Reflective+Letter+(bartley)

Dear Reader,

I have liked to read since I can remember. It has always been a great comfort to me to be able to be transported so easily into a place far, far away by simply opening a book or writing words in a notebook. This is something that I hope to give to students in my classroom: a love of reading and writing. This is something that many students lose throughout the course of their schooling because of the sheer volume of textbooks they are given to read and papers they are given to write. I want to get away from that in my classroom. I want students to be able to learn to love reading and writing again.

Throughout my time in the education program at Eastern, I have been given a chance to read some really great literature regarding classroom format and management. Thanks to the work of Penny Kittle, I aim to have a primarily workshop-based classroom. I love Penny Kittle’s ideas that she demonstrates in her book //Write Beside Them//. She talks about always writing with students, because she states that “you can’t tell kids how to write; you have to show them what writers do” (Kittle 8). Throughout her book and the accompanying DVD, you can learn about how Kittle demonstrates to students just that-she takes them on a journey of using their own writing and that of other writers to figure out just what it is that makes writing “good.” Through this, students learn about craft, voice, construction, and, through the true heart of the workshop format, revision. I am overall very inspired by Kittle’s work. I fully intend to write with my students, which is something that Kittle is a big proponent of in //Write Beside Them//. I have always been interested in increasing my writing skills, and I don’t see why this should change just because I am now teaching students how to write. __My interest in the writing process is evident in my literacy memoir, which is included in my portfolio.__ I composed this memoir during my ENGL 408 class with Sarah Andrew Vaughn. The memoir went through several drafts, including peer review. Each time we worked with each other to edit, we used a different technique. It gave me a lot of information on how to do peer editing with students. For example, we read our own pieces aloud, and our group mates wrote down comments while we read them. This is a good practice because then the readers of the piece can understand the author’s intent by hearing the inflection in their voice, and, also it gives the writer an opportunity to see how audiences realistically react to their writing.

I am also very inspired by Randy Bowmer’s ideas about integrating reading not into just the classroom, but students’ lives as well. He talks about getting students to understand that they read all the time, but they just don’t know it. Bowmer also talks about the importance of choice in the classroom and especially in reading. He talks about giving students choice through independent reading. When I first began to think about the actual act of reading in the classroom, I was unsure how to go about it. In traditional classrooms, I feel that students really aren’t given time to just read what they want to read during class. I couldn’t think of a way to integrate independent or choice reading into the classroom without simply having students do DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) for a few minutes at the beginning and end of the class. However, in his book //Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s Classrooms//, Bowmer introduces the idea of a reading workshop. Similar to a writing workshop format, the day is began with a mini-lesson about reading, craft, or something similar, and then students are given time to simply read. The teacher will confer with students about what they are reading and have conversations about it with them individually, and at the end of the class, there is a share session where students are given an opportunity to share what they have read during the period. Bowmer suggests that the most important thing to do with students in regards to reading is having them //discuss// what they are reading or have read, as the ideas will stick in their head better and they will actually take something away from what they have read. These discussions can happen through multiple forms, such as out loud with a whole class, in small groups, or via blogging/online discussion, as I discuss later. Discussion will really help students internalize and analyze what they have read, as many of them don’t do, as I discuss in my journal entry about __what makes a good reader__. Integrating a lot of discussion into the classroom will help students build analysis skills and therefore help them increase performance on assessments and in the classroom in general.

I am a firm believer of giving students as much choice as possible in the classroom. It has been proven through various sources that students perform better when they have some kind of choice in what they are learning. In my SOFD class, we read a lot about CPESS, a school in New York that actually allowed students to take part in choosing the curriculum and deciding what and how they wanted to learn. I think that this element of choice is very important. In something as simple as allowing students to chose a few books a semester or letting them chose what format they want their final project to be submitted in, we give them the power to take their education and learning into their own hands. I plan to implement this kind of thinking into my classroom in ways such as letting them choose a book to read for independent reading and using project formats such as choice boards, as __demonstrated in my summative unit on the Hunger Games. In my unit, at the end of each section of the novel, the students complete a worksheet asking them to respond to the text, reflect on what they have learned, and predict what they think will happen. These “choice boards” allow for differentiation for students with different learning types, as well as letting students decide whether they want to write or draw, compose fiction or non-fiction.__ I think that this type of project really allows students to showcase what they have learned in the way that is the most effective for them and the best way to really show off what they have learned and the skills that they have developed.

In terms of text selection, I am a firm believer of using current, contemporary Young Adult texts in the classroom to pair with classic texts. These contemporary books are a lot more accessible to today’s students and can often serve to help them understand canonical texts easier. For example, a pairing of //The Hunger Games// with //Of Mice and Men// or even //Twilight// with //Romeo and Juliet// can be very beneficial for a modern student. By taking stories that offer elements of society and life that they are familiar with and comparing it with these classic texts often seem dated to the average high schooler, we offer them an easy access point to begin to understand. Apart from being paired with classic texts, I believe that contemporary YA novels can function on their own as very valuable pieces of writing. I mention this in my __book rationale for //Thirteen Reasons Why// by Jay Asher.__ //Thirteen Reasons Why// is a very recent novel written about a girl who commits suicide. Before she dies, she records a series of thirteen tapes that detail the thirteen reasons she killed herself that are supposed to be circulated between the thirteen people mentioned on the tapes. This book would be a very valuable tool in the classroom for both thematic and stylistic reasons: bullying is at perhaps an all time high in schools and the narrative also takes a dualistic format which is very interesting for students to learn about. It is important to consider Young Adult texts for their value before just writing them off that they lack the “merit” that canonical texts have. Contemporary books are able to teach many lessons, as I note in my __journal entry about myself as a reader where I talk about my favorite book, the //Harry Potter// series.__

Language and grammar instruction is always a tricky issue. Teachers who have been teaching for years still struggle with this. I think that the essential issue in the question of language instruction is how to get students to understand that their own dialect is important while still understanding that they need to have a control of Standard English. The Conference on College Composition and Communication states “We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language—the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their identity and style.” As stated in my __reflection on language use/study, seen in my portfolio,__ I feel that this is very true. To accommodate the use of both students’ natural dialect and teach them Standard English, I will allow students to use whatever dialect they want when composing response journal entries and works of fiction. By allowing them to use their own dialect when creating and writing their own words teaches them ownership of this dialect and helps them create better writing. As demonstrated in my //__Hunger Games__// __summative unit__, I think that journals should not be graded for content or mechanics, but rather the effort that was put forth. Evidence of students’ higher level thinking should be apparent in these responses, and I think that we are more likely to get this higher level thinking if we allow students to use their own dialect. Likewise, however, Standard English is the language of power in our country, and students need to have a command of it in order to be successful. The Michigan High School Content Expectations and the national Common Core Standards both require that students are able to write for vast audiences and adapt their writing accordingly. By allowing multiple dialects in the classroom, this will teach the students to tailor their writing to who is reading it.

Writing assessment is also a tricky spot, especially when assessing what students know about literature and what they have read. After __interviewing Elizabeth Scott__, the transcript of which is included in my portfolio, I formulated a __research proposal__ about including blogging and online discussion into English/Language Arts classroom. In her classroom, Liz has her students blog about the independent reading that they do, asking them to post answers to analytical questions and respond to others choices. This becomes particularly valuable when students read the same things and can engage in discussions. I intend on using this in my classroom to the fullest, as long as I have the technology resources available to me. I mentioned this in my research project, but I think that overall student performance will improve, as it will fully engage students. In my experience, students get very excited when they are allowed to use computers. I’m sure that this excitement will fade eventually as computers get more and more integrated into our society, but for now I think it’s really valuable and should be used to our advantage, especially in terms of assessing how students write about the literature that they read. These blogs serve as a great form of formative assessment. These small posts can also be kept and used to help students remember their thoughts and analysis of the text to use when coming up with summative assessments. I also believe that formative assessments that allow students to express themselves creatively are very important. This is also evident in my __unit plan__, where I give students an opportunity to think about the information that they have been given about each of the Districts in Panem (the setting of the novel) and try and compose a map of the country based on this information. They are later asked to reflect about their map and how they came up with the locations of the countries. I think that it is very important to do something like this with summative assessments as well. While writing is a primary aim of Language Arts, I think it is also important to let students express their knowledge and understanding of texts, ideas and themes in other ways. This allows students who may not be the best at writing to express themselves.

Integration of technology was something that was also discussed at a __conference/seminar__ that I attended through the Eastern Michigan Writing Project about rationales for using portfolios and using technology and the internet to integrate them into the classroom. Before attending this conference, I didn’t have the highest opinion of the use of portfolios in the classroom. I had never had success in one in my own academic career. When I was in fifth grade, we all had pizza boxes that we were supposed to keep all of our work in, but we just put writing in there and not really do any reflecting on it. In attending this workshop, I learned that when reflection is integrated, portfolios are a really valuable experience. Also in my 408 class, I was able to correspond with two high school students in regards to their writing for an entire semester. One of my “pen pals” was a senior in a poetry class. At the end of the semester, I was given a copy of his portfolio, which consisted of all the poems that he had written throughout the entire semester, and an accompanying reflection where he discussed his process for writing, the poetry devices he used, and his feelings about each poem. This was the first time that I was really able to look at one student’s writing progression from start to finish through the eyes of a teacher, and it was really miraculous to me. I was able to see the edits that he had made to the poems, as I had been receiving copies of his work all semester. It was really special to me to see the work that he had changed because of something that I said. This, in addition to the conference, really opened my eyes to the importance and greatness of portfolios in a classroom. If I could learn so much from looking at his writing, I could only imagine what he could learn from it. I believe that portfolios really are essential to use in the classroom, especially with the new digital age and the use of internet sites such as Google Docs and Wikis for portfolios, since this gives students a chance to keep all their work in one spot without having to lug around a cumbersome pizza box or a large binder.

I hope that through looking at my portfolio and reading this reflection you get a better idea of who I am as a teacher, reader, and writer. In writing this reflection, it has really opened my eyes to all the people and ideas that have gone into formulating my teaching philosophy. I can only hope that someday I can inspire someone in the ways that so many people have inspired me.

Sincerely,

Ashley Bartley