Workshop Narrative

William Kee

EDSE 786

Dr. Styslinger

7 December 2015

Workshopping Huck Finn

For my resource collection I chose to organize a unit based around Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  I chose this canonical text for a few reasons, the first being that it is one of my favorite books that is commonly taught in high school classrooms.  It is both funny and exciting while also offering an honest and important commentary about social justice in the United States that is still important today.  While there are many topics to be explored in Huck Finn, I decided to focus my unit around the theme of ‘Surviving in a Prejudiced Society.’ This is shown through the struggles that Huck and Jim face as they go on their adventures, and particularly through Huck’s struggle with what he believes to be the right thing to do, and what society expects of him.  

Huck Finn is known for its use of southern dialect.  In my experience, this dialect is known to throw readers off.  In order to scaffold them into this, I will kick this unit off by reading aloud a picture book.  Helen Ketteman writes her picture books in dialect.  The dialect that Ketteman uses is indeed southern, but it is not quite as hard to comprehend as Huck Finn.  In her picture book Heat Wave! Ketteman uses words like ‘ma’ and ‘pa’ as well as the lesser used ‘hollar.’  I plan to kick the unit off by reading this aloud in an animated fashion while really laying the accent on thick so that students can begin to hear how the best way to read this text is to think about how you would say it out loud.  

I will also do another thing before I actually introduce Huck Finn to the students.  For this unit, and hopefully most of my units, we will be having book clubs.  The young adult novels that I have included in this resource collection all focus on the themes of a protagonist going against the societal norm in order to do what he or she believes to be right.  In order to get book clubs started, I will have a book pass where I pass out Day of Tears, The Day they Came to Arrest the Book, The Absolutely True Diary of  a Part-Time Indian, 47, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, and The Crazy Horse Electric Game.  Students will pass around books and select their top three.  I will then figure out who will get what book and pass them out the next day in class.  I like Styslinger’s idea of alternating between book club books and the canonical text so that each gets the same amount of time.  During book clubs I will not participate.  I will walk around a listen, but the students will be on their own for the discussions.  They will have autonomy.

After getting students excited about the books for their book clubs I will introduce Huck Finn.  I will be sure to explain to my students how Huck Finn connects to the books they will be reading for their book clubs.  I expect myself to say something along the lines of, “I know you have probably heard awful things about this book from students who are older than you, but how many of you have been in a position where you thought you were right and a parent, or teacher were wrong?” This is not only a good way to get students interested in the book, but also a good way to get students to begin transacting with a text before they even begin reading.  I could frame this as a class discussion, but first I could have students write down what they have heard about Huck Finn from older students and then have them answer the question that is closer to a representation of the theme of this lesson.  Of course, we would have class discussion after students have shared their answers with a partner.  From here, we have students transacting with the text through title testing and personal response.  When we begin reading, we can connect these responses to the beginning of the novel when Huck runs away from his father.  This activity would be the jumping off point for me to begin reading the novel to them and then have a discussion after.

I mention in the paragraph above that I will begin reading the novel to the students.  I think that reading to the students is critical to their interest and understanding of the text.  The books that I give them in the book clubs will be read on their own time of course, but Huck Finn is not something that students need to read at home.  There are some heavy topics and the obvious word choice that students need to be guided through during whole class reading.  Subject matter aside, if students are struggling with the dialect in this text, they are just going to get frustrated and give up if it is assigned to them.  If I read it to them in class, I can pronounce the dialect in a way that is easy for them to understand.   It is also important that we do not call on students, or have students ‘popcorn’ read.  If students are going to read in class, they need to already be familiar with what they are going to be asked to read.  They also need to be willing.  Forcing students who do not want to read aloud into reading for the whole class is just another way to make sure that students hate reading.  

Another important aspect of doing all the reading in class is ‘advancing the plot.’  There is a lot of floating along down the river in Huck Finn and even for someone interested in the book, these parts tend to lag.  If we skip over some of these parts and just give students a summary, it will allow them to hold interest while still getting a good understanding of what is going on in the novel.  After all, if we are using these works to teach around the theme of ‘surviving in a prejudiced society’ then it is not necessary for us to read the parts of the text that do not contribute to our students learning about this theme.  We have also been told that often when teachers advance the plot students will go back and read those sections on their own time so as not to miss anything and to inform the class of what the teacher has chosen to skip over completely.

Our standards dictate that the basic breakdown for what kind of writing out students need to do is split between argument and explanatory writing.  I think that the best way to teach students about argument is to have them have class discussions.  This is where the informational texts category in my list comes from.  The informational texts in my resource collection serve as mentor texts to teach students about informational and argumentative writing.  I will use these in class to teach students about the structure, but I will also ask students to write down things that they notice about the article, and how they think these articles relate to Huck Finn.  Once they all have something written down, I will circle them up and we will do a Socratic Seminar.  Now, I like the idea of a Socratic Circle with a hot seat because I know that sometimes it is too much to not say something when you are listening from the outside of a discussion.  I also want to set it up so that students in the outer circle have two or three note cards so that they can write questions and hand them to the people in the inner circle.  The point here though is so that students have a mentor text that they then find an argument for and defend that argument in the Socratic Circle.  Here, they are citing evidence from the text, providing backing for their arguments, and even addressing real rebuttals to their arguments. This is a fun way to get them to form arguments that they can then take and put into their argumentative writing.

The picture books I have chosen for this resource collection are not only a good way to introduce dialect in writing to students, but they are also a good stepping stone to get students into formal analysis.  The novel Huck Finn is written much like any other novel, except that it is written in this form of dialect.  We not only need to teach students how to understand the dialect in this story, but we also need to teach them why Mark Twain has chosen to use this dialect in his novel.  What does this do for the story that writing in standard English would not.  We can also use music here. How does the word choice, affect how we recieve Lenny Kravitz’s “Mr. Cab Driver?”  We can use this to get students talking to each other about how this story is written, and how voice affects the telling of stories in general, not just Huck Finn.

The obvious theoretical lens to use when looking at Huck Finn is critical race theory.  Critical theory is something that I struggle finding a place for in the class room.  It is of couse, where we all want to get, and why we love English to begin with, but it is one of the last things we are able to get to.  I want to shape my units around critical theory.  At the beginning of a Huck Finn unit for example I would introduce critical race theory to students through a mini lesson, and ideally we would have already been going over another theoretical lens in the units before.  I would eventually work towards students looking at this text through different lenses.  The best way I think to do this is to put them into groups and jigsaw them.  Each group has a different lens and then I split the groups so that each group consists of one of each different lens and each ‘expert’ explains their theory to the group.  This way, we do not focus on one theory, and students are able to teach each other about what they have discussed in their groups.

What I have learned this semester, and over the course of this program so far is that we need to have a long range plan for teaching our students.  We can not just go into a unit knowing that we are going to be teaching a specific novel.  These resource collections offer us tools to use in our classroom as we form units around these particular texts.  Students are likely not willing to read canonical texts of their own accord, but they will be receptive of reading the next hot young adult novels, or even some nonfiction news articles.  We can workshop canonical texts by using these other sources to bridge the gap and hopefully students will be more interested in what we have to teach because they will be excited about what we don’t have to teach.

Text Sets

Building Bridges by S. Herz
What Else? Other Approaches by S. Herz
SAY:
     I've found through these Say/Dos that there are a lot of things about teaching that just seem daunting to me.  Text sets have turned out to be one of those things.  I feel like I am at a point in my educational career where I have read a ton of stuff, but most of it comes from the canon because I majored in English.  We do not really focus on stuff that is for readers of a lower reading level, and especially readers who are learning English as a second language.  In fact, I have no idea how to choose books for kids who are learning English as a second language.  I am glad that we are creating these text sets so that I can have this collection of resources for my future classroom.

In Building Bridges Herz talks about something that we are all familiar with, the thematic unit.  This article seems like something that we have been working up to all semester because it is largely things we already know from this class.  I too thought that getting kids to read more than one book at a time was ridiculous when we were talking about it at the beginning of this course, but now, I'm not so sure.  These text sets offer us a way to enter students into book clubs based around topics that we are discussing with our main texts.  These readings are connected to everything that we have read about because they form the basis of our units.  When we are teaching with Socratic discussions, we can pull an article from our text sets to foster discussion about a certain topic.   These information and explanatory texts can also act as mentor texts when we are teaching students how to write in multiple genres.  Teaching multigenre papers is the most obvious way to use text sets because we can teach them in the context of our core text by giving students different examples of genre because we now have a set amount of different genres to show them.

Students can begin transacting with text through the text sets as well.  Students do not want to read The Grapes of Wrath and I don’t blame them.  Herz brings up a good point when he talks about word spreading about texts in English class.  Students don’t want to give these canonical texts a chance because they have heard from other students about how awful they are.  We can experiment with this by doing what Milner and Milner call ‘Title Testing.’  We can see what they already think they know about a work, and then gauge our lessons based around that. We can get them to interact with these canonical texts by first giving them something that they will enjoy reading and getting them to respond to that.  Once they have established this connection we can begin discussion comparing these works to the piece of canon that they are reading.  

DO:
The DO for this week is of course my text set.  The canonical text that I chose to work with is one of my favorites that I have not really thought about teaching before, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.  The theme I chose to work with is "Surviving in a Prejudiced Society." My texts focus around the experiences of groups of people who have been othered in American society over the past hundred years.  This text set focuses on race and ethnicity and how are views have changed since the writing of Huck Finn and more importantly, how they have stayed the same.

Huck Finn Text Set

Multi-Genre Papers

Blending Genre, altering style: Writing multigenre papers by Tom Romano
Multigenre-Multigendered Research Papers by Mary Styslinger

Create flow: Pulling in all together. In The multigenre research 

paper: Voice, passion, and discovery in grades 4-6 by C.A. Allen

Say:
     So Vic has taught us a little about writing multigenre stuff, but I have not really heard anything about what a multigenre paper is until I did the reading for this week.  After reading Blending Genre though, I think that multigenre papers might be the thing that we have learned this semester that I like the most.  There are students in every class who hate writing the traditional essay, and when I say that, I mean that most students hate writing the traditional essay.  I don't remember the last time that I wrote an essay for an English class that I actually enjoyed writing and didn't just make up the whole thing the night before it was due.  My academic writing process has been painful to say the least.  Multigenre papers seem to be a good way to get students writing about something without them having to try and make stuff up to fill in gaps for page limits with meaningless fluff.  The big thing that we talk about is transacting with literature and the multigenre paper offers a great way to do just that.  The best example of this that I can think of from Romano's book is the Count Basie poem.  He gives students a biographical encyclopedia entry and asks them to write what they know about Basie afterward, then he gives them a poem about Count Basie and has students write what they learned from the poem about Basie.  The results are amazing.  Students feel a connection with this historical figure just by reading a poem about him rather than just reading expository text.  Romano is careful to make sure we know that there is still a place for expository text however.  Students still need to learn academic writing in the traditional sense so that they are prepared for college, and these papers should be taught alongside other writing, not replace it.  I do think that having students write at all will prepare them to write anything in the long run though.
      Another thing that I like about the multigenre paper is the wide variety of themes and topics that students can choose to write about.  The example from our reading gives an interesting critique on the author's dissatisfaction with selling cosmetics.  Students could also write a multigenre about a specific character from a work of literature, or about a topic from a text.  My middle schoolers from A2 are reading the YA novel Lyddie right now, and I could easily seeing them doing multigenre research about child labor and other working conditions in factories in the 19th century, with entries from the perspective of the main character put in with the rest.  The thing that I appreciated most about this book though was how Romano laid everything out for us.  We often get readings where people are telling us things that are nice to do in classes, but Romano said, "OK, this is how you actually organize this in your class day by day."
     The description of a research paper at the beginning of Styslinger's article is similar to what I went through in high school.  In English III when there were about two months left in school our teacher brought out a packet describing the research paper and what our expectations were.  We then scrambled to finish it at the end of the year.  It was a nightmare.  The solution to this is of course the multigenre research paper.  Where Romano talks about having papers about topics and themes, Styslinger presents us with the idea of creating papers as a way to answer a specific question.  By doing this we are given a broader definition of research.  This broad definition of research allows us to utilize transactional theory again, as students first think about the answers to these questions from their own point of view.  This is where the research begins, with their own thoughts and feelings about a question.  Multigenre-multigendered research papers offer students the chance to reflect on their views about gender in ways that a traditional essay form can't.  One of the students in this article writes about gender by way of satirizing the traditional view of familial roles in the 1950s.  This satire says more than if he had just described his dislike of gender roles in the mid 20th century.  These papers also offer ways for students to make arguments in their writing that they would not be able to in traditional essays.  They can use journal entries, newspaper articles, or pictures as backings rather than just talking about them or quoting them in a paper.
     Allen provides us with some more practical knowledge about how students can organize their research papers.  We cannot just get in front of our class and tell them to just get started.  We have to scaffold them into it.  Once we know that they have a grasp on what a multigenre research paper is, it is time to teach them how to organize it.  Allen gives us a few ways to open up research papers, and how students can use these throughout their papers to separate different sections.  The other thing that Allen offers is the opportunity for students to present their research papers.  There is a duty of the writer to make sure the readers understand his or her paper.  Allen provides his students with the chance to separate into groups so that students can teach their peers how to read their papers.

Do:
     Coming up with a DO for this week seems a little more difficult than previous weeks if only because the only thing that I can say I am going to DO is to assign multigenre-research papers.  This seems to be the obvious thing.  I do think however that we need to put thought into how we organize these multigenre research papers into our curriculum.  It is unfortunately likely that students have not had the experience of writing multigenre papers before they take our classes.  I know that this will be my first experience writing one and I'm a grad student.  We need to begin with teaching students what a multigenre research paper is.  Then we can move on to the different forms of genre that students can create.  From here we need to have students writing, and once they have works written we can begin teaching them how to 'create flow.'  The unit of course will end with presentations.  I found this introduction to multigenre writing that includes some links to helpful things like organizers and genre lists.

Multigenre DO

   

Informational Text

Get it Done! Writing and Analyzing Informational Texts to Make Things Happen by Wilhelm, Smith, and Fredricksen

Say:
     One of the biggest problems I have with telling people that I am in the process of becoming an English teacher is that inevitably they look at me and say something along the lines of, "WHY?" There is a mindset that has permeated our culture of people thinking that the only disciplines that matter are science and math.  Writing an essay will not make the newest IPhone come out, and what did we really learn from reading The Pearl in ninth grade anyway?  Writing informational texts is a perfect example of how and why we still need to spend time teaching English to all students.  On page four our authors say, "Every discipline uses these thought patterns extensively, so if we are going to help students think like real readers, writers, historians, scientists, and mathematicians, we need to teach these patterns and text structures in the context of our subject matter." In any career, classroom, or even general conversation, people need to be able to give other people facts.  This can either be to inform, or as we have learned from our class last week to argue.  Informational texts offer up the basis of our warrants and backing when we are getting into an argument.  As always, our three authors end our introduction by discussing how these lessons adhere to the Common Core State Standards.
     Chapter five of Get it Done! offers some insight on something that I am aware of, but that I haven't really had the chance to use often enough. Essential questions.  I was recently working with Julian on our class log for Vic's class and I was working on writing a purpose.  When I asked him what he thought, he said that he usually just puts in essential questions to guide the lesson.  Wilhelm, Smith, and Fredricksen also present Essential questions as a way to organize a unit.  I like this idea of beginning with a text and then thinking about what the important questions are relating to it.  What do we want students to get out of reading this text?  Essential questions interest me for two reasons. If you are in a school where you are being required to teach a text, it gives you something to look for when planning a unit.  If you get to choose your own text to teach, it gives you the chance to look for something happening outside of the classroom to think of something you would want your students to think about and then to find a text that would begin answering these questions. This of course also ties back into transactional theory because students will be not just reading texts to learn about English, but to think about them in a way that connects to their own lives and the world around them.
     Chapters six through twelve go through each of the different types of informational texts.  These different forms of informational text all seem to be self explanatory based off their names.  The first form is naming and listing.  This form asks students to look into real world settings and have them find different lists of things they see.  One of the easiest ways is to have students look at top ten lists and then move them into logging information into lists and having them categorize data.  Summarizing is another form, and I think that this would be a good way to get students interacting with texts because it allows students to look at an informational text and think through it in order to tell us what it says.    

Do:
Today, I really lucked out for this Say/Do.  I did my observation of another teacher at my internship today and that teacher just happened to be going over informational texts with her students.  The way she did this was really cool because they had already learned about argumentative writing the year before, so she started with that and then taught writing informational text in the context of argument.  This allowed students to think about information and facts as a way to strengthen their arguments as they move into their final unit assignment of writing and argumentative essay.  So, what happened today consisted of looking at one argumentative essay and one explanatory essay and having students think about the differences without discussing anything beforehand.  They then looked at writing prompts for each essay and filled in a venn diagram with the differences in structure of the essay prompts.

Argument vs. Explanatory Essay

Argument

Oh, Yeah?! Chapters 1-2. 4-7, 9 by Smith, Wilhelm, and Fredricksen

Say:
    The definition of argument used in this reading was much broader than the one that I had previously thought of. Before reading this book, I always viewed argument as something that took place between two people who disagreed about something.  Smith, Wilhelm, and Fredricksen, present argument as something that happens every time we make a decision.  For example, if I am choosing something to wear in the morning, by choosing which tie to wear with which shirt, I am making a claim about fashion, or what I need to wear for certain situations.  It was interesting to go back and think about all the arguments that I make on a day to day basis.
     This book is heavily dependent on the Common Core Standards.  It makes sense that they wrote this with those in mind, because at the time of writing this, these standards were the norm for almost the whole country including South Carolina.  This is not to say that now that we are on SC State Standards this book is useless.  In fact, I would argue the exact opposite.  In Vic's class, we did an activity where we matched up the SC standards with similar Common Core State Standards, and our new state standards are pretty much just copied and pasted from the Common Core.  That's all I have to say about the first chapter, because it was just the argument for writing this book to the CCSS and that is self explanatory.
     Chapter Two was one of the more interesting chapters for me to read.  Like I said before, I didn't really know how an argument was structured, or what the process was.  After reading this chapter, I was able to place this structure over any other reading, or discussion that I have had to do.  It was also cool to see how this book was structured as an argument for a good chunk of it.  This also made me think about the Socratic Circles that we talked about two weeks ago.  We could structure a lesson about argument by introducing the basic structure of argument and then have students use this structure when they are having Socratic Circles.
    Chapters four through Seven discuss how we can actually use argument in our classroom, from introducing it, to actually implementing it, and using it to teach specific things.  The use of journalistic articles in order to teach argument is interesting because not only does it give students the opportunity to evaluate another person's argument, but it also serves as a mentor text for students to form their own arguments in class. Chapter five gives us two ways to introduce arguments.  Both ways are accessible, by relating argument to two things that students are already aware of, talk and advertisements.  In our Teaching Composition class, we just began talking about argument and we started our unit by playing "Would You Rather?" This was a good entrance into argument because it gives students a choice to make and then they will definitely have a reason for making that choice.  Lastly, we are given a way to teach argument through reading.  This allows us to give students a text and describe what the author is trying to argue.  This moves into book clubs, socratic circles, and even critical lenses, as they can begin to make arguments about a text. They can do this with their peers through Socratic Circles and book clubs, but they can use the tools of critical theory to also form and support their arguments.

DO:
For this week, I wanted to create a Do that would be helpful in introducing argument to the class.  This will take the form of an interactive mini-lesson where I will present students with the parts of Toulmin's argument structure and then ask them to identify them in different advertisements.  I will use Vic's idea of starting with 'Would You Rather?' as a fun way to begin the lesson and to get the students involved and talking to each other.  I will end with another "Would You Rather?" and have students break down their own arguments using this process.

Argument PowerPoint

Reading Like a Writer and Close Reading

Where Does Rigor Fit?
What is Close Reading?
Defining the Signposts
Explaining the Signposts
Wondrous Word: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom by Katie Wood Ray
Mini-lessons for Literature Circles by Harvey Daniels and Nancy Steineke

Say:
     The close reading section of readings all appeared to be from the same book, so I'm going to address them all pretty much together.  The first chapter that we read, Where Does Rigor Fit? was interesting to me because it addressed something that I had not put a lot of thought into before.  We often hear people discussing the benefits of a rigorous course, but we do not often see it actually defined.  I remember when I was in ninth grade, I had to read The Pear for summer reading.  I did not read it until the day before, and when I did read it, I thought that it was so dense and boring, that I didn't care about anything Steinbeck had to say.  I hated Steinbeck until a year later when we read Of Mice and Men.  For me, it seemed like the only reason that we had to read some of those books was because they were hard, and it was somewhat shocking for this article to confirm that for me.  I think that we need to challenge readers by maybe having them read above their grade level, but I do not think that they should be reading Ulysses because it is hard to read.  We should use rigor in a way that makes them think about texts and that makes them want to read more texts rigorously.  Close reading is something that I did all the time in my senior year of high school.  We would have assigned reading and the next day we would come in and talk about it.  Inevitably, at some point during this talk our teacher would bring our attention to a specific passage and we would go into deep detail.  This detail would be much through the lens of new criticism, but these close readings were probably one of the main reasons that I really started to enjoy analyzing texts and why I became an English major.  Now, I think that close readings would be a good way to bring in other theoretical perspectives.  Having close readings would be a great way to get deep into the text and start asking questions about different schools of thought.  The signpost ideas from these readings was presented in a way that I enjoyed.  I know that when reading we often tell students to think about different things, but these signposts give them an indication of important things from the text that they can begin talking about.
     The Katie Wood Ray chapters from Wondrous Word seemed to be something that we had already been aware of.  We are constantly being told that in order to be a writer you need to read more and write more.  It is no surprise then that Ray tells us that when reading as writers, we should be looking at how the author crafts the actual sentences and how he or she chooses words.  When reading, we need to be looking at what the writer does that seems to work so that we can try to use those things in our own writing, but we also need to be able to look at things that don't work in writing so that we know what to avoid.  Chapter two tells us that we need to look at the craft.  This is something that we hear a lot in English classes as well.  There is nothing written in a work that is not put there on purpose, but we need to look at some things that the author includes as the author employing a craft.
     This week in Mini-Lessons for Literature Circles we are given some ways that we can examine the author's craft in our classroom.  I like how these two writers give us a variety of ways that we can have students doing this, from classroom discussion supplemented by book clubs, to students acting out the verbs.  I think that having students act out verbs is particularly interesting because it connects to Wondrous Word in the way we are looking at craft.  Students can think about how important the words that the author chooses are because they need to understand the meaning fully to act the word out.

Do:
My Do for this week connects most directly to the close reading reading that we did for this week.  Right now, I am interning at Meadow Glen Middle school which has been an interesting placement because of their Expeditionary Learning.  The units are centered around expeditions, and there are premade lesson plans that the teachers teach.  These lessons make it so that all the teachers are doing the same thing each day.  This allows for teachers to have planning together each week to discuss where they are each at.  The lesson packet for the text requires that we often read aloud to the students which is as we know a good practice, but occasionally it will call for us to go back to specific sections of the text in order for us to do close reading activities with students.  For my Do, I am presenting one of the close reading activities that we did in class.  This activity takes place after we have already read the chapter.  We read the chapter, and then go back to the passage and talk about the questions presented about the reading.  I am including a lesson plan as well as artifacts with what the students actually did with the information they gained from close reading.

Lesson Plan

Anchor Chart

Book Clubs (Online)

It's All About the Book: Motivating Teens to Read by Diane Lapp and Douglas Fisher
Wiki Literature Circles: Creating Digital Learning Communities by Elizabeth Edmondson
Digital Literacies: Online Book Clubs: Bridges Between Old and New Literacies Practices by Cassandra Scharber
Mini-Lessons For Literature Circles by Harvey Daniels and Nancy Steineke

Say:

     In Digital Literacies Cassandra Scharber gives us a look at how she uses technology to encourage students to read.  The idea here is that students are reading and writing all the time, they are just not doing it in the traditional way that English classes try to make them write.  When students are reading now, they are reading Facebook status updates and tweets.  They are writing one hundred forty characters at a time.  Digital Literacies suggests that we use this technology to have students talk about literature.  With the website that they suggest, Moodle, students get to post statuses about what the think of the books they are reading.  They can respond to each other as well.  This not only encourages people to read literature, but it also allows them to build a safe community to share their thoughts, similar to the reasons that O'Donnell-Allen suggests for having book clubs last week.  I completely agree with this article and think it speaks for itself.  I intend to try and use Moodle or similar formats in my classes in the future.
     Wiki Literature Circles was an exciting thing to read because Elizabeth Edmondson gives us an example of how these digital book clubs have worked in her classroom.  The results in this article sounded too good to be true if I'm being honest, but that is what makes it such an inspiring read.  That being said, I have a personal beef with wikis.  In my experience, wikis have been difficult to use and they don't do much more than other similar sites that are easier to use.  I think that some other good options are Weebly, or even Blogger.  As far as the actual philosophy of doing this goes I think it is a cool idea and I enjoyed reading about students getting excited about what they were reading through these communities.  Hearing about students getting excited about doing homework was interesting as well.
     I like that It's All About the Book gives us a scaffold for how we can organize our classes around book clubs.  I think that this set up is a good idea.  We begin with teacher led read aloud and think aloud and then move to having students do sustained silent reading.   From this, they branch out into their book clubs where reading moves from an individual activity to a group conversation.  The question that I had with this article is how do they make sure that students get their first choice.  In the reading for last week we learned to have students list their top three choices and then to make sure that if students didn't get their first two choices then they would get their first choice the next time around.  Lapp and Fischer suggest that we have students go to the book shelf and bring back books.  This seems like it could inspire chaos.
     Mini-Lessons for Literature Circles gives a lot of practical advice and lessons for us as teachers.  This text is not as much theoretical as it is practical.  It gives concrete examples of what we can teach with literature circles, steps to put these into practice, and ways that they can go wrong.  I particularly like the section about reading journals because Daniels and Steineke tell  us what to do when kids are writing in their journals.  It also tells us that the problems with journals are minor and that they are not writing about what the class is reading as a whole so it is hard for us to keep up with them.

Do:

     The lesson lan that I provide for this Do is in response to my discussion of Wiki Literature Circles.  In this lesson, I have students make posts and comments to other classmates through the use of wordpress.  Wordpress, like Blogger offers students the ability to post their own blogs.  They can each essentially create their own website for English class and make general posts either about class, what they're reading, or their literature circles.  I like this idea because it promotes that idea of a reading community in class.  Students are more likely to feel safe if they are able to see things that their peers are posting, and if they see things that I am posting.  Student websites offer a great chance for us to model for our students.  As we read our own literature, we can post thoughts, predictions, and observations about our texts.  Not only that, but it just makes our lives easier by having a substantial amount of student work online where we cannot possibly lose it.

Lesson Plan
   

Book Clubs 10/19/15

The Book Club Companion by Cindy O'Donnell-Allen

Say:

     In The Book Club Companion, Cindy O'Donnell-Allen makes it clear that she has not revolutionized learning.  People have always known that putting students in small groups and letting them talk about literature together is a good idea.  Book Clubs however put the focus of the learning on the students.  They get to decide what book they read, and for the most part what they talk about when they meet in their groups.  There are however open ended prompts that can be used to help facilitate these book clubs.
     Book Clubs are similar to Socratic Seminars in that they give the students a more open ended idea of what they can talk about.  Both of these methods force us to look at how we lead discussions in our classroom and what the idea of discussion actually entails.  When we have a classroom discussion with the teacher at the front of the class and the students in their desks there is an expectation of the students to answer a right or wrong question.  These two methods however prompt the students to think about something from a text and then to just discuss their thoughts.  The teacher is as far removed from the discussion as possible so that the students do not feel pressured to be 'right.'  These two methods differ however in that Socratic Seminars are not a regular occurrence in class.  They certainly can be, but there is not an expectation to have them once a week.  Socratic seminars also have more students participating in discussion based around a book that they whole class is reading together and that the teacher has assigned, where book clubs are in groups of four to six and the students get to choose the book they want within a theme.
     The idea of book choice through me off a little in this reading.  I like the idea that students get to choose a book within a theme for the book clubs.  What we have been doing in this class with one anchor text and another reading would work well for book clubs.  You could have one classic text and then students could read a YA novel in their book clubs that would probably be more interesting to them and give them the option of seeing how entertaining literature is connected to these more literary works.  What threw me off though was that in the list of clusters in the appendix for this book were a lot of classic texts that were paired together.  I wish O'Donnell-Allen had given us a wider variety of types of text to read because while there are quite a few different themes, most of these books are books that I would rather use as anchor texts.
     The list of things involved in the social dimension of reading described in this text is something that I have been seeing in my time at internship A at Meadow Glen.  Lexington One uses Expeditionary learning, and we have been teaching a book called Lyddie.  So far the students have not read any of this novel outside of the classroom.  We have either read it to them in class, or they have read it with a partner in class.  My CT actually records herself reading the text ahead of time so that if they are reading on their own they have the ability to listen along if they need to.  The one thing on this list that concerns me and has always concerned me is the size of classroom libraries. Of course I think that we need to have large libraries, but I just wish that we had more funds to buy books.  All I want is more books.
   

Do:
My do for this week is a lesson plan that involves getting students acquainted with the book club format.  I will begin by introducing an anchor text for my students.  This will be something such as how we used Brave New World in this class.  I will associate that with a theme and use one of the thematic clusters from O'Donnell-Allen to allow students to choose texts.  After introducing the anchor text I will have students vote on what books they want to read and then put them into groups accordingly.  I want students to begin interacting with the text so I will then have them read silently for a few minutes before having them fill out the sheets that describe their expectations of the book clubs.  It is important to have students set up the goals and structure of their book clubs so that if they get off task they don't have an argument for getting side tracked because they are losing sight of their own goals.  The last thing that students will do is to do a short activity with their groups.  This will get them to feel more comfortable in their groups and give them a short taste of what will be happening in the book clubs.

Lesson Plan

Fostering Talk Around Literature

Adolescent Literacy by Beers Probst and Rief
Response and Analysis by Probst
Strengthening Argumentative Writing with Speaking and Listening (Socratic) Circles by Styslinger and Overstreet
The Chicken and the Egg: Inviting Response and Talk through Socratic Circles by Styslinger and Pollock
Socratic Circles: Fostering Critical and Creative Thinking in Middle and High School by Copeland

Say:
     This section of readings was useful in clearing some things up for me.  I have heard about Socratic circles on multiple occasions, but I have never seen them in action or had them properly explained to me.  This section has piqued my interest in learning about Socratic circles, although I am sure we will participate in one in class.  This section of readings also interests me because fostering talk around literature has been one of my weaknesses in my teaching.
     In the article about using Socratic circles to strengthen argumentative writing the most interesting thing to me was that these class discussions did actually strengthen writing.  We are learning all these different methods and sometimes we forget that they really build on each other.  I would think that the main goal of the Socratic circles would be to just get students to think about arguments in a more structured way.  Overstreet and Styslinger say that students love to argue, but think that the way to win an argument is to just be louder than the opponent.  I think that teaching students how to have a respectful debate or discussion is enough reason alone to use Socratic circles and that there would be another activity used to bridge the discussion to the writing.  It never occurred to me that the discussion would strengthen the writing all on its own. I am however having trouble connecting the overall discussion of a text through socratic circles to actually forming arguments.  In The Chicken and the Egg Styslinger and Pollock talk about how students had trouble using evidence from the text to support their arguments.  To me, it seems like the circles teach how to be respectful and to debate, but not necessarily how to argue.  While the students in The Chicken and the Egg did not always use textual evidence however, they still worked up to it and still used the format of discussion as a way of thinking about Romeo and Juliet as a class which is something that I thought was great.
     Response and Analysis by Probst is the text that I spent the most time thinking about this week.  This could possibly be due to the fact that I used one of these lessons in my classroom without knowing it, or that I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with Probst frequently during my reading.  The thing that I most disagreed with Probst on was the analogy that he set up within the article.  This is that people need to talk with others about movies or books.  I went to a movie with my friends last night and we talked about it for about ten minutes afterward.  I'm not sure that there needs to be a dialogue with others to fully think about a text.  This is not to say that we shouldn't think about what we read, or just move on after we are finished, but we can think about it on our own.  We can also think about reading through our writing.  One of my professors said that if you spend more than thirty minutes reading anything then you should write about it.  I think this is true, and if you need to talk about it then it wouldn't hurt.  I did however like his take on the most important word activity which is what I actually did for the Do portion of this post.
     The reading from Adolescent Literacy this week talked about one of the biggest problems that I have when getting students to talk, and it is even something I struggled with when I was in school.  This is getting students comfortable with discourse.  We think that talking is easy.  After all, we do it all the time, but talking in front of people and about assigned topics in an English class is a different story.  We need to teach students that there is not necessarily a right or a wrong answer, but there is only what the tell us, and if it is supported by the text or not.  The point of having arguments is to have students learn the method of talking with peers, not rehearsing factual answers.

DO:
My Do this week comes from a lesson that I planned for the first part of internship A.  This lesson is after I had tried to have classroom discussion a few times, but it did not go as well as I had hoped.  I should point out here that I was teaching Freshmen and they needed explicit instructions on what we were doing and why we were doing it.  My coaching teacher suggested when I had discussion that I gave them handouts, or questions to answer to lead the discussion so that they wouldn't be scared to say something wrong.  I chose instead to do the Most Important Word activity that I found in Bridging English and then found again in Reading and Analysis.  This worked in much the same way that my CT expected questions to work, and in the same way that we have been taught in our education classes.  The students first combed the text for the most important passage.  They then narrowed this down to a sentence and finally to a word.  I then had them draw the passage to help them visualize.  After this independent work, they talked to a partner about what they drew, and finally we talked as a class about what we all thought were the most important aspects of this story.  It was a great success

Lesson Plan

Finding the Right Balance

Say:
What Matters: Meeting Content Goals through Teaching Cognitive Reading Strategies with Canonical Texts by Styslinger, Ware, Bell, and Barrett
Bridging English by Milner and Milner
Readicide by Gallagher
When Kids Can't Read by Beers
Reading Better, Reading Smarter by Appleman

This has been one of the more helpful sets of readings that we have done.  I find myself thinking fairly often, "This is great, but how are we supposed to balance these practices while teaching the books that we are required to teach?"  I think that ideally, we would be able to teach whatever we thought our students would react to best, but here we are.

I think that What Matters was a helpful article in this regard because it talks about specific ways that teachers encouraged literacy by using these different required texts.  I personally responded well to the use of visualization during The Crucible and The Great Gatsby because one of my internship classes is during a reading seminar, where we are teaching struggling readers different strategies.  We taught them visualization last week by having them draw out scenes from The Things They Carried. Gatsby is also a good text to teach with visualization because it is easy for students to imagine huge parties and old cars.  I also liked the idea of teaching how to make predictions.  These things may seem like obvious ways to read for us, but they are not always apparent to struggling readers.  Having them make predictions as they read forces them to think while they are reading.

One of the most important things that Readicide said in this chapter is about supporting student reading throughout all of their school careers.  We used to believe that once we taught them how to read, we could just give them anything and they would be able to handle it, but now we know that they need to be supported over time.  We need to work them up to different texts, and read some texts with them to talk them through it and help them to understand.  One of the things that I struggle with is taking notes in the margins of books.  Gallagher suggest that we tell students to underline things and to write things in the margins, but when I was in school, and often still today, I never knew what I was supposed to underline, or what people were writing in their novels.  One of my English professors presented her copy of Emma to us one day and it was covered in markings.  All I could think was, "How did she know what was important enough to mark in that book?"  I thin that people often struggle with this and that there needs to be a way that we guide our students into making notes in books.

Milner and Milner, Appleman, and Beers are our methods texts for this week.  Milner and Milner does a great job of showing us how we need to move from reader response to interpretive community, and into formal analysis.  Beers and Appleman give us great methods for prereading, during reading, and post-reading strategies.  Between our class at DJJ and our internship this semester, I have found these texts helpful.  During my internship, I have used tea party from Beers and found that on its own it was alright, but it works well as a way to enter into a discussion about a text, or about a specific topic about a text.  I have also found that reading to students is helpful as well.  It relieves the pressure off of them from worrying about if they are going to have to read so that they can focus on the text.


Do:
For my do section this week I am presenting some student artifacts representing some things that I have done in my internship.  The first is a list of discussion questions.  These were answered by students in pairs after they participated in Beers’ tea party activity with a poem by Shel Silverstein.  The students did tea party then answered these questions in pairs and finally we discussed them as a class.  The tea party went over well, but I could have modelled it better.  The students were having trouble understanding what they should talk about with the people that had other lines.  They were more focused on putting a poem together than talking about the meaning of the lines they had.  The other artifacts in this Do are from a lesson I did on The Things They Carried.  Students were told to highlight what they thought was the most important passage and were then required to draw a picture of it and talk about it with a partner.  This also led into a class discussion that turned out pretty well.  Students were adamant about the discussion because they had put so much effort into these drawings that they believed that the passage they drew was indeed the most important.

 

                                      
                                      
                                      

Bridging English by Milner and Milner

Reading Better, Reading Smarter by Appleman

A Lens of One's Own: Of Yellow Wallpaper and Beautiful Little Fools

Of Grave Diggers and Kings: Reading Literature Through the Marxist Lens, or, What's Class Got to Do with It?

Critical Encounters in High School English by Appleman

Say:

I appreciate Milner and Milner and Appleman a great deal during these readings about critical synthesis.  Usually when critical synthesis is discussed, we just get a list of different critical perspectives and their definitions.  This is also helpful as it boosted some of my prior knowledge from undergrad, but I appreciate the methods given in Bridging and Reading Better, Reading Smarter, because they tell us how to actually put these different theories into action.  Milner and Milner is also realistic in letting us know that often times critical synthesis is something that we do not get to.  I like to think that it is something that we can address as a teachable moment when a student interprets something through a particular lens.  I do however want to use jigsawing in my classroom in regards to critical synthesis.  I like the idea of having different experts of feminism and marxism to share their views with each other.  While not really a problem, only a nagging that I have is that this will best be suited for juniors or seniors, as my main focus with younger students will be to get them to interpret a text through their own knowledge before I have them go at it from the perspective of a critic.

A Lens of One's Own is interesting not only because of the pun on Virginia Woolf in the title, but also because it uses The Yellow Wallpaper as an introduction to feminist theory.  We often hear the complaint of only teaching stories written by dead white men, and this is mostly true.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story is one of the only feminist stories that is consistently taught in high schools, and it makes for a great place to introduce feminist theory because we can introduce theory as a participatory role that the reader and writer are both involved in.  Gilman set out when writing this story to make a point and without knowing anything about feminism you can probably get the same theme from this story.  Teaching it with feminism allows our students to easily gain that lens so that they can view other works through the same lens.  I think it's cool that in this article they also move from the general to the personal and begin connecting this feminist theory to things the students see in their lives.  This is a great example of how literature can be used to teach social consciousness in our classrooms.

Teaching Hamlet through Marxist theory is something that I really should have thought of before.  I'm realizing that I don't know nearly as much about Marxist theory as I should.  Shakespeare lends itself to the Marxist lens because it is all about class struggle.  We are of course given the idea of grave diggers and kings in the title of this article and it makes sense.  We have the aristocracy all losing their minds and the gravediggers are just making jokes and being wiser than everyone.  This is typical of Shakespeare, especially through his use of fools typically being the wisest.  I think that King Lear would be another good text for this because the conflict is driven by the division of land between the wealthy while the poor are still poor.

Do:

As I said in my Say portion of this blog post, I think that introducing theory to our students seems to me like something difficult.  We really need to do a lot of scaffolding so that they have the background information to read texts through these various lenses.  I think the only time theory was discussed when I was in high school was in the IB theory of knowledge class.  The rest of my English career consisted of either reader response or new criticism.  For this Do blog I have decided to make a powerpoint mini-lesson to introduce some of the basic schools of thought. With critical synthesis, while not ideal, it is just one of those times when we will have to make our students take some notes before we can get into some of the more interesting activities with it.  This lesson plan is based around a unit covering Frankenstein so I would then move into some of the jigsawing that I discussed in my Say so that students can play the roles of different theorists.

Subject: English I Honors – 90 Min

Topic: Critical Synthesis with Frankenstein

Title of Lesson: “I don’t have a clever name for this”

Objectives:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.1

Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 9-10 topics, texts, and issues, building on others' ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.9-10.6

Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and tasks, demonstrating command of formal English when indicated or appropriate.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.8

Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; identify false statements and fallacious reasoning.

The Student Will Be Able To:

• Understand different schools of literary thought and theory
• Analyze a literary text through the lens of one or more of the schools of theory discussed
• Discuss the text as a class in a way that differentiates the different schools of criticism.

Purpose:

In this lesson, students will be introduced to topics literary theory, particularly in relation to the text of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Looking at texts through a critical lens is not only useful in the classroom.  If gives students a lens to look at the world in different ways, and from view points of others.  This could either be through TV shows, movies, or even advertisements.  

Procedures:

Introduction: (20 Min.)

• PowerPoint lecture on the different schools of thought.  I have allocated 20 minutes, because it seems unlikely that students will have much background in Critical theory so this would likely need to be something that I go into detail on.

Development: (1 Hour)

• Role Playing Activity (Milner 172).
• Students will draw a different school of literary thought at random. They will read it and then throw it away.  We will then have a classroom discussion based around a close reading of Frankenstein (preferably a section with Elizabeth) and the students will each take part in the discussion playing the role of the critic that they drew from the hat.  It will be the job of three to four other students to choose who the critics are role playing as. Sort of like a party quirks game, but with the whole class and with literary critics.
• Jigsaw Groups (30 Minutes) (Milner 172).
• Students will split into groups of four.  Each group will choose one critical school of thought, and discuss the text of Frankenstein through the lens of that school of thought.  After about ten minutes of discussion students will split up into different groups so that they can discuss their findings with other schools of thought.  After the activity, we will come together as a class to briefly discuss what they came up with in their groups.

Conclusion: (10 Min)

• With the remaining time in class we will come together and begin reading the first part of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and discuss any questions they have about the poem before they read the rest of it over the weekend.

Materials

• Smart Board
• PowerPoint presentation
• Notes for Mini-lesson
• Copies of Frankenstein

Evaluating:

During:

During the lesson I will be walking around during group discussions to check off everyone that is participating in discussion.  I will also make a note of who contributes to the classroom discussion though this will be to boost those that speak but not count against those that do not.  Points will be deducted for students who are not paying attention in class discussion.

Say/Do September 14

(Re)Introducing Reader Response
Response & Analysis by Probst
Bridging English by Milner and Milner
The Challenge of Literature by Rosenblatt
The Lens of Reader Response
Responsive Reading Using Edmodo by Styslinger and Eberlin
Dimensions of Failure in Reader Response by Henneberg
Critical Literacy as Comprehension by Mclaughlin and DeVoogd

SAY:

Reader response is one of the things that we see come up again and again. After doing these readings, it is becoming clear why.  Reader response makes a lot of sense.  While it should not be the only thing that we do in our classrooms, it is a good way to get students to enter a text.  Having students find ways to connect to a text will make them interested more in reading, which is ultimately one of the things we want our students to love.

Robert E. Probst in Response and Analysis offers some interesting activities that we can use with our students.  The first activity involves having them write down the first word they think of whenever they hear another word.  This activity stuck out to me because it presents the opportunity to show them that when responding to literature there are no right or wrong answers, there are only the things in our lives that we connect to the literature.  Another idea presented here is that the reader is just as involved in the book as the author is.  Readers may have different views about a piece of literature based off individual experience.  

The ideas presented by Probst are similar to those of Rosenblatt, shown through his repeated quotes from Rosenblatt.  Rosenblatt talks about transacting with literature, which is the same thing as reader response.  She places reading in the center of all other studies.  Students can learn psychology by reading a novel that deals with that study.  Oedipus can be used to help study Freud for instance.  Rosenblatt also says that we can teach students about the human experience by having them read.  This is the reason that many people read in the first place.  They either want to see the problems that they are facing solved by someone in a story, or they want to read in order to experience the life of another person. Rosenblatt frames this as information versus experience in that sometimes we read in order to learn specific information, but other times we read as an escape.  We read as a way to experience a life other than our own.  By being involved with a text we become more aware and sensitive to the aesthetics that an author uses.

In The Lens of Reader Response I found that the most interesting section was the one titled “I am Not a Lesbian; I am Not a Jew.” This section discussed how students reacted to a text based on their own identities.  They were more likely to choose characteristics about themselves that said what they were not as a way of removing themselves from the book.  The book dealt with themes involving sexuality and Judaism, so the students made sure that they let it be known that they were not either of these things.  This is interesting in that it seemed that they felt they could not relate to a book if the main character did not share key features with them.  In the end, most seemed to learn something from the book, but others were still using their lack of relation as a reason for not learning anything.

Finally, I found the article Where We Are: Responsive Reading Using Edmodo particularly of interest because I am participating in it right now.  Not only am I responding to something, but I am doing it online, and after today, I will be able to respond to the responses of my classmates.

DO:

I chose to do this lesson because I think that with some of these canonical texts like The Odyssey have a lot of history and stigma attached to them. Something like this text is something that every student at the school has gone through and has told the people under them about. This allows us to test the title with what they think they know, and then to have them read on their own to see if what they have heard matches up to what they have read. The discussion after then allows them to see as a class what they have thought about the text, and if it were easier, harder, or more or less interesting than they had heard from their classmates. I added the say/do as a way for them to continue reading with others so that they do not get frustrated trying to read on their own until they are a bit further along in the story. I think that for the reasons of frustration, The Odyssey is also a good candidate for skipping parts and summarizing them for students. Many textbooks seem to do this by default by containing abridged editions and I think mine in high school included a graphic novel type story of the Trojan War. That was not included in this lesson, but would come further on.

Lesson Plan