Making the Journey Ch. 5, 8
My favorite text thus far is this one, by Leila Christenbury because it reminds me how far I've come in the six years I've been teaching. Although her text is written to help and encourage the new teacher, it holds many good reminders to me as an experienced teacher as well. For example, Christenbury says, "All of us are haunted by the worry that we are ill prepared, underread, insufficiently educated, ignorant about a number of crucial areas. And the fact is, we probably are" (122). Even though I've been around the educational block a few times, these are worries that I still feel at the start of each new school year. I'm able to supress them most of the time by reminding myself that I'm teaching 7th grade and not senior English, but there are always a few students each year that really challenge my knowledge, and those are the ones that cause that stint of anxiety.
Luckily, Christenbury continues with, "You will also have the pleasure of watching your own tastes change and expand as you add to your storehouse of learning authors and ideas and techniques...you will, as the years go on, become far more accomplished - and education - than you can really imagine right now" (123). My thoughts? Bingo, Ms. Christenbury. As I sit here today, working on my LAST Masters class, I've overcome with a sense of accomplishment and...knowledge. I've spent countless hours expanding my mind as an educator as well as studying various ways to help my students succeed. I've changed lesson plans, unit plans, introductory activities, culminating projects, and what I deem "necessary" vocabulary on an almmost yearly basis, but it's all for the good of the system. I look a summer's worth of work three years ago and think, "This job will never be done." I think THAT is the basis of a good teacher: one who rolls with the punches, complies with the latest district initiatives, all the while working to help each student learn to the best of his or her ability level. For this year, I'm working on my reader response approach to the literature I teach.
Christenbury describes the reader response approach as one where the emphasis is on what the reader brings to the piece. I'm not going to lie - I've spent many a lesson introducing a text with historical background, life of the author, etc. just to see my students lose interest. I've played around with reader response and I think I'm getting better at it the more time I devote to it. For example, I still move my students through a bit of history about a piece to help set the stage, but then as we're reading, I may ask them to write three to five questions they have about the piece, as broad or narrow as they desire. As we read, we stop to discuss some of their questions or I may point out important points that I feel they need to understand. At the end, if they have questions remaining, they pair up and share and discuss briefly before we talk about their questions and answers as a whole class. It's not a perfect model of reader response, but I'm trying. My concern is that 7th graders are a bit too young yet to bring everything they need to a piece of literature without some guidance from me, but I'm working to foster that type of discussion in the reading we do in class. Christenbury warns against this when she says, "Pay attention to the literature you choose and try to resist trotting your students through every literary element" (140). Well, that's all fine and well, but if we don't hammer home literary elements in middle school, we'll never hear the end of it from the high school teachers. It's an interesting balance - something that I play around with and change a bit every year to see what works best. That, too, is still a work in progress.
Reader response opens the door to the craft of questioning and how to best use discussion in an English class. "In its proper context, the craft of asking and answering questions can be the heart of a lively and learning class" (Christenburg 239). I found it fantastic that although Christenbury discusses the various sequential questioning schematas, she enforces that rigidly organized questioning is not always the best plan of attack. I agree, wholeheartedly! I may start with a list of questions that I deem important, but as the class discussion continues, we may move in a different direction completely (there's that reader response stuff). I've found that I'm okay with that, as long as I can bring the class back to a focal point before the class period ends.
Two of the questioning behaviors that I found especially useful to remind myself of were wait time and student repetition. Wait time is my nemisis...well, maybe a thorn in my side. My classes are often very fast-paced, which suits me, the material and age level of students who I teach, but wait time is still something I have to actively remind myself of each year. It's my tendency to want to "bail the student out" if he or she is stuck on a question, but really, I need to just stay quiet and give wait time. I'm much better now than I used to be, but I think I'll still need to remind myself of that even after I've been teaching 20 years. The second behavior that I want to include more of is allowing students to repeat their answers instead of me repeating them. Oh, how I tire of hearing my voice repeat answers after five classes a day. It only makes sense that students become attuned to listening to their peers, and I like that Christenbury says allowing students to repeat their own answers keeps possession of them. It just makes sense to me and I'm definitely going to try it more this coming year.
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