"Readicide" by Kelly Gallagher

            Much like Cris Tovani’s book, Readicide by Kelly Gallagher is a great book and a great tool for teachers to use to look for ways to get their students to love reading and to comprehend what they’re reading.  I feel like these two books overlap in some ways because they both talk about how students are “fake reading” because they are having trouble figuring out strategies to use to comprehend text and about how students have come to hate the thought of reading because everything they have to read is specifically for tests or an assignment and it doesn’t spark their interest.  Students aren’t reading for pleasure anymore, they are reading because they have to.  In “Readicide,” Kelly Gallagher is saying that schools need to focus less on tests and teaching to the test and focus more on letting students get immersed into books that interest them.  If students are reading, they are learning.  Something Gallagher talks about that I really liked was that teachers are over-teaching novels to the point that students are starting to hate reading.  They aren’t able to get into the “reading flow” that Gallagher talks about so much in the book and that we as adults are able to get into so easily when we’re reading for fun.  Teachers should want to help students discover that “reading flow,” because once you experience that, you realize how fun reading is and how it can take you into another world for a while and allow you to block out everything else around you.  If you over-teach a book and stop students constantly to reflect on what they read and to answer questions about what they read, they will never reach that “reading flow.”  How would you like it if you had to stop every ten minutes to reflect on what you read?  Students are going to get burnt out on reading if this is how you teach a novel.  I think one of the most important things I’ve learned from this book is that you have to find a balance between over-teaching a book and under-teaching it.         

Cris Tovani's "I Read It, But I Don't Get It"

I loved this book.  Cris Tovani is absolutely brilliant in the way that she describes the problem that students are having these days with comprehending what they read.  I loved the examples and stories she shared from her own classroom because that made it all the more real for me and helped me better understand this problem.  I found myself laughing out loud at some of the things her students said to her, and I also found myself recognizing that I used to do some of the things her students did in school when I didn’t understand the textbook I was reading.  I’ve loved to read for pleasure for as long as I can remember, but I have always found it difficult for me to get into reading boring textbooks.  I used to find myself re-reading passages in a textbook (what Tovani’s students often tried to do) in the hope that I would miraculously understand what I just read.  But I never did, and I ended up getting the answers to a worksheet from a friend. 

            I had never thought of what I was doing as “fake reading,” but that was indeed what I was doing.  I think its interesting how teachers and parents just assume that their students or their children are amazing readers because they can read every word and pronounce them correctly from the page.  But if they were to ask that child to summarize what they just read in their own words, they would find that they were “faking reading.”  The strategies that Tovani suggests that teachers use to help students comprehend what they read are very helpful.  This book is probably one of my favorite things we have read this quarter.  My favorite section of the book is called “Re-reading is only the Beginning” and it is my favorite because the strategies that she gives to “fix up” confusion are so obvious and simple, yet teachers never think to tell their students that this is what good readers do.  My favorite suggestions on what to do when you are stuck on a passage is to “Visualize” and to “Retell what you’ve read.”  If you aren’t able to visualize what you’re reading, that is a good sign that understanding has stopped.  And if you aren’t able to retell what you have just read to someone, it is a good sign that you either didn’t understand what you read, or you were actually thinking of something else as you were reading.  Overall, I think this book is a great tool that every teacher should be using to help their students comprehend what they read.        

Individual Exploration: "Creating Classrooms for Social Justice"

            When I read the question “What is social justice?” I could not think of what my response could possibly be to that.  And if I couldn’t even define social justice, how could I say why it is important for our classrooms?  After looking through many articles, I came across a post on a website called edutopia, that simplified what being an educator for social justice really means and gave me ideas on some practices I could use to teach my subject, while still advocating for social justice in my classroom.  This post made it clear to me that social justice is important in the classroom because it is about using the power we have as teachers to make a positive change, and it is also about giving students the opportunity to see that they can make positive changes as well.  There were a few suggestions in this post on how to create a classroom for social justice that I really thought was important.  The idea that you need to make sure what you teach is relevant to the real world is such an important one.  This post talks about how you could incorporate what’s happening in the news into your content and it also talks about how you could ask your students if they have any questions about something controversial in the news that they have been hearing about.  I thought this was an interesting point because I never would have thought of that.  I think I would be too afraid of bringing up anything too controversial.  The post also suggests that you should create as many opportunities for students’ voices to be heard as possible through discussion and collaboration and that you should go through all of your materials for your lessons and make sure they include examples from diverse aspects of society.  I think both of these are extremely important.  I agreed with everything this post said.  In my mind, social justice is now defined as promoting tolerance, freedom, and equality for all people regardless of race, sex, orientation, religion, handicap, etc.  And it is important for our classrooms because students need to feel like they are accepted before they can begin to learn.

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

Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom

            This article gave great insight into the many injustices that are experienced by students in their schools and classrooms.  I also felt like this article gave me so many new ideas on how to approach teaching and how to approach creating my lesson plans.  In some ways this article gave me more courage to think outside of the box and create lesson plans that would be more interesting for my students.

            There were many ideas that interested me in the first section of this article.  Andrade and Morrell talked about how they were all for teaching popular cultural texts in the curriculum, even though they still taught the “classics.”  They also went on to say that many teachers interpret teaching multiculturalism with simply giving their students texts written by African American people or where the main characters are African Americans.  Andrade and Morrell talk about how a text isn’t necessarily multicultural just because an African American writes it, and always teaching these texts to show so-called multiculturalism is really oppressing African American students.  Teachers need to think outside the box and figure out what texts are actually multicultural, without being oppressive.  One of my favorite lines from this section of the article was: “Nothing promotes border crossing or tolerance more than helping students to arrive at an implicit understanding of what they have in common with those they have been taught to perceive as different.”

            In the second section of this article, I particularly liked the mention of the movie Stand and Deliver and how it was used in the classroom as a comparison to Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities to study the conditions and ways in which students were able to achieve great things in urban schools.  I remember watching this film many times, one of which was for my educational psychology class, and I remember that I was so inspired to go out of my way to help my students.  I want to make sure my students know that they are not destined to be a high school drop out or to never go to college just because their school doesn’t have the materials they need.  There is always hope.  Every student has the potential to do better.

            Lastly, I just wanted to note that I loved the idea (taken from Paulo Freire) that a pedagogical practice should be centered on dialogue, inquiry, and the real exchange of ideas between teachers and students because they have a great deal to offer one another.  Andrade and Morrell had this idea in mind when they created their unit plans and I plan to keep this idea in mind when I am writing the three-week unit plan for this class.       

Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" Chapter 2

            I thought it was interesting how this article compared the most common teacher-student relationship, one where the teacher is the narrator and the students are just passive receptacles of information that they just memorize and repeat, to depositing information into the garbage.  There is no creativity, no back and forth conversation, no opinions, and no building knowledge because students take in the information and store them in their minds for a short period of time and then let it go.  This ‘banking’ concept of education I was reading about in this article became eerily familiar to me with each and every word, and I realized why.  This is the most common practice of teaching in schools today.  For so many years, I have been the receptacle of thousands of facts, phrases, and just information I’m supposed to know (sometimes I was never told why I needed to know it- I just did).  Most of the time I would store this information in the back of my mind for a little while and then I would just forget it.  There was no meaningful conversation or inquiry happening in class, so the knowledge never stuck with me.  So many of my classes in high school and even in college were the type of classes where the teacher would stand up at the front of the classroom and spout off a bunch of facts and tell us to write them down.  Then we would have a test on those facts (I would memorize them the night before) and after that those things would never be talked about again.  It really is like filling up a trashcan, and once it gets too full you have to dump it out.  I definitely think that the ‘banking’ concept of education needs to stop and teachers need to think of ways that they can get their students involved creatively in lessons and still learn the material that they want their students to learn.          

Assessing and Evaluating Students' Learning and Secondary Standards-Based Grading and Reporting Handbook

            One thing that stuck with me after I had read the entire handout was that there are different conceptions of learning literature and your conception of it will influence the kinds of assessment tools you use in the classroom.  I agreed with the text when it stated that if you think learning literature is only about acquiring facts and knowledge about literature, there would be a lot of limitations to that conception.  Teachers who have this conception about learning literature focus simply on if a student knows that fact about the story, they don’t focus on the student’s ability to apply that knowledge to texts.  Tests that only give the opportunity for students to give the right answer rather than allowing students to express their thoughts through open-ended responses are not very effective because students will then focus on trying to retain only the facts they need to get a good grade on the test.  “Correct answer” tests do not let students be creative and thoughtful with their responses and in the long run I don’t believe that always administering these types of tests is going to get students to the types of learning goals teachers have for their Literature students.  I liked the alternatives to “correct answer” tests that this handout gave.  My favorite was to provide “reader-based” descriptive responses.  A favorite quote I got out of the reading was this: “To assert through a multiple-choice test that a piece of text has only one meaning is unacceptable, given what we know of language.”

            As far as the “Secondary Standards-Based Grading and Reporting Handbook” article goes, I thought it showed how much a failing grade on an assignment can affect a student’s overall grade.  A student could be doing great in class, with good grades, and if they have one little slip up their grade could be in the toilet.  I don’t think this is fair because a student’s grade, in my mind, should reflect what they know and how hard they are working.  I’m not sure what I would do as far as my grading system goes.  I don’t like the idea of giving a student a zero for a grade, but then again, I don’t want students to think that there won’t be consequences for not doing an assignment and turning it in on time or not trying at all on an assignment.

California State Universities Expository Reading and Writing Course Assignment Template

            I liked this handout because it had many great ideas about how to get your students to not only read what you want them to read, but to understand it and be able to question it and respond to it in writing.  I especially like the whole section on pre-reading.  Oftentimes we forget that there is steps we need to take before jumping into the reading that will help us better understand the text. Pre-reading also helps students to develop a purpose and plan for their reading, which would help them later down the line in writing a paper about what they are reading. 

            I liked how this handout had suggestions and strategies you could use with your students to help them read and understand text, not only for the pre-reading section, but also for every section.  Some of the pre-reading activities that were my favorite suggestions were group discussions, brainstorming, role-play activities, and quick-writes.  Another section I liked that had great suggestions was the section called, “Reading for Understanding.”  I like the idea of having students read the text multiple times, with a different purpose in reading it each time so that they can identify the main ideas and then develop their interpretations and opinions on the text.  Teachers can have their students make predictions about the text and then revisit their predictions.  My favorite questions that were suggested to ask students were:  Which of your predictions turned out to be true? And if any of your predictions were inaccurate, what in the text mislead you?

            Overall, this handout is a great tool that can be used by teachers to help their students understand what they read, think outside the box, and think critically about what they read.  One of the best sections in this handout is a subsection in the post-reading section called, “Thinking Critically.”  The different questions it suggests students ask themselves after reading something would be excellent starting points for an argumentative paper.