Tune the Teaching to the Students' Learning
Traditional pedagogy believes that the process of teaching consists of imparting the teacher’s content knowledge to the students. This belief ignores the fact that students don’t always learn what they are taught and that students have their own unique learning process. Maybe it is due to my background of being educated in China, when I first started observing teaching in the U.S. schools, what impressed me the most was how little time teachers spent in direct instruction and how much time they allowed the students to work on their own. It was not until after I completed the research and interview for the student learning project in Professor Nolen’s “Dilemmas in Teaching and Learning” course that I realized that teachers should tune the teaching to the students’ learning process and help students become the owners of the classroom.
When I began student teaching full-time in January, 2009, I was glad that I had a chance to put what I have learned in methods and other classes into practice. For example, I was willing to try some reading strategies I learned from Methods Professor Karen Mikolasy’s class because I wanted my students to discover how to read effectively and reflectively. I also wanted to diversify the classroom discourse, resulting in a two-way communication between the teacher and the students. The second goal was especially important because when I started student teaching at Bellevue High School for my first field experience, I was at a loss in engaging in a meaningful dialogue with my students. Often, I just taught by rote. I had made a lot of improvements during my second field experience at Odle Middle School by observing and imitating, and as I began my 11-week full time student teaching at Tyee Middle School, I wanted to formulate my own teaching style that was tuned to student learning process. I focused on a unit that involved reading Jennings Michael Burch’s autobiography They Cage the Animals at Night and writing an expository essay on how Jennings used his two character traits to help him overcome the challenges.
I started the planning by assessing students’ prior knowledge and interest and then comparing them to the learning goals of the unit. They Cage the Animals at Night is a book on childhood hardship and abuse that happened in the 1950s’ New York City. The learning goals for the students were not limited to understanding the plot and then writing a book report; instead, the goals focused on improving students’ reading and writing skills through comprehension and analysis of the literary text.
In my opinion, prior knowledge about the related topics such as orphanages and poverty would be helpful, but not indispensable. With careful planning, I could build on whatever they knew about the foster care system to scaffold for their on-going learning. I wanted to assess how much they cared about those kids struggling through poverty and how much they thought about issues like child abuse and challenges of life. What’s more, I wanted to see a keen interest in reading a good text and the determination to make improvement in reading and writing. It was for a while that I, always a straight-A student, learned not all students wanted to learn and we needed to kindle their interest in what they read and to persuade them that the text was worth reading. It was no secret that students devoted more time and energy to the texts that were more relevant to their own experiences. That was why Wolf (1988) encouraged the students first to hold a conversation with a work (what Rosenblatt would call “a transaction between the reader and the text”), to be engaged with literature. To hold a conversation with the book meant that the students would not receive the knowledge from the book passively. Instead, they actively posed questions and sought for the answers in the book. They also reflected on what they had read and formed their own understanding of the book based on their life experience. Only in this way could students really become active and thoughtful readers.
Tovani (2000) also stressed that reading could be difficult for some students who might seem quite capable readers. I found the same situation in my classroom: some students who could express themselves very well in a monologue performance were stuck on the first chapter of the book and expressed frustration. It was not because the vocabulary daunted them (Burch’s book uses simple but eloquent language), but because the setting of the story was so out-dated that some students failed to make a connection.
Before we tackled the text, I used some pre-reading strategies illustrated in Tovani’s (2000) I read it, but I don’t get it and found they were immensely helpful. For example, I decided to use some other literature pieces the students were more familiar with to bridge the gap between what they knew about poverty and child abuse and Burch’s miserable childhood as was described in the book. These literatures included movie clips adapted from their bed-time stories such as Anne of Green Gables and Oliver Twist. It proved that the viewing of the video and the following Quickwrite on orphans coping strategies proved a good method to, as Tovani (2000) says, “connect the known to the new.” I was not surprised to find that later in our discussion about They Cage the Animals at Night students often compared Jennings to Anne or Oliver, or compared the orphanages that hosted them. When we came to the part that Jennings was punished in the orphanages for minor mistakes, students were reminded how Oliver was punished for just asking for a little more to eat. They highly sympathized with both Jennings and Oliver and developed a great interest to read. Actually, just a few weeks into the reading, a lot of students proudly pronounced that they had already finished reading the book.
To sustain their interest in reading the book thoroughly and reflectively, I held a “My Doggie Talk.” Doggie was a stuffed animal that accompanied Jennings throughout his hard struggles through the foster care systems. When we were reading the book, questions like “Why are kids so attached to their stuffed animals?” kept coming up, and nearly all kids had stories about their own “Doggies.” So I decided we would devote one class to talking about an object we had special attachment to. I brought my own stuffed animal Dobby to class and told them some stories about my childhood amidst poverty and political instability. My students were also eager to share their affections to their “Doggies.” The attached student work sample, a note card, showed that the student could relate his own lonely experience (his parents being divorced) to the reason for Jennings’s deep affection for Doggie. This empathy was essential to understanding and reflecting on the texts.The fulfilling experience of the “My Doggie Talk” reminded me of two types of teachers described by Grossman (1991) as “Collin,” who cared more about developing her subject matter knowledge, and “Martha,” who devoted more time to developing her relationship with her students. In my opinion, it is important to have a thorough knowledge about what you want the students to learn, but it is even more important to help your students see why they should learn. My focus is always on my students, paying attention to their needs and assessing their learning progress.
During the 6-week instruction of the book, I mainly used dialectical journals as a useful tool to help my students build up understanding of the book and prepare for the embedded assessment of the unit. The dialectical journal was quite similar to what Tovani (2000) described as “Double-entry Journal.” Students copied down important quotes from the book that showed Jennings’s character traits on the left column and wrote down their reflections on the right. They would comment on how this quote showed a certain character trait and why this character trait was important. I decided this activity would construct a major part in the learning activities in addition to the classroom discussions. This was a good example of “holding a conversation with a work,” (Wolf, 1995) and after a few days into reading and grading their dialectical journals, I found that a lot of the students had some misconceptions about the definition of “character traits.” Previously they were handed a sheet in which certain traits were listed, such as “happy,” “sad,” and “surprised.” While these words could be used to describe a person’s feelings and emotions, the way some students used them didn’t work very well as constant traits of a person’s character and helped little for their embedded assessment. For example, some students quoted a paragraph of Jennings finding his sick brother at home and identified the character trait as “surprised.” To address this misconception, I could do two things. One is to put a red X on their journals and tell them straight, “No, it’s wrong!” Or, I could find a way for them to realize and correct their own misconceptions. In the class, I asked the students to describe what kind of persons they were; using the sentence structure “This is who I am. I am a(n) _____________ person.” Students came up with all kinds of sentences imaginable, such as “I am a funny person” or “I am a goofy person,” and they obviously enjoyed the activity. Then I asked them to think about two things: first, whether it was acceptable to say “I am a surprised person”; second, if they were sad most of the time and happy only at this moment, whether it was fine to label them as “happy people.” We had a heated discussion, and even a debate. In the end, though some students were still insisting “surprised” could be a character trait, most of them reached the understanding that a character trait was something the person constantly had. What should be kept in mind was that throughout, it was an open dialogue. I never dominated the discussion because I saw effective teaching as a two-way communication. All through the lessons, students were at the center of the learning process, and I tailored my teaching to their needs and supported students’ autonomy in the classroom. Instead of telling them what was correct, I preferred showing them what was correct by modeling and letting them see the difference. It was at these moments that I began to understand what Sawyer (2004) meant by saying teaching is “collaborative discussion as disciplined improvisation.” Cooperative learning constituted an important part of my classroom not only in the sense that I held open dialogue with my students, but also in the way I let students engage in group learning activities. I used some cooperative learning strategies (Cohen et al, 2004) to make sure that students had equal access to the classroom discourse and to foster an equitable relationship between them. Group discussions, cooperative group work and seminars are the usual forms in my classroom. Students had a sense of becoming the owners of the classroom instead of being force-fed by the teacher – sometimes even useful knowledge can be nauseating if not taught right.
I used the assessments in the unit as a way to gauge students’ abilities and to build on my next teaching steps. I’ve already talked about some formative assessments such as the dialectical journals, and now I’d like to focus on the summative assessment of this unit – the essay. I have attached some students’ essays about Jennings’s character traits. From these essays, one could see that most of them did a fairly good job identifying the two positive character traits, such as “empathetic,” “brave” and “affectionate.” This showed that the dialectical journals and classroom discussion had really helped students and clarified their understanding of key concepts. A lot of the students also used their commentaries in the dialectical journals to construct the commentary parts of the body paragraphs. This showed a way to let classroom learning build toward the final assessment and strengthen students’ knowledge and skills. What made me especially elated was that some of the students make a good effort to relate the book to their own life. A student who struggles with reading concluded his essay with such encouraging words – “Jennings was independent and courageous. He had to learn special skills to survive in order to get by every day. These traits helped overcome his challenges and let him know what to look to avoid trouble or pain. Jennings never gave up because if he gave up, he wouldn’t be able to go on. He teaches us to keep on going. He teaches us to not run away: running away from your problems is not good.” After reading his essay, I can vision him overcoming his own problems coming up with this essay.
In conclusion, I feel teaching is best when teachers have the students in their minds and plan the lessons for the needs of the students. Building the teaching on the students’ schemata and scaffolding, modeling are essential parts of good teaching practice. Tuning the teaching to the students learning is the only way to a successful classroom.
References:
Cohen, E. G., Brody, C. M., & Sapon-Shevin, M. (2004). Teaching cooperative learning: The challenge for teacher education. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Grossman, P. L. (1991) “What are we talking about anyway? subject-matter knowledge of secondary English teachers” in Brophy, J. E. (Ed.) Teachers' knowledge of subject matter as it relates to their teaching practice. Greenwich, Conn: JAI Press.
Sawyer, R. K. (2004) “Creative teaching: collaborative discussion as disciplined improvisation.” Education Researcher, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 12-20.
Tovani, C. (2000). I read it, but I don't get it: Comprehension strategies for adolescent readers. Portland, Me: Stenhouse.
Wolf, D. (1995). Reading reconsidered: Literature and literacy in high school. The Thinking series. New York: College Entrance Examination Board.
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