My Year in Flip-Flops

Some ideas after being assigned to read an article by David O'Brien: 

     The traditional meaning of “literate” is situated in print based texts.  Students who struggle with print based text are perceived as “at-risk” or in need of “remediation,” regardless of their competence with other kinds of texts. O’Brien argues that we should “reframe the way students usually positioned as incompetent modify their identities of competence—their abilities to tackle challenging tasks, and to persevere in engaging in future similar tasks.” In other words, if a kid has a lot of confidence in his ability to succeed in Zelda, can that student’s feeling of competence, self-efficacy, help-seeking behavior, (etc., etc.) be transferred from participating in video game text to print based text? O’Brien says yes.  Furthermore, he argues that the literate world is moving in a digital or hybridized direction anyway, so inevitably, we’re going to have to merge our understanding of print and digital literacy.  Why not start now with the Zelda kid?
    Motivation research shows that kids’ views of their own competence relate to the value they place upon tasks in our classrooms.  If they don’t think they can do it, it’s a dumb assignment. O’Brien says this is about attribution—“to what does one attribute personal success or failure?”  In O’Brien’s construct of attribution, there are four possible answers.

• Ability.  Struggling readers attribute failure to lack of ability, which they think won’t change.  However, ability in the context of digital literacy is viewed as competence with authoring software, which is changeable, rehearsable, and within students’ control.
• Effort.  While struggling readers seem to think their effort doesn’t have anything to do with success or failure on standards based tasks (like reaching a new grade level on a reading assessment), they perceive their levels of effort as leading to success or failure in mastery-oriented tasks (like learning new software to create a media project). Believing that trying harder will lead to success increases the likelihood of students engaging in activities and seeking help.
• Task Difficulty.  Tasks are viewed as stable and outside of students’ control.  Students attribute failure this way:  it’s just too hard for me.  If students can construct a “doable” task, they can “view success as attributable to effort”—meaning if the task is their own idea they have the perception that they can do it and will be more motivated to try it.
• Strategies. Since text and ability are perceived as unchangeable, struggling readers are unlikely to know about or use reading strategies. As a task, authoring media texts is perceived as flexible and complex, occurring in stages that lend themselves to strategies—mode switching, hyperlinking, using tools within an application, revising aesthetically and recursively during drafting and composing.

Content area teachers, or even language arts and reading teachers, are often bound by time, inexperience and budget to assign textbook reading to students.  Textbooks, however, can be limited in possibilities for differentiation in readability, student interest, and timeliness.  Primary teachers have long solved this problem by offering students structured choices among what some researchers call "twin texts" or "paired texts" of fiction or nonfiction trade books. (For further information, see this article- 2765688.pdf -from The Reading Teacher 53(4) retrieved from EBSCO).

Secondary teachers are using this strategy as well, but from my vantage point, not as often as our primary peers.  I've seen Sophie's World used as a complementary text in an AP European History course and An Ordinary Man in a world studies course.   I'd love to see Ishmael on a biology syllabus. That a trade book is offered at all in a content course is good news, but contemporary researchers  are telling us that choice in texts is a crucial motivator for secondary readers.  Handing out the same book to each student may be a motivation defeating practice.

How trade books are used may be as important as which books are used. Rebecca Olness has a new book out about using literature in the content areas (its first chapter is available free from the International Reading Association).  Although her target audience includes K-5 teachers, she offers a rationale for using trade books in the content classroom as well as suggestions for how to use them--reasoning and advice that seems applicable to secondary classrooms.

While secondary students may consider themselves too sophisticated for children's picturebooks, Olness encourages us not to count them out.  (I use them for scaffolding all the time.) But at the secondary level, most of us feel comfortable including websites, films (and other video text), art, music, and news articles to complement word based text.  However, I notice that these content supplements are not being treated as twin texts; rather they are illustrations of content.  To stimulate higher order thinking, they ought to be treated as meaninful texts and read using literacy strategies.  Otherwise, as mere illustrations, they may be judged redundant by students.

Our course text offers a variety of book lists for content area teachers.  These resources are important, but so is extending sound literacy practices to the complementary texts already in use.

Lisa Delpit, in her article "Ebonics and Culturally Responsive Instruction:  What Should Teachers Do?", reminds us that language learning is different than reading comprehension.  If an answer comes our way in nonstandard English, but accurately represents literal facts and plausible inferences from a classroom text, is the answer correct or incorrect?  According to Delpit, to call the answer incorrect "will only confuse the child, leading her away from those intuitive understandings about language that will promote reading development, and toward a school career of resistance and a lifetime of avoiding reading."

Instead of contstantly interrupting learning to correct nonstandard English, Delpit advocates encouraging students to take on roles with different voices than their own.  Intuitively, then, it isn't their language that is a problem.  They begin to learn to code switch.  Delpit concludes, "All we can do is provide students with access to additional language forms. Inevitably, each speaker will make his or her own decision about what to say in any context."

The authors of our course text suggest that this can be true generationally as well, or even regionally--any juxtaposition of dialects will do.

   A bidialectical dictionary could be generated to

• enhance role playing activities
• activate prior knowledge
• teach content specific vocabulary
• complement a classroom word wall
• underscore the relationship of language-purpose-audience
• shift the group into critical literacy

Table

WebQuest or Internet Busy Work?

Bernie Dodge from San Diego State University is widely credited with having created the concept of WebQuests in 1995.  In the past decade or so, educators have generated criteria that differentiate an authentic WebQuest from other uses of the Internet. A WebQuest

• focuses on a relevant, interesting, real world task
• is a scaffolded learning experience
• requires higher-order thinking
• makes good use of Internet resources
• inspires confidence in achieving success

Tom March (mentored by Bernie Dodge) claims that such criteria may be too simplistic because they overlook the Webquest's underlying pedagogy of transformative learning. In addressing the question what are webquests really?, March writes that "The main critical attribute of a WebQuest is to facilitate this transformation of information into a newly constructed, assimilated understanding."  webquests_tom_march.pdf

As literacy lessons, well-designed WebQuests offer opptortunities for guided and independent online reading and writing.

Locating or Creating WebQuests 

Various websites offer rubrics for evaluation of WebQuests, resources for creating WebQuests, templates for WebQuests, and sample WebQuests for professional development.

SDSU maintains a searchable database of WebQuests created for a variety of content areas, as does Zunal.com. (Never having designed an authentic webquest before, I would choose to follow zWebQuest's procedures to draft my own WebQuest rather than adapt an existing one.)

Browsing though online samples, most WebQuests seem to include these sections (as links in a sidebar):

I'm not ashamed to admit I have purposefully taught inanities such as "topic sentences," or "the 17 rules of comma usage."  Oh, the certainty of writing -1 in the margin of an essay. How adult I felt, smoking Camel Lights and drinking iced coffee over piles of student work at Urban Bean, "correcting" papers.  We all have to start somewhere.

Never mind that none of what I was teaching seemed natural or even slightly useful in the practice of writing, or reading for that matter. 

Bibbity, boppity, boo, a decade passes, I actually start paying attention to student work as an appreciative reader.  I do the Minnesota Writing Project a couple of summers, I finish my MFA, have some babies and watch the older one learn to read and write.  I'm sort of getting it. 

Another five years with more intuition and less red ink, and the epiphany finally shakes loose and surfaces: I have to teach my students to love what they can do with language and think like writers if I want them to learn to read and write.

Duh.  This is one of those epiphanies that seems so common-sensical now, but that wouldn't make any kind of sense before it happens to you--if someone tries to explain it years before you're ready to hear it--like "there's more to the good life than happy hour appetizers" or "even though you gave birth to them, you might not always like your children."

And science teachers should teach their students to think like scientists and math teachers mathematicians, art teachers like artists, etc., etc. 

I learned this week that this profound shift in my professional practice has a name;  one could even refer to it as an epistemology.  It's called cognitive apprenticeship and was apparently popularized in the 1980s (Brown, Collins, &Newman, 1986; Collins, 1988; Brown, Collins, Duguid, 1989; Brown, Collins, Holum, 1991).  For a while today, I felt so important, so insightful, so correct.  I had stumbled upon an actual pedagogy.  It has a name and citations.  It probably has a collective and a following of robust researchers.  And I was doing it!  All by myself!

Tonight, I searched cognitive apprenticeship on Google Scholar--33,000 hits!  Another 95,000 on plain old Google.  A Wikipedia page...

Huh. 

So 120,000 people thought about this before I did. 

I'm not feeling so much correct as corrected.

Maybe it's because I love the lecture I give on basic plot structure, my unoriginal yet endearingly dorky metaphor of Protagonist Bill climbing Plot Mountain.  "In the end, there's always resolution," I tell my students. "It may not always be a happy ending, but at least it will feel like an ending." 

So Thursday, the audiologist confirmed that Josh's hearing appears to be stable.  No change in his hearing ear at all.  We don't even need to go back until June, 2009.  This was supposed to be my close the book, last chapter moment.  We never had an explanation for Josh's hearing loss and strange, episodic symptoms.  But at least since his tonsillectomy the symptoms were gone and throughout the difficult year, he had no further hearing loss.

So then, Friday, we wake up to an episode (that had been coming on for several days, but that I denied in the classic psychological sense of the term).  He had been developing the transient red rash, flushing his cheeks and inner arms, his low grade fever, mysterious body aches (this time his right elbow joint), and another strep infection confirmed both by a clinical exam and a culture. 

Everyday living doesn't lend itself to resolution, happy or sad or otherwise.  Probably that's why I need stories so much. (And for sure why I vented so melodramatically in an email to Josh's ENT, geneticist, and rheumatologist. That had nothing at all to do with my character flaws.)

Oh, yeah, and Sophie and I have strep infections again too!  GDMF.

I'm feeling like it's over.  June is upon us next week, my husband is wound up like teachers always are at this time of year, and my kindergarten son is ripping a link off his paper chain every morning.  My sabbatical work isn't done. I have one more core course on teaching reading in secondary content areas this summer, and of course my capstone research data to analyze.  I'll keep blogging about those.  But I feel my days are counting down to zero too.

Today, I'm thinking about having one more week to commit to a sabbatical lifestyle (before kindergarten and daycare are over).  Yes, I've learned a lot to take back to my classroom and to shape my continued teaching practice.  I'm a geek and I'm always taking classes, but this year, I engaged deeply in learning entirely unfamiliar and even slightly frightening content that challenges the foundations of language arts teaching.  This kind of personally challenging learning keeps me well. The other things that keep me well--exercise, reading the newspaper, developing relationships with neighbors, reaching out to old friends, gardening, my morning coffee--these are really what I mean by committing to a sabbatical lifestyle.  I'm thinking about a tattoo that could capture the feeling of "sabbatical."

As professionally wonderful as this year has been, it's been one of extraordinary personal challenge.  My son experienced sudden unilateral deafness, and we spent months testing him for every possible syndrome or disease that could explain his permanent, profound hearing loss. (We have no answers, just more audiologist appointments.)  I traveled to Arizona to arrange for involuntary inpatient psychiatric evaluation and treatment for my mother and continue to pour significant amounts of energy into managing our relationship and her care.  These two unexpected crises brought me back into therapy and not surprisingly have stressed my marriage.  And if I hadn't had time to do what's necessary to be well, I don't understand how I could have managed any of it.

These things happen.  Kids get sick, spouses disagree, we become the caretakers of our parents.  And they will happen when my homework is a pile of mostly uninspired Great Gatsby outlines to get through instead of life-changing research to read and just think about.  So today, I'm thinking about how to keep living well when I'm not being paid to do it, when it will require sacrifice--of time with my kids and husband, sleep, money, feedback for my students.  Hmm.

This is a placeholder post because I don't have time to fully think about this right now.  I came across this idea of a pedagogy of interiority while listening to a podcast interview with Irish poet John O'Donahue.  He was being interviewed about his philosophy of beauty and its intersection with faith and religion. Not really relevant to my classroom, but then he brought up how the American education system doesn't seem to have a lot of room for beauty because of our surface orientation on accountability.  Well, that's not exactly what he said, but that's what he made me think about.

I'm currently researching why my use of visual art in literacy curriculum has been so motivating for my students.  After O'Donahue called for a pedagogy of interiority, he recalled the experience of attending a violinist's debut in New York.  It was so beautiful, he said, that even the most hardened New York critics were moved to tears and a standing ovation after the first movement.  He said the audience that night had shared an aesthetic event, one that may have touched an inarticulate place in the soul visited most often only in prayer and meditation (that's my interpretation of what he said).  So in bringing visual art to the most routine of parts of my instruction, reading and writing, have I been creating aesthetic events for my students, arranging meaningful connections between them and what I ask them to read?

I am, as Louise Rosenblatt would say, an aesthetic reader.  I hate having to use study guides and give tests or using methods like TPCASTT for analyzing poetry.  The soul of the writing just gets sucked out of it when it gets reduced to multiple choice questions and busy work.   Of course, my students may just be responding to my enthusiasm since I'm choosing to teach how I love to read.

Aesthetic theory is another up and coming area in schools of education.  I suppose I should get a handle on it before it gets packaged as a curriculum reform.

    Now that I find myself closer to 40 than 30, closer to veteran than novice, I realize that I stand on the far side of a generational divide.  When I started teaching, I may have bumped into my students at concerts, or watched the same TV shows.  Now, frankly, we inhabit different realities.  They text message; I still handwrite notes. They have YouTube dates; I still tape the shows I want to watch on my VCR.  Today’s school age generation has been characterized as understanding their American identities more as consumers than citizens (Kress), as living in “a kaleidescope world of representation, where sound image and print are constantly refracted by each other” (Millard, p. 3), as acquiring literacy from the screen rather than the page (Bearne, 2005), as learning to think by “seeing” information rather than reading it (Heath; Freedman), as postmodern producers and self-referential composers, and famously as “digital natives” (Prensky).  Here they sit in twenty first century language arts classrooms with teachers who typically privilege word text over visual, aural, kinesthetic or any other kind of text, in a formalist or new critical pedagogy that situates them intellectually in the early twentieth century (Marshall).  My learning disposition does not match theirs anymore.  In school, I was taught to conform to convention; their functional literacy is about innovation (Kress).
    Probably like many teachers, I teach like those educators I most admired as a student 25 years ago.  And like many language arts teachers, I love to teach my favorite books from my school years.  I struggle with the notion that the way I experience reading, learning, thinking—what I experience as a great text—that these may seem like antiquated notions to young people, or more disturbing, as useless, boring, obsolete.  Even my sense of time is quaint compared to theirs. They live in a time of exponential change.
    Maybe as I have heard, and must admit have said, during late afternoon office talk, “these kids just don’t like to think,” or “their junior highs didn’t teach them how to write.”  However, it could also be true that I didn’t understand how they like to think and compose, what their comfortable and functional semiotic landscape looks like, or how to use it to ground my curriculum.

You know you're Minnesotan if you feel compelled to say out loud "at least no one died,"  but secretly you think if someone had died, at least people would bring casseroles and there would be some possibility of cathartic emotion.  Instead, there is the relentless drip...drip...drip of ordinary catastrophes. Josh gets his tonsils out, then he gets the flu, then mom gets the flu, then Sophie gets the flu, then it snows, a lot, on March 31, and all we have to look forward to is that daddy will have the flu by Saturday.  Can't say, "Sorry Josh.  I know you feel worse than you ever have in your short life, but Momma needs to take a break and get a pedicure so that she can feel fifteen minutes of wellness and peace. Sorry, Sophie.  You're fever is nearly 105, but Momma has a fever too and needs to lie on the bed and feel sorry for herself."  Beware the Ides of March, indeed.

You know you're Minnesotan if you feel compelled to find blessings on a day like today.  We had a mysterious credit on our account at the pediatrician's this morning, so no copay.  Sophie's lollipop was vanilla, her favorite and a surprise inside the purple wrapper.  It might reach 50 degrees today.  It's pet show day in kindergarten.

It's April at last.