I’ve been committed to learning more and improving my practices as a teacher, but that was my sole focus. I didn’t pay much attention to the policy or research/ theory pieces that are necessary for moving that practice forward.
This journey for me has been mostly because of our conversations in class. I love the readings and they make me think but it is sitting around the table and questioning and discussing that has really pushed my knowledge and my views on teaching. I was talking to a teacher at my school today about grad school and we hadn’t really talked about it much since the beginning of the semester. I think the last conversation I had with her was a rant about critical literacy and everyone talking about it and how cool they were for knowing about it and how left out I felt and how no one I knew had heard of it so it couldn’t be that great. Then, today when I talked to her, the first thing I told her was how obsessed I now am with critical literacy. The more I read about it, the more I want to figure out ways to get the other teachers at my school on board. It is crazy to think about how much my view on something has transformed in just a few months. I now find myself looking for opportunities to question my kids and make them think about things critically. I also find myself viewing even the smallest everyday interactions through a critical lens (which is somewhat annoying at times).

Coming into this class, I would have told you that literacy was reading and writing and that was it. I would have told you that incorporating technology meant having kids write in word rather than in their journals, do a power point presentation rather than a poster presentation. I was challenging my kids and exposing them to new things but only new things that were in my comfort zone. I wasn’t challenging myself or making myself aware of what is out there and so I was doing a disservice to my kids.

I have very limited prior knowledge when it comes to bilingual education. I have never taught in a school with bilingual classes and I have few opinions on how a bilingual class is best taught. Because of these things, these articles took me a long time to read and wrap my head around. In fact I am still processing and I have a huge desire to know more. I want to hear opinions of teachers on what works best and what bilingual education should look like. I want to see it in practice. It was hard for me to sort through the implications of the TAKS test on bilingual learning when I didn’t bring that much knowledge of bilingual learning to the table in the first place.

What I did learn is that the TAKS strikes again. Once again, teachers are changing their instruction, altering what they know to be best practices to try and help their kids pass the test. My big question as I was reading this, though, was what is best practice in a biliggual classroom. I understood that it is being thrown out the window but what did it look like before? What would it look like if it weren’t impacted by the test?

student- oh i get it. like you need a boyfriend but you only want a hot tub

We’ve been reading about multimodality and multiliteracies and critical literacy and new listeracy studies and they all seem so similar to me. Maybe it is just the fact that these words are all brand new to me and that is why they are blurring together. I just finished a thick, long article on multimodality and the entire time, all I kept thinking was, “wow this sounds just like the chapter I read for another class on NLS and a whole like the major tennants of critical literacy”.

I can deconstruct the roots of the words and kind of gather how they are different but I would love someone to explain it to me more. I feel ridiculous for not getting it but I want to undestand how these big concepts differ. And maybe they all just lend themselves to one another so well and that is why they seem so similar or maybe they are just 4 different legs of the literacy table. Regardless, I would love some help.

This student’s prior knowledge told him that poop was brown and he couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to have a name the color of poop. All kids come in with prior knowledge and opinions and it is our job as teachers to learn about those and use them to help our students learn.

I think it is really easy as educators to get bogged down in what is wrong with the system. We read so many articles about the problems and how we’re falling short, and how are kids aren’t learning what they need to be learning or getting where they need to be. It was so refreshing and inspiring to read an article about finding new ways to relate to students and to make them love learning. In, Feeling the Rhythm of the Critically Concious Mind, Alexander-Smith talks about incorporating hip hop into her currciculum to engage her students. She had just one class that was difficult — the rest were learning and not presenting much of a challenge. I think many teachers would right that one class off and decide that it is their problem and those students just can’t learn. Instead, she was willing to be responsive to her kids. She searched until she found a way to spark their interest. Using hip hop to learn about voice and tone did the trick. Not only did she get her students to want to learn, but she did it using a vehicle that holds so much potential for discussion and culture knowledge. “Listening to hip-hop music, an element that shapes their language and discourse, allowed them to question their world, reconstruct their identities, and develop their voice.” How amazing — to be able to allow students to participate in something they love and still teach them how to question and understand the world around them. Not only did she find a way to get them engrossed in the curriculum but she also worked to make them into free thinkers who dissected the world around them.

I love this quote of her’s so much, “As teachers, we must raise students’ critical consciousness to the symbols of popular culture by finding a space in our instruction to discuss them.” I completely agree. Our job is to give our students knowledge for school but also knowledge for life!

My school is an RTI campus and we are piloting a specific screening method/ intervention within AISD. When I first started reading the RTI article by Gersten and Dimino, I was really frustrated by what I felt like it was saying. The article was complaining about the labels tied to kids receiving intervention and I know that at my school, for one, we use reading intervention as a way to try and prevent kids from needing to receive these labels later on. I also can’t see how extra time with a teacher can be harmful to a kid so I don’t really understand a blanket objection to RTI.

That being said, my first grade team has been having a lot of conversations surrounding reading intervention lately. Our first question is: when in our day do we fit this in? It is a 40 minute daily intervention and has to be outside of the literacy block. So that presents its own struggles. Our bigger concern is that last year was our first full year to be piloting this program. And all we heard about from the reading person hired by the district that we worked with was how much further along the kids were going to be coming into first grade this year. Of course, all of the first grade teachers were so excited at this and were eagerly anticipating having time to really work with those few struggling readers. Well it turns out that that is not the case. We have more students that need intervention than we ever have had before. This makes me wonder about the reasons behind it all. One option is that it could be just the students/ the population this year or something totally unrelated to RTI. But I would feel irresponsible as a teacher if I just wrote it off as that and didn’t search deeper.

Other possible reasons:

1. The kindergarten teachers didn’t actually do the assessment correctly and flubbed their date.
2. The kindergarten teachers did the assessment within the literacy block and in place of guiding reading so those kids weren’t getting the double dip they needed.
3. There is a fundamental problem with the assessment we are using.
4. The assessment has actually worked at filling in many of the phonemic awareness holes and the reading is coming in a different order than we are used to seeing and so it only seems right now that they need intervention but they will quickly catch up.

So right there I determine (without the use of a standardized test) that this child does not know letter sounds…

A common reoccuring theme that I have noticed throughout most policy that I have been reading is that somewhere along the way, policy makers forgot about the kids they were writing to help. The individual child no longer matters. It is the big pictures that matter — the percentage of kids that pass a test. The government said “no child left behind” but do they really care about the 3 children that didn’t pass a test as much as they care about the 100 that did? Students are no longer people. To policy makers they are merely numbers or statistics. And the few people in education that still see the child they are teaching, rather than the information they are teaching, aren’t given enough of a voice.

I just read an article by Peter Afflerbach on the problems with high stakes standardized testing. He goes through many issues he has with a standardized test. In the article, he says this, “In contrast, other students never do well on tests. These students may be all too familiar with the routine of their reading failure and public disclosure of their failures, as they struggle through hours of high stakes testing.” Do the policy makers ever ask themselves how detrimental these tests might be to a child’s morale, or confidence, or self efficacy as a reader? I can guarantee that is not a question that crosses their mind.

Afflerbach also brings up the fact that the tests are given, and results returned so late in the year that it is impossible for teachers to use those results constructively — to actually teach. If teachers can’t use the material to help their students, what good does the test do? Shouldn’t the goal of all we do in education be to make children better? Shouldn’t a single child that is struggling stand out more in our minds than the other 20 in our class who are successful? As teachers, we know our kids and they are not a number. Policy makers need to figure out a way to see children this way too.

While I don’t completely disagree with his criticisms of standardized intervention, I don’t completely agree with them either. In the article he says, “The problem with replicability is that it assumes that good instruction can be packaged and then replicated over and over again.” I am completely opposed to teaching out of a box or from a script. It’s like when we were little, getting a kid’s meal. You could choose a burger or chicken nuggets and that was it. You had to get fries and you had to get a coke. Now, there are so many options, you can get fruit or veggies. Some places even let you get an ice cream instead of a toy. If fast food restaurants can figure out that flexibility is key, why can’t educators?

Even though I hate the idea of scripted teaching, I do think that to completely right off those resources is not ok either. I am at a RTI campus currently, and we administer Dibels as well as the intervention that goes along with it – responsive reading intervention. This intervention is about as scripted as it comes. It is a program that believes in systematic and explicit teaching. It is very structured in the day to day practices. I’m sure it is everything that Allington thinks reading instruction should not be. However, I have seen it work. Now, I have not tried this intervention in isolation so I can’t be sure if it is solely responsible for my students’ growth, but I do believe it played its part. I am in favor of this program. Do I see flaws in it? Of course. And I work to fill in the gaps during my regular reading instruction time.

Allington says that teachers should be, “dedicated to doing the right things”. I think it is our job as teachers to expose and familiarize ourselves with as many methods, interventions, resources, as possible. Because students are so different, we need many tools in our toolkits. To completely disregard a program because it is super structured and learning in a box, is to pass up a potential break through for a student.