Chalk Talk

We talk about student choice all the time:  students should be able to choose what they read, what they write,etc.  The idea of making schoolwork relevant to students’ lives is not new, and most educators value its importance, even if the practice of such a notion is not widespread.

But what if students actual had more freedom in choosing the courses they take? Not just a choice between AP, IB, or “on-level”–what if the content of the course was different?

Pittsburgh Public Schools are introducing a black literature course next fall that students could take instead of AP or “regular” senior English.  In the past, such a course has been offered as an elective.  The texts to be studied would include Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Octavia Butler’s Kindred, as well as works that are connected to the region, such as those by playwright August Wilson.  The writers of the curriculum are looking to offer students a historical perspective on the literature.

You can read all about this new course online at:  http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10032/1032518-298.stm.

When I read the article, I thought two things:

1.)  In my methods class, I teach that “multicultural teaching” doesn’t mean designating one day to study the Harlem Renaissance; I inform my students that Amy Tan is not the only Asian-American who has ever written fiction.  I encourage my students to consider how to make their courses multicultural, offering readings from a diverse group of authors throughout the year.  So, the thought of having an entirely separate class to teach black authors seems contrary to this.

HOWEVER…

2.)  I like what Pittsburgh is doing for lots of reasons.  First, the designers of this curriculum have a focus and rationale in mind.  So often the objectives for English courses are vague, and by the time students are seniors, they are primarily reading works that are “good for them”:  Beowulf.  The Canterbury Tales.  Macbeth.  We tell students that these are works they’ll have been expected to read when they enter college.  However, few of our students will graduate and go on to be English majors, and they will have the opportunity to select the courses they take.  And, I teach freshman composition at a state university; I care very little whether my students have mastered some Great Works curriculum.  What I hope for is that the students who enter my class have some critical reading and writing skills.  Few do.

But if students were given a choice of what English course to take at the end of their high school career…and, if one of their choices was a course designed with the students’ interests/backgrounds in mind…wow.  You could get a whole generation of students reading again.  Perhaps that’s hyperbole, but here’s a quote from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article covering this story that I found both heart-breaking and maddening:

“Anna Roseboro, a former high school English teacher active with the National Council of Teachers of English, said students in her black literature courses had various reactions to the material. Some were pleased with the content, but disappointed they hadn’t seen it before.

“Many of them were shocked. Many of them were delighted. Many of them were appalled,” she said.

Forty states plus D.C. submitted monstrous grant proposals earlier this week to get a slice of the $4.35 billion dollar education reform pie served up by President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.  Texas, the state where I currently reside, will have none of it, says Governor Rick Perry.  Here’s my favorite Perry quote on his decision, courtesy of a press release from his office:

“Texas is on the right path toward improved education, and we would be foolish and irresponsible to place our children’s future in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and special interest groups thousands of miles away in Washington, virtually eliminating parents’ participation in their children’s education…If Washington were truly concerned about funding education with solutions that match local challenges, they would make the money available to states with no strings attached.”

Lots of people would beg to differ with Governor Perry’s assertion that Texas is on the right path toward improving education.  Texas continues to have one of the highest percentages of high school dropouts in the country, and, as someone who has been working in Texas public schools for ten years, the reforms at the state level are more of the same, packaged a little differently, year after year.

One thing Perry objects to is the Race to the Top’s request that states “adopt standards and assessments that prepare students to succeed in college and the workplace and to compete in the global economy.”  It seems that this administration is looking to create a set of national standards so that we might all agree what should be learned in grades K-12, no matter if you live in Delaware or Texas, Alaska or Rhode Island.  At first, I was concerned that what is being suggested is a national curriculum–like, no matter where you are and who you are, you MUST read To Kill a Mockingbird in the ninth grade.  Such mandates are dangerous; they squash the creativity and innovation of teachers and don’t take into account individual students’ needs and interests.  But it seems that we should all be able to agree on what standards students should be able to meet by the end of each school year.  States have already created such standards, thanks to NCLB, and most educators will say that standards are GOOD.  It’s okay to have goals and objectives for student learning.  And it is likely that the standards from state to state don’t vary enough to warrant an argument for commonality.  Perry’s rejection seems to be motivated by politics (surprise) and not a fundamental or worthy concern about Obama’s money or the strings attached to it.

But what about the money? From  a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece written in July 2009 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204886304574308442726348678.html):

“Between 1970 and 2004, per-pupil outlays more than doubled in real terms, and the federal portion of that spending nearly tripled. Yet reading scores on national standardized tests have remained relatively flat. Black and Hispanic students are doing better, but they continue to lag far behind white students in both test scores and graduation rates.”

So where’s the money going?  Why isn’t it fixing the problem?

Some of the Race to the Top funding would go toward merit pay for teachers who demonstrate success with their students.  Some is set aside for the expansion of charter schools.  According to the WSJ article, the teacher unions don’t like either of these suggestions:  ”School choice is anathema to the nation’s two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which also oppose paying teachers for performance rather than for seniority and credentials.”

You can offer teachers bonuses if they get their students to bubble in enough correct answers on a test that should really just indicate basic proficiency, and you can give students the opportunity to choose what school they want to attend.

But.

As someone who taught in challenging schools and is currently involved in teacher prep, it seems that the biggest indicator of student success, and therefore, the success of a school, is the quality of the teacher in the classroom.

In Readicide, Kelly Gallagher cites many statistics from the 1998 study “Good Teaching Matters:  How Well-Qualified Teachers can Close the Gap.”  In this report, Katy Haycock, director of the Education Trust, concludes that “a student’s teacher may determine the difference ‘between entry to a selective college and a lifetime at a burger joint’” (Gallagher 89).  Both NPR and The Atlantic have also run stories recently about teacher prep and teacher quality:

NPR:

“New Orleans Casts a Wide Net for Teachers”:  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122252953

“Study Tries to Track Louisiana Teacher’s Success”:  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122224872

The Atlantic:

“What Makes a Great Teacher?”:  http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching

Our country’s public schools are in trouble–and yes, Governor Perry, that includes Texas schools.  And adequate funding is and will always be an issue.  But there are phenomenal teachers doing exceptional work at some of the nation’s most impovershed and challenged schools, and there are mediocre teachers doing less than mediocre work at well-funded, affluent schools.  If we really want to consider how to improve our schools, we must study the work of those exceptional teachers and schools, and we must start talking about what matters most:  not the latest classroom technologies or the newest canned reading program, but the quality of the person who teaches our children day after day, year after year.

One of the greatest lesson planning resources for English language arts teachers can be found at http://www.readwritethink.org/.  Funded and supported by the International Reading Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Verizon Foundation, ReadWriteThink.org is a virtual warehouse of great lesson plans, reprintable handouts, and rubrics.  Every semester I encourage my students and student teachers to use this website.  There are many truths about teaching, and two of my favorites are:

1. Teachers don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
2. There’s no stealing in teaching.

The revised site allows educators to search the Classroom Resources for lesson plans, student interactives, calendar activities, and printouts.  You can search for lesson plans by grade level, objective, or theme, and you can find minilessons as well as entire unit plans.  There’s also a keyword search;  typing in To Kill a Mockingbird yielded six results, including two entire unit plans.  For teachers whose students have reliable access to computers, the Student Interactives section gives students the opportunity to tap into a variety of tools for learning, like the Essay Map organizer which allows students a space to organize their thoughts before they draft an informational, definitional, or descriptive essay.  In the Printouts section you can check out lots of rubrics, as well as informational sheets–including handouts on how to make a podcast, create a PowerPoint presentation, and use Movie Maker.

And, for friends and colleagues who are teaching freshman comp at the university, there are tons of plans that would be applicable to your students as well.  For example, a search for 12th grade writing lesson plans yielded over 70 results, including one titled “Assessing Cultural Relevance:  Exploring Personal Connections to a Text.”  There’s enough material for several class meetings, but the beauty of this site is that you can mine the lessons for activities and strategies that would suit your needs and the needs of your students.

Unfortunately, teachers have little time to plan, and schools aren’t  doing what they need to do to help teachers become more effective.  Readwritethink.org is a free resource that is user-friendly and comprehensive.  Check it out, find something worth using in your classroom, and let us know about it.

I talk so often and so passionately about Kelly Gallagher that my students think I have a crush on him.  He is the author of several texts that I’ve used in my methods class at the university and with my student teachers.  Two of his books–Deeper Reading and Teaching Adolescent Writers–have completely transformed the way that I teach reading and writing to my freshman at Texas State.  But here’s why I think he’s great:  he isn’t an ivory tower academic who is out of touch with the little red schoolhouse (see the link in my previous post for more on this).  He currently teaches students who are repeating the ninth grade at a large urban high school in Anaheim, California.  He’s been in the classroom for twenty-three years and still cares enough to get fired up about what defines good teaching.  He’s good, and his new book has me thinking that he may be the most important voice in education.

At the National Council of Teachers of English conference in Philadelphia last November, I met Gallagher and heard him speak about his new book titled Readicide:  How Schools are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It.  Funny story:  I was attending the conference with my then four-month old son, Xavier.  I schleped him around, wearing a carrier that allowed him to face out.  He was a big hit at the conference, and when we walked into his session, Kelly Gallagher remarked, “Wow, it’s our youngest conference participant.”  I took that as a sign that it would be okay to introduce myself and tell him how much I admired his work.  He was gracious, and as Xavier and I headed toward the back of the room, I whispered to my dear sweet boy:  “please let Momma hear what this man has to say.”  By the time the presentation started, X had fallen asleep and I was ready to listen.

Gallagher defines readicide as “the systematic killing of the love of reading , often exarcebated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in schools.”  He peppers his book with lots of startling statistics such as:

• Only 16% of adults are frequent or avid readers of literary texts (from the NEA’s Reading at Risk)
• 1 in 4 students are able to read and comprehend material in a textbook (from the Alliance for Excellent Education)
• In 2005, only half of the students who took the 2005 ACT College Readiness Benchmark for Reading demonstrated readiness for college reading

Of course, part of Gallagher’s argument is that reading frequency and proficiency have declined since the conception of No Child Left Behind in 2002, and schools are no closer to narrowing the achievement gap between affluent and low-income students than before standardized tests began muddying the work of public school teachers.  He’s even traced the decline back to Rod Paige, who served as Houston Independent School District superintendent while I was a teacher in the district and who, thanks to the supposed miracle he performed in the district, went on to serve as the US Secretary of Education under George W. Bush.  (Paige’s work of increasing test scores, particularly among low-income students, was known as the “Texas Miracle,” but Gallagher offers many reasons for why this “phenomena” would be better defined as the “Texas Mirage”–including the rampant cheating that occured throughout the district.)

Gallagher isn’t the first to cry foul on NCLB.  Public school teachers across the country understand that standardized tests have impacted their teaching and their students’ learning.  And perhaps, like me, some were hoping that with a change in administration, standardized tests would vanish like some kind of miracle or mirage.  But, in fact, it seems that buzz terms like “student and teacher accountability” and “performance-based standards” are here to stay.

And maybe they are.  Or maybe we read Kelly Gallagher and decide that enough is enough.  Maybe we decide that, as teachers, we’ll find ways to help our students become more successful readers and help ignite the love for reading they have until they enter middle school.  Maybe as teachers, community members, parents, tax payers, and advocates for public schools, we all decide that we’ll ask tough questions about how and if reading is valued at our schools.

At the book’s close, Gallagher challenges language arts teachers to “find [their] courage to recognize the difference between the political worlds and the authentic worlds in which we teach, to swim against those current educational practices that are killing young readers, and to step up and do what is right for our students” (118).

While Readicide is definitely Gallagher’s most political book, he also offers lots of  practical ideas for teachers about how to combat readicide–stategies that have worked for him in his own challenging classrooms. But so much of this book deserves to be read by those among us who aren’t teachers.  The effects of readicide could have a devastating impact on  generations of voters, consumers, book buyers…we need to decide that we are invested in growing citizens who see reading as a vehicle for better understanding themselves and others.

Here’s the link:  http://www.stenhouse.com/shop/pc/viewprd.asp?idProduct=9158&r=&REFERER=.  Buy this book, read it, and come back to let me know what you think.

I’m not proud of all the work I did as an English teacher at an inner-city Houston high school.  Sure, my students and I made it out alive, and perhaps some learning occurred.  But my current work as a teacher-educator has forced me to reflect on what defines “best teaching practices.”  And I’ve realized that while I had great intentions during my early years as a teacher, I wasn’t quite sure of what I was doing, especially when it came to teaching reading.

I like to think I’ve learned a few things, and now I teach an undergraduate methods class and I supervise student teachers.  I spend a lot of time in middle and high school classrooms.  I don’t consider myself a master teacher, but I am a master observer.  I see things from the eyes of the students and the teachers, and either perspective can be frustrating.

Consider the teaching of a class novel…an often dreaded task no matter which side of the desk you’re sitting on.

Each semester I remind my student teachers of the strategies they could incorporate into the study of a novel—literature circles, dialectical journals, Socratic seminars, small group work, whole class discussion…

But the  strategy I am most likely to see when observing any of my student teachers, no matter what grade or level they are teaching, is one that is all too familiar:  they read aloud to their students.

I’m not talking about reading an opening line to get students excited or re-reading a passage to better understand a character’s motivation or pick up a subtle plot point.  Whole books are being read aloud:  To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, The Odyssey, Beowulf.  Sometimes students are asked to read, but more often than not, the teacher reads, expecting students to follow along.  Sometimes the teacher stops to ask a question about the text.  Students rarely know the answer because they aren’t paying attention.  They are looking out the window.  They are thinking about lunch.  They are texting their friends.  Can you blame them?

Had you observed me during my early years of teaching, you would have seen me doing the same thing.  A recent article in Education Week entitled “Reading Aloud to Teens Gains Favor Among Teachers” (http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/01/06/16read_ep.h29.html?tkn=UN[Fx3bLjkKLdQye5ls2RalA9K576xX0pBAu) gives some credit to this “strategy.” While the article cautions teachers against overusing this technique, I’m concerned that secondary educators might read this and think, “yes, sure, this is what I do.  And look, it’s a technique that is helping to improve adolescent literacy.”

Really?  Again, I admit that I read long works out loud to my students.  Most of my students did not read at grade-level, and resources were scarce at my school.  Many of my student teachers tell me that their students won’t read on their own or there aren’t enough books to take home.  But if I ask myself and my student teachers if we are doing our part to improve adolescent literacy by reading texts aloud to students while they are otherwise occupied, I’m sure we would shamefully agree that the answer is no.   So many of us became English teachers because we love reading and writing.  How are we going to foster that kind of love in our students if we never give them books they might enjoy or the opportunity to practice reading them?

So I’ll end the first of what I hope will be many posts with a question to you, dear reader:

How do we teach a novel in the middle or high school English classroom so that it is interesting, engaging, and improves literacy?