Readicide- Kelley Gallagher

When reading this book you can tell that Gallagher has put lot of thought into the topic of reading. You can instantly tell that he is concerned about our youth’s ability to become lifelong readers and he concerns the reader about this topic by opening up the book with some pretty scary reading statistics. One statistic in particular was that “27 percent of adults in this country did not read a single book in 2007” (Gallagher, pg. 3). This is way too much. I completely support Gallagher in his endeavor to make students become lifelong readers, and I have felt the effects of being pushed away from my interest in reading just like he talks about in his book. Gallagher goes into depth in this book with ways that students lose interest in reading and it is a sad thought when I think about how many situations I have seen in my life where this loss of passion for reading is displayed. One of the biggest road blocks for my own personal interest in reading throughout high school was what Gallagher calls the “Chop-Chop Curriculum.” In this method of teaching literature, the book is broken up into bits and pieces and then even more bits and pieces until it isn’t a book anymore, but rather a series of small readings that you have to try and follow along with. By the end of the chop-chop method, most students are tired of the book and don’t even know what they read. I was definitely one of those students that resented this method of reading. I truly enjoy what Gallagher calls getting into the “reading flow” and that is nearly impossible to do when a book is being over-analyzed and chopped up into a million different pieces. Gallagher tackles many reading issues in our school such as the chop-chop method and better yet, he even offers ways to fix those teaching issues with different teaching methods. Just like Tovani’s I Read It, But I Don’t Get It, this will be one of those books that I will hold on to in my classroom throughout my teaching career.

I Read It, But I Don’t Get It – Chris Tovani

This book is meant for teachers as a tool for teaching adolescents how read and comprehend what they are reading. Even though it is meant for teachers, I found myself reading the book as a student as well. This book was the first book that I read at the start of this quarter and I did that for a reason…the title. I thought about how I have read a lot of things that I did not get and could not fully comprehend. I thought that this book could be really useful in setting me up with better reading strategies for the rest of the quarter’s readings. I was right. I was never a bad reader by any means, but since I read Tovani’s work, I have completed several other books and have felt a noticeable improvement in my comprehension and understanding of the books I read. There are so many great strategies in Tovani’s work that can be used to teach and to learn how to read more effectively. As you can probably tell already, reading about the comprehension strategies in this book really made me contemplate my own reading skills and how there have been times throughout school when I have been lacking in that area. I don’t remember a time in high school when my teachers would focus on teaching good reading strategies to me. I would just be assigned the reading and not understand why I was reading it or the benefits that could come from good reading strategies. I lacked purpose for reading throughout most of high school and that is one of the first things that Tovani covers in her book. Having a purpose for reading is extremely helpful for gaining understanding from the text. That is only the first reading strategy that Tovani talks about, but the book is organized in a way that makes it easy to refer back to any of the strategies. This is one of those books that I see myself holding on to and using throughout my teaching career.

Creating Classrooms for Social Justice

By: Tabitha Dell'Angelo

https://www.edutopia.org/blog/creating-classrooms-for-social-justice-tabitha-dellangelo

In this post by Tabitha Dell’Angelo, she discusses how creating a classroom for social justice can be done in any classroom, not just the ones that are diverse or lack diversity, or the urban classrooms. Dell’Angelo defines social justice as “recognizing and acting upon the power that we have for making positive change.” If I’m not mistaken, I think educators hold a significant amount of power and responsibility when it comes to making positive change in their students’ lives. Teachers should also recognize that they have to ability to teach their students how to create these changes on their own. This is why Dell’Angelo suggests that “It's a good idea to give students opportunities for seeing how positive change happens and how they can be both actors and leaders in creating change.” This seems like an important step that teachers should take when thinking about the lessons that they want to make. I like what Dell’Angelo says about how “classroom walls aren’t magical barriers to the realities outside of them.” In the context of social justice, this statement suggests that social justice applies to the real world, so when teachers incorporate social justice practices in their lessons, then they are preparing their students for real world situations. In the world outside of the classroom, students need to be able to think critically and form their own opinions which are skills that can be taught by including social justice lessons. Dell’Angelo uses an example of these types of lessons that seems to get a good response from the students. She presents a scenario where students are learning how to write letters and actually has them send the letters to a real person instead of just having the teacher hold on to them when they are done. The students sent their letters to multiple zookeepers and they even got responses. This was a way that the students were able to put themselves in a real situation which meant more to them than just writing a letter that would not be sent anywhere. It placed more meaning behind what they were learning and taught them how this lesson can actually work outside of the classroom. Lessons like this can better prepare students for life outside of the classroom.

Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom

Jeff Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell

This article shares some of the applications of critical pedagogy that are needed in urban high schools around our country. I am not sure exactly what to think about this article though because there are parts that seem like they would be useful in a classroom and really catch my interest, but there are also parts that seem to go against certain teaching strategies that I have read in other texts such as Chris Tovani’s I Read It But I Don’t Get It or Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide. For example, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell say that they “developed vocabulary units and units that prepared for the SAT and ACT exams.” This is contrary to what Gallagher says in his book which suggests focusing less on massive test preparation and more on students’ actual thinking process and comprehension of a certain text. Another example of a perplexing difference I found between these two texts in when Duncan-Andrade and Morrell suggest that when reading a book, “One common format was to divide a major work into sections or themes and divide the class into groups of five or six.” In Readicide, Gallagher has a whole section devoted to the misuse of “The Chop-Chop Curriculum” which breaks the reading apart and overanalyzes it to the point where a student might despise that reading in the end. There are a number of clashing ideas between this article and Gallagher’s book that I have left out, but there are also interesting similarities within. The two similarities that I found to be true in both texts were the use of a 50/50 approach to text selections. This means that a student will read 50 percent academic books and 50 percent recreational books. I also found that both texts highly advocate critical thinking with their students. Gallagher’s book is overflowing with examples of critical pedagogy and this article spends some time not only explaining how they got their students to think in this way, but also the effects that it had on the school and the students’ lives. Duncan-Andrade and Morrell share how their students were able to research school spending policies and interview administrators which led them to feel “empowered to challenge conditions that were seemingly innate and immutable” within their school. These students were able to think critically by questioning their own circumstances in their school and then being active in trying to do something about it. Both texts lead to encouraging methods of critical pedagogy in one way or another but I lean more towards the strategies used and the supporting evidence behind those strategies in Gallagher’s Readicide.  I think that unlike Gallagher’s work, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s work lacks overall clarity in their application of critical pedagogy. 

Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire

Chapter 2

Freire’s work is very impressive because of the way that he constructs his thoughts of our pedagogical system to portray a deep philosophical understanding of certain themes and methods that are used in the teacher-student relationship. In this chapter, Freire shares his thoughts about the ideal way in which a teacher should approach a relationship with their students. The main idea here is that teachers should be a “student among students.” He suggests that people of power in the educational world (the oppressors) have advocated a “bank-clerk” teaching approach in which teachers have their student’s record, memorize, and repeat class content without them perceiving what that content actually means in the large scope of things. Instead, educators should be using a “problem-posing” approach in which we teach our students (the oppressed) to think critically on their own. I can think of many instances throughout high school where I was limited in my own free thinking and my understanding of a certain topic only went as far as the multiple choice questions would allow me to. I have been in classrooms where the teacher assumes that they know everything and the students know nothing. Situations like this in my own life help me understand what Freire means when he says “oppressed” in this context. Students everywhere are being taught this way so that they can be a better fit in the world, but this just creates students that do not know how to think on their own. It is troubling to think that our future generations might be taught in such a way that limits their free thinking. This chapter makes it clear that all educators need to structure their class in a way that allows students to think freely so that teachers and students can “become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow.”

Assessing and Evaluating Students’ Learning

How Do You Know What They Have Learned?

One of the more difficult tasks for an educator seems to be assessing and evaluating if a student actually knows what they have learned in class. This article speaks to the difficulty of that task, but also provides teachers with a tool set for how to effectively evaluate a students learning. The article takes a stance on avoiding “correct answer” tests and promotes the idea of a “knowing how” approach to learning literature instead of a “knowing that” approach. In other words, we want students to think freely and truly understand literature by formulating their own thoughts about it instead of just spitting out facts about what they read. The article gives several examples of how to approach assessments and evaluations in a way that breeds confidence in a student’s ability to think on their own and look deeper into a text to find meaning from it. Something that I have always been a fan of and is also stated in this article is journal entries and “exit memos.” This evaluation strategy allows a student to recall what they have learned and to collect their thoughts about the certain piece of literature that they are working with. It is a way to evaluate a students learning process by asking them to reflect on what they have learned. Instead of giving a student the option for right and wrong answers, like many standardized tests do, journal entries allow for their thoughts to be fully expanded on rather than condensing their thoughts into a small multiple choice question. The beauty of journal entries and exit memos is that they are versatile and you can use them in several different ways such as blog posts/responses as well as asking prompting questions to focus on a specific part of what a student is learning. This evaluation strategy is just one example from the article that shows how teachers can promote a “knowing how” learning strategy in their classrooms instead of a “knowing that” strategy. 

Assignment Template

Aligned to California’s Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy

This Assignment Template is a great resource for showing the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in a simple and helpful way. It emphasizes ways to help students read, comprehend, and respond to texts. The structure of this template is much like the edTPA Lesson Plan Guidelines which I personally enjoy because of the detail that is put into explaining each step of the process. The section about pre reading was an important section for me because it is something that I do not see people do as much as they should, and it is probably something that I do not do enough either. It is a very strategic and important way to approach a reading and it sets the tone for the rest of a student’s experience with the text. Once the student starts the reading, they will already be engaged with the text because of the pre reading process that they have gone through. This article points out something very interesting when it talks about the actual reading process. It introduces the idea of reading “with the grain,” and reading “against the grain.” By using just those two concepts of reading, I can see students having a deeper understanding of what they read. This way they are able to read for understanding and then follow that up by asking questions about it and analyzing the text. The article goes into two other parts of the process for the assignment which are the post reading and the writing part. It seems that by taking the proper steps for the pre reading and the reading, a student would be able to easily reflect on their reading and be able to write a cohesive response about it. The first two steps of this process are vital because by doing them, a student will set themselves up for success with the rest of the assignment.