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

Say/Do 8/31: Transacting with Literature

Transacting With Literature
Adolescent Literacy by Beers, Probst, and Rief
Teaching YA Lit by Mike Roberts
Using Graphic Texts in Secondary Classrooms by Mary Rice
Directing Versus Exploring
SAY:

Transacting with literature is about more than students just reading a text.  In order for a text to be meaningful to the students they need to be able to get something from the text and in a sense, to give something back.  Transactional theory is closely related to reader response because it requires readers to respond to literature before they can make meaning of it.  The text needs to matter to them, or they need to be able to relate to it in order to care.  Students will not read anything we give them if they do not care about the subject matter.

One of the ways that we can get students to care about reading is to start them out on books that they can relate to.  This is the point of Mike Roberts’ “Teaching Young Adult Literature.”  He gives the example of a student who believes reading is not for him asking for a book recommendation.  This student believes that he is not made for reading because his experience with reading in the past has shown him that the books he’s been forced to read have not been made for him.  Once we find a book that relates to a student they begin to see that reading is not all that bad.  If they like one book, we are able to push them in other directions.  The way that we find out if they like the books is by having them respond to them in reading journals, or class book clubs.  From these young adult books that students care about, we can move them into the classics that we are expected to teach.

I was excited to read Rice’s novel about using graphic novels because this is something that I plan on doing.  Comic books and graphic novels are what got me to start reading in middle and early high school.  I remember watching V for Vendetta and then going out and buying the graphic novel.  This article brought up different points about using graphic novels that I had not thought of, specifically the price.  I want to use graphic texts in my classroom because they are popular, and for the same reasons I had for YA above, but I can’t do that if I cannot find money.  Another thing I like about graphic texts is that students can actually see a representation of themselves in the book.  It’s important to learn about your students in order to choose which of these texts to use.  

I think that motivating students is important and with that comes finding them something that they want to read, because if we just give assigned reading, they are not going to do it.  In my coaching teacher’s classroom last week she did something similar to the book pass.  She does not have enough books currently, so she had student browse book lists on their chromebooks and come up with a list of the top ten books that they found.  They seemed to be invested in finding the books, and I walked around with my CT trying to help them choose books by reading summaries, looking at covers, and talking to them about other things they like.  I think that the best way to get students transacting with literature is to have them choose what they read.

DO:
The lesson that I have come up with comes largely from the reader response from Milner and Milner. I want the students to begin interacting with a text before they have started reading it. The text that I chose is A Sound of Thunder. Ideally, in my classroom, I would be able to have students choose their own texts, as I said in my Say portion, but as I am working in someone else's classroom I have decided to use the short stories that we are doing this week. I will have students answer a writing prompt about a time in their lives related to the story, and then we will go into discussion. This way, they are now thinking about that time in their life, and are able to relate more closely to the text. I will then perform an At the point of utterance reading, stopping when the main character needs to make decisions to discuss with the students what they think he should do based off their experience, and the experiences of those that they have talked to. We will conclude with an exit slip having them write about what they had just read, and what they thought about the protagonists decisions.


Transacting with Literature Lesson Plan