http://www.viddler.com/player/bd0ae6fe/

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On another note, was “teaching this book” how this was worded as you discussed in class? That is how I remember the verbiage in my Pitt Ed classes as well. But, since I have been in the classroom my mindset has focused more on the text as a vehicle to teach skills. The difference may seem subtle linguistically, but has serious pedagogical implications for one’s approach to planning and teaching.

He goes on to suggest that students, then, might be more interested in reading if it’s something that they chose or have more of a say in. That doesn’t always seem feasible when it comes to public schools and their curriculum – and it seems even more difficult to pull off when I take into consideration that I am only an intern right now and don’t necessarily have my own classroom.

But in going back to the comment, I think we do need to use texts as a “vehicle to teach skills.” Yes, we can ask our students to read to broaden their knowledge on a subject or prepare for a test. But broadening knowledge will only work if students are genuinely interested in that and preparation for a test is too short-term.

I’m starting to believe that we need to use texts to teach our students skills. We can use these difficult texts to prepare them for the next step in their life.

If they go on to college, they will need to read, comprehend and interpret a vast array of textbooks, essays and other documents. If they go into trade and mechanical schools, they will need to read, comprehend and interpret various directions, signals and instructions. If they go on to play a sports in college or professionally, they’ll need to read, comprehend and interpret playbooks. If they go on into the work force, they’ll need to read, comprehend and interpret different documents, research, graphs and a wide range of other texts.

The point being, teachers need to use these texts as a way to teach reading skills. In my case, and I’m assuming most others, it’s to use these texts to show students the importance of deciphering and dissecting these texts because they’ll need to do it in some capacity – and it doesn’t matter what way of life or profession they go.

So, while this doesn’t entirely help me reach a conclusion on student motivation, it does help me work toward an understanding of why I need to teach difficult texts, like Beowulf. I need to show my students that comprehending a difficult or foreign text is an important skill.

Now to tackle that motivation issue…

As a teacher, though, that’s a hard concept to get across. So often – and I’m guilty of it as well – any time a student comes across a text that they can’t understand on the first read or even just by “judging” the text to difficult, they’ll just put it aside and claim it’s meaningless and pointless to attempt to read something like Beowulf. What my mentor teacher and I, then, have been working on is encouraging student to read it once and not to cast it aside because it seems impossible to understand. We want them to come into class the next day with questions about the text and their interpretation of certain parts of the reading. Then, as a class, we’ll work through it together. This week we focused heavily on close readings, partner conversation, small group discussion and whole group discussion to come to an understanding of the text from a comprehension standpoint as well as an investigative standpoint (the “why” is something included and “what” does it mean discussion). I’d have my students look at passage of Beowulf, read it to themselves and think about what it’s saying. Then, they might talk to a partner or other students at the their table before I’d bring it back to a whole class discussion where we could combine ideas and figure things out together.

Needless to say, we were able to get a majority of the students to do the reading and jump in on discussion. For my periods, especially, I was amazed at the amount of participation from all students in the classroom. They seemed genuinely interested to reach conclusions and find out what happened next. It makes for some good days.

Tomorrow evening, I hope to make a quick follow-up post with some activities and ideas that my mentor shared with me that do two things: checks that students are actually reading; and marks a place that can kickstart discussion.

The question that caused this sobering graphic: What word or words do you associate with No Child Left Behind?

As a side note, I did something similar when I was studying the future of  journalism at Pitt a few years ago.

But if you take a look at the word cloud, you see words like “flawed,” “failure” and “has to go.” But if you look hard enough you can see “goal is good” and “a wakeup call for parents and educators.” While I’m not here to debate one side or the other when it comes to NCLB – not yet, at least – I do want to look at what 10 years of NCLB means for me, a pre-service teacher (PST).If I was to respond to the question about what NCLB means to me, I thought process probably would have headed toward the word ‘accountability.’ I’m under the impression that everybody is being held accountable under the NCLB act. Public school districts are held accountable for what their administrators and teachers do all the way to how their students perform on standardized tests.  And because those tests have a lot of weight on how much federal funding, if any, a district may get, it seems like English teachers are in a struggle between teaching to the test and teaching for students to make meaning out of texts and other media.

I’m thinking this way because when it comes to teaching short stories or even excerpts of works that students haven’t seen before, I feel like there isn’t enough push to have students take into account different strategies like multiple perspectives and shared inquiry. Because of NCLB, I get the feeling that students expect to be taught for a test and not just taught to learn and make meaning.

I’d like to create an environment where class discussion doesn’t revolve around the question of whether or not it will be on the test. Instead, I’d like to see a class where students question, for example, whether or not the actions of a certain character were fate or free will. And in doing so, I’d like to have a classroom where students can question the teacher and form their own opinions rather than take my suggestion or response as the one and only true answer.

How can we, as teachers, combat the restrictions of NCLB?

So, for all my fans out there, you get your wish. There will be a weekly blog (or vlog) post on Fridays this semester.

As always, any feedback, suggestions and thoughts are appreciated in the comments.

Note: this entire post is going to be sporadic and jumpy because I can’t even begin to grasp the concept of student motivation. This post is merely just a way for me to complicate and problematize my understanding of student motivation.

The idea for this post came a few weeks ago after my mentor and I returned unit exams back to the students. From the beginning of the year to that first test, student interest, note-taking and participation fluctuated from person to person and from day to day. But overall, it was all probably less than my mentor and I would have liked.

I’m in a 1-to-1 school, which means there is one laptop for every student. Yes, the school gave them each a personal laptop. We’ve had some good lessons (integrating chatrooms into readings of plays) and bad lessons (student distraction with games) involving these laptops. But in general, it’s not uncommon for us to notice a game being played. Fortunately, our students are responsive and will turn it off and focus back on the task at hand.

My mentor said she had a class discussion a little bit ago and the students agreed that these laptops were more of a distraction than positive tool to their learning. Dang.

But the thing is, my mentor and I have had some really engaging, fun and meaning-making lessons with these laptops. And this brings me to the essence of “Part I” of student motivation: the teacher.

Teachers need to make sure that their lessons are strong, eventful, engaging, FUNNY, and overall enjoyable. They also have to contain learning goals. But, I believe, it’s possible to mix all of those together – and then some – to keep students motivated in class. We need to make sure that tasks will not lead themselves to distractions and that the students can stay on task.

If we’re in a whole class discussion, the teacher needs to walk around and have a strong presence in the room to encourage all students to focus and participate in one way or another. If the students are in small group discussions, we need to check in on those groups. We need to see how they’re doing and if they’ve run into any problems.

Overall, and this is especially relevant to my class, the teacher needs to make sure students understand that everything builds on each other. From the first day of a unit (or even school year) to the final day of that unit, lessons should connect. It should get to the point where a student can have that “Oh yeah, I remember that” or “This reminds me of” moment during a lesson. If a teacher can make sure students know that everything works together and builds off previous lessons, the hopefully the students will be more engaged and motivated to stay on task because it is a nice combination of new material mixed with prior knowledge.

The teacher, obviously, must play a major part in student motivation. If there’s a boring lesson, the students daze and get distracted. If it’s interesting and engaging, the students focus.

Does this even answer anything?

Still, even if the teacher does everything in his or her power to motivate students, doesn’t some responsibility fall onto the students as well?

That’ll be my next post, hopefully sometime this weekend after I take the Praxis II. I got to see a talk by Bena Kallick about the “habits of mind” during an in-service a week or so ago, which I’ll throw into that post.

But there’s something that I’m pretty sure got brought up in my practicum class this week. And if it didn’t exactly get brought up, I was thinking about it during one of the discussions. Basically, the practicum class is designed for us pre-service teachers to learn, talk and discuss about high-leverage practices (HLPs) in the classroom. We learn about 4 throughout this fall semester and are responsible for implementing it into our classroom, videotaping the lesson and sharing it with our peers. The four are “building a literacy community,” “accessing prior knowledge,” “collaborative learning,” and “modeling.” A lot of these practices should be intertwined with each other and carried out throughout the school year, not necessarily implemented once to try it out and forget about it.

Recently, I did a lesson aimed at accessing prior knowledge (APK) in students.

But let’s get back to the question that I haven’t even mentioned yet. These HLPs deal directly with student learning. We, as teachers, use these practices to maximize student motivation, learning and achievement. Most of the time, the students don’t even know the specifics of how they are learning. Yes, they may get that feeling that they’ve learned something or, as I’ve seen plastered throughout English education books, “made meaning.” But do the know the process that went into learning (or meaning making)?

I tend to think the answer is no.

So, is it OK to tell students about the learning process? Does throwing in a little psychology in the lesson hurt them? Could telling students how they are learning help them think even more about the topics and learning goals established by the teacher?

And in this case, I tend to think the answer is yes.

My most recent HLP was on APK. They students are about to start a unit on ancient Chinese literature. A quick hand survey (or auditory one judging by the groans) suggested that not many of them have read any of that before, let alone know much about the ancient Chinese culture. So, to get them started in this new unit, I had students APK to kickstart their interest in it. But part of my lesson was to not only get students thinking about ancient Chinese literature and culture, but to also tell them about the learning process. I wanted my students, who are seniors, to know how they are learning. And I wanted them to know that people learn by building upon what they already know. It’s an ongoing process. And if they can understand that very basic concept of APK, then maybe it will encourage them to think harder whenever they encounter something unfamiliar in their future studies.

And judging by their body language and discussion, I think it worked. The students seemed more interested in the unit, as compared to introductions to previous new units, and took the APK activity more serious because it made them think about two things: the content and the process.

Has anybody tried this before? Am I just fortunate because I have seniors (and maybe they could handle learning about the learning process)?

And I’ll post my lesson outline/plan if anybody is interested to see how I integrated the new unit and teaching the learning process.

And right now, the students are in the classics. They just finished Homer’s Odyssey and are now working on the Iliad.

That discussion, then, where students are complicating their thoughts and clashing and sharing ideas with other students doesn’t happen often. If they don’t read, then there is nothing to push them to think about the text. And if they’re not thinking about that text because they didn’t read, then they’re not going to be able to complicate their classmates’ ideas. It’s a sad cause-and-effect that I’m sure tortures many teachers who run into this problem.

But what is the solution?

I shouldn’t discount all of my students, however. There are some who read, and there are some who analyze and even a few who make the deep connections within the text (and to other texts). But when a handful of students carry the discussion for the whole class, it feels like a struggle.

I guess the issue is motivation. Are they disinterested because it’s boring? Does it not relate to them? Or are they just seniors and they’re already checking out? Maybe they just need to see the reason behind reading, analyzing and gaining a strong, deep understanding of a text. But how do you do that?

A few students who “hated” reading the Odyssey actually realized that some of the ideas we talked about as a class (the idea that Homer’s view of a hero may transcend into modern Western civilization) made sense and became “interesting” after connecting it to more contemporary pieces. It was cool to hear that, especially from those who struggled to find any reason to read the classics.

And while I’ll get into what I did to help those students who previously “hated” what they were reading later, I think this just goes to show the importance of connecting what students are reading to their surroundings, to modern times. Whenever that happens, students seem more interested and engaged.

But, still, how do you get past that first step of just reading the text – as homework – to begin with so discussion can lead to more realizations for students?

In the meantime, I’m going to a weekly reflection on Fridays on here, most likely building off what I post on Twitter.

And I’ll leave you with this video about Twitter in the classroom one of my instructor’s shared with us: Twitter in the Classroom

And that was me for a couple weeks. I just stood and paced around the room during class and got to observe a few other classes. But for the most part, I was just that guy, who dressed up, and didn’t do much during class. I was even having trouble with names (and to be honest, I’m still only at about 50% right now).

I feel like most beginning teachers, especially those who are maybe new to a school district or haven’t been around long enough to earn a reputation among students, have a hard time connecting with students. But they’re luckier than us lowly student-teachers. They get to talk from day 1. It’s their classroom. They’re the teacher. And the students are the students. They are no longer that sideshow student-teacher.

That, then, was my biggest hurdle in these first few weeks. I needed to get over the fact that I was an intern and still learning about how schools work, let alone how to be a teacher. I had to make connections with students, but it was tough.

That all changed, however, yesterday.

Yesterday, my mentor teacher was out during the morning periods (she has class periods 2-5 consecutively). It was either have the sub run the lesson or give me a shot at it. You see, in Pitt’s program, it’s supposed to be a gradual process. We’re supposed to observe for a month or so, maybe prep a lesson after 6 weeks, teach part of a lesson shortly thereafter, maybe do a whole one sometime in the beginning of November, and try to do a couple in a row before winter break. That’s what is supposed to happen.

But I’m teaching seniors. If I didn’t get myself known to them as soon as possible, there was no way I was going to get their attention sometime in November. So, I had to make a decision about yesterday’s lessons. I chose to teach them all – beginning to end, 41 minutes each, 4 classes in a row. I just wanted to jump right into it. I didn’t want to ease myself into earning their respect. And because they were seniors applying to college in the near future, they wanted me to help them with their college application essays. That’s what my lesson was on.

The first period went well and the second was even better. By the time my fourth class (in a row, mind you) came in, I felt so comfortable teaching. I moved around the classroom a little bit more. I felt more relaxed. I asked questions that made students think a little bit more and make stronger connections between what I was telling them and what they could do with their essays.

Needless to say, I felt great after 5th period.

But just because I feel good, does that mean I did a good job? Well, for starters, the sub thought I did fantastic. That’s great, but I needed to know how the students felt. What did they think? That got answered today.

I spoke with my mentor teacher this morning and she told me that when she came back in the afternoon, she ran into some students. They said they missed her, which I can see, but she asked how they thought I did. Apparently they thought I did just fine. And above all, the students think that I’ll make it as a teacher.

I like the sound of that.

Still, though, that was my mentor telling that to me in a second-hand nature. But it proved true. Today, during the various periods, the students came up to me, talked about college, fantasy football and where I went to high school – basically class and non-class topics alike. For some, they wanted advice. They saw me as teacherly figure who could help them. For others, there was just some free time at the end of the period and wanted to talk.

It feels awesome to finally make connections with students. It’s still early, but it’s a good start.