Reflection+Letter

Dear Reader,

 Upmost and foremost, my first goal as a secondary English Language Arts teacher is to be a positive role model for my students. One of my favorite quotes of all time is “Children learn more from what you are than what you teach” (W.E. B. Dubois). I want to inspire my students to be the best they can be inside and outside the classroom. I believe gaining students’ respect and showing how much you care through making connections on a personal level are essential to establish right away, before it is even possible to instill a true passion for language, literature, and writing. Therefore, the classroom environment is crucial in presenting the right kind of message to students. I want my classroom to give off the aura of a warm, safe place where their ideas, thoughts, and achievements are the most important thing. I plan on having their favorite work cover the majority of the walls. I also want my classroom to promote a love and desire for reading. There will be an extensive library of various genres and containing everything from popular literature of the canon to young adult novels, which I have been collecting and adding to for the past four years. I want to help strengthen my students/ writing abilities by showing them the power of language and revision, and introduce them to a combination of classical and adolescent literature of all different genres. I plan to engage my students through a mixture of collaborative and individual higher level thinking activities and assessments on topics that spark their interests. I plan to give them as much choice as possible for writing and reading. However, as far as reading goes, I would still like to include an opportunity for exploration and discussion of the same texts as well, in order for students to grow and build upon one another’s thoughts, ideas, and intertextuality.

Perhaps, I am most passionate about the power of young adult literature in the classroom. I wrote a __paper on this very topic in my adolescent literature class__, and how it can be used in conjunction with canonical literature. The inclusion of adolescent literature in the classroom is vital to students’ development and understanding of literature. It is crucial for them to read literature that has characters who speak to them, and that they can relate to in their lives. The addition of adolescent novels in dialogue with classic works of literature brings many benefits for our youth, especially in concern with developing a desire and eagerness to read. Young adults long to read novels/books that they are mentally and emotionally ready and to able to understand, which is why it is necessary to include in the curriculum. I studied how the book //Jacob Have I Loved// by Katherine Paterson and //Little Women// by Louise May Alcott could be taught effectively together in the classroom, because they grapple with similar issues that each and every generation of teenagers face, such as gender, identity, low-income households, sibling rivalry, education, and worldly/economic events. However, my stance is not that both types of literature must be books/novels, in fact, more often than not, I plan on mixing young adult literature with classical short stories and poems within a given unit and vice versa. My point is that teaching such novels in conjunction, or following one another works as well. Nor is my stance that adolescent literature holds more significance than canonical, because I find much literary merit and value in canonical as well. I find both to be inherently crucial to students’ success, but adolescent can be used as a building block to effectively understanding the more difficult texts.

__My preliminary unit, __ which I collaborated on with on with my classmate, Mattie Frank, is a thematic unit that ties in the adolescent novel //Wintergirls.// I wrote a __book rationale__ on why I believe this novel has distinct literary merit and importance to adolescent lives at the secondary level. The students spend approximately a month analyzing the novel, in addition to other related texts in groups, with partners, and individually. I think it is undeniably important for students to discuss literature in all three ways, and through both forms of speaking and writing. I am concerned about students gaining confidence voicing their opinions in front of an audience, no matter how small or large that may be, because I think it is beneficial to their success in life in general. In school, I was a shy student in the classroom, who often tried to deflect any attention from myself. I was afraid to speak up in the class through the majority of middle and high school, as a result of not being coaxed or pushed to very often. Consequently, this made expressing myself verbally more difficult for me in the very beginning of my college career. I have always been great at expressing myself through writing, but talking about the same topics, such as literature was a struggle because I was scared of being wrong and embarrassed publicly. However, great professors, in addition to acknowledging my weakness and working towards it in college have been my savior. Therefore, I want my students to feel comfortable speaking about literature in the classroom from an early age, in addition to writing about it. I want them to gain the confidence they need to exceed wherever life may take them, whether that be college or not. As a result of my experience, we incorporated numerous class, group, and partner discussion activities in the preliminary unit for verbally discussing literature at every opportunity. We also included journal writing as another primary formative assessment for learning. I think journal writing helps students not only express their thoughts, but build conclusions, and make the text relevant to their lives. Journal writing will always be a safe place to write freely, without the worry of being graded on mechanics, grammar errors, or format in my classroom. However, my philosophy on teaching language to students will be delegated in other ways and in more appropriate situations.

 I have strong beliefs that the teaching of language must mostly take place when the opportunity arises within units. However, I believe that there is some benefit to using language as a topic for inquiry in the classroom as well. This is because I want my students to understand that while Standard English is important in many contexts, especially in the professional world, which we as teachers, are supposed to be preparing students for, it is not more important than various cultures dialects and oral/writing traditions. In fact, both are equally important, they just call for different writing situations. Creative writing for instance, is an excellent opportunity for students to write however they see fit, and defining their background through the usage of their culture’s dialect is a great way to bring life and style to their stories. One way to express this distinction for appropriateness to students might be to have them participate in a contrastive analysis project, such as the one suggested in Randy Bomer’s text, //Building Adolescent Literacy in Today’s English Classrooms//. This type of project calls for the students to use two columns, such as Standard English and Chicano English, in order to compare the ways of saying the same thing in each group. At the bottom of the page, students would make generalizations about language patterns, which would later lead them to picking a generalizations and gathering new data, in order to test their theory. While this will inevitably spark an interest in looking up unknown words, Bomer and I agree that the selection of terminology should be “selective and purposeful, serving to build concepts and meanings” foremost (276). The main objective is to help students to understand the larger issues of language use. In my linguistics class, I presented __facts__ to the class for my portion of a group PowerPoint presentation, which briefly describes the differences between prescriptive and descriptive grammar, which might be a great way to start off this language inquiry unit in the classroom. Overall, it is important that students understand the power and function of language in all situational contexts.

__My final unit __ is a narrative poetry unit, designed for eleventh graders. This unit accurately reflects my philosophy for teaching writing. After revision, it briefly touches on two sub-genres of narrative poetry, but focuses mostly on three distinct sub-genres. These three sub-genres are slam poetry, dramatic monologues, and ballads. However, the students are only required to write in two of the sub-genres, which are slam poetry and ballads. I chose to narrow the sub-genres down in order to provide greater understanding and reflection of each individual component. I also wanted to provide more time for analysis on contrasting the sub-genres, since they all comprise narrative poetry, and are so similar. I am drawn to teaching poetry in the secondary classroom not only because of the average length of pieces, which is generally shorter than novels and plays and allows for more time for discussion and analysis, but because of the opportunity to grab students’ attention from the start of a unit. I admit, this may sound strange because many students are likely to have had bad experiences with poetry in previous classes, but the critical factor is the pieces of work chosen. The various texts they will read in my class will be closer to half-teacher-selected and half-student selected, in order to keep their interests piqued, and to help them keep their sense of autonomy. I believe poetry is largely about exploring oneself, and my ultimate goal is that students will not only be able to grasp important poetry concepts by the end of the unit, but find self-worth and success in their own poetry writings and reflections.

I am drawn to teaching narrative poetry specifically, because students are excited about narrative writing. It is naturally easier for them to write in the subject. I think it is just as important to cater to students’ interests and natural abilities, as it is to introduce them to more difficult and unknown genres and sub-genres of literature. In the beginning of my unit, students focus on what various poems say, mean, and matter, and build to discussing literary devices within poems that especially highlight them. In my narrative poetry unit, certain literary devices are touched on more than others, which distinguish the genre, such as tone rhythm, alliteration, imagery, and rhyme. I am interested in students using these devices to enhance their poems, but ultimately, I am more concerned about the content being appropriate to the genre than the usage of devices. I also think it’s important for the students to share their poems with one another, and designed a slam poetry competition within the unit, which ensures every student shares, whether it is through performance, or simply through verbal recitation. Of course, this is in addition to students sharing their works in partners and groups numerous times prior to presenting to the class. The goal of the competition is to make the exploration of narrative poetry fun and exciting for the students, and to give them a purpose for writing and sharing. After all, that is the ultimate goal of teaching in general.

When I attended the __MCTE conference__ in East Lansing this past semester, I gained a lot of insight from the three speakers I sat in on, especially in concern to the common core standards, literature, and writing. I was most intrigued by the second speaker, John Brandt, a teacher from Lutheran High School in North Macomb, Michigan. Brandt shared four unique ideas for alternatives to whole-group discussion, which I find especially useful for dissecting literature. One of the alternatives was speed debate. Speed debate is not only fun, but it gets students thinking on the higher level of thought spectrum (analysis, synthesis, and evaluation). It gives students an opportunity to build and expand on thoughts continuously, and students like it because of the friendly competition aspect. I plan to incorporate this idea into my own classroom one day because it gives you the chance, as a teacher, to tap into their willingness to argue to engage them. The last speaker was poet, Terry Wooten, gave tips for teaching students how to write poetry. I was interested in one specific word of advice he gave for helping students’’ shape their poems, which is to tell them to make sure each line ends on a “power” word. “Power” words are words that evoke vivid images, such as verbs and nouns. I feel like this is a great way to get students motivated to spruce up and revise their poems, in addition to getting them thinking about how language works. Overall, the conference proved to be entirely useful for me, as a future educator.

The conference made me think about how crucial it is for teachers to share their experiences in the classroom with one another on a regular basis, and in formal and informal settings. Consequently, this means that it is necessary for teachers to perform their own research in the classroom continuously, in order to do so. For instance, I wrote a __research proposal__ about the effectiveness of portfolios in measuring students’ writing skills, ability to reflect, and progress. By the end of my research, it was pointed out to me that my true proposal was figuring out the best method for the student reflection aspect in the overall portfolio. Is it speaking or writing? I believe that if I were to revise my method, I would spend semesters alternating between the two means of expression. However, I would first teach students to reflect in a given manner before instructing them to do so. It is true that many students excel at one method, as opposed to the other. Therefore, perhaps, I may find in the end that my time would be better spent helping students figure out the best method for reflection for them. After all, it is a matter of learning styles, and many students do not know which mode of expression they are better reflecting in. I find teacher research undoubtedly essential to a teacher’s success, and plan to do so religiously myself.