when they have the background knowledge of state standards and have seen many come and go, but this state standard is different than others that have been introduced. The Common Core State Standards allows teachers to create their own curriculum and teachers don’t feel like they have to only teach to the state test. 

Because of previous standards many students were being held back from exceeding and others were forced to suffer. I have seen first hand during my time in high school that my teachers were not pushing us to further in English Language Arts. It seemed that my teachers were only trying to get the basics across so that we could pass the WASL. Although it was a perfect pace for me, I could tell some of my fellow classmates were bored from either not being challenged or because they were so lost. Also my English class curriculum had no cultural background. In a school where 98% of the school was of white ethnicity. 

As a future teacher I am excited to experience CCSS. It will allow me to bring my own twist to my curriculum and get ideas from other teachers as well. With this system there will be more creative ways to teach materials and students will feed of that creativity and take it with them as they go onto college. I wish CCSS was around when I was a student in the secondary level, maybe then I would have more creativity within my classroom at Mead High School. CCSS are more so guidelines for teacher to reach, it doesn’t matter how they reach this standard but as long as they do their students will prosper. 

Discussion in the Secondary Classrooms

In "Discussion as a Way of Teaching" the authors go into depth on how discussion really enhances a classroom. Not only does discussion help to get the students to interact with one another, but it also gets the students to see more than one side of a topic. As teachers it is our job to get these teenagers to see that the world outside of middle/high school is more complex, but this task is not an easy one. As a student teacher myself, I find it hard to get my students to talk about simple stuff (i.e complex relationships like Romeo and Juliet's). After this reading, it has given me a little insight on how I can make discussion happen in my classroom.

One important aspect I found useful in chapter one was humility in discussion. In the high school settings there are so many cliches and stereotypes that it makes speaking out difficult. The students are scared of being judged for talking about a certain issue or maybe believe that if they don't draw attention to them they can survive high school. By making it clear the first day to your students to not judge someone based on their opinions of an issue and to show respect as they talk, then there should be no problem getting your students to speak up.

The benefits of discussion in the classroom are worth it to push your students to be more interactive in the classroom. Looking back to my high school days I realize that my teachers didn't have discussions. It was more of a lecture based high school classroom, and because of that I think I suffer as a college student myself. I feel that as a learner I have a hard time exploring the diversity of a subject and I never gained the intellectual agility that I see my colleagues obtaining. My high school did not prepare me for college, and because of that I will be sure that my own students don't suffer the same things. "Discussion as a Way of Teaching" has inspired me to further my teaching abilities and start using discussion within my classroom at Mead High School.