CCI # 2: Inherently Social Nature of Literacy

Layer 1


Pre-reading:


The concept of a Scaffolding Reading Experience is a fairly straightforward, sensical, and subtle idea that is revolutionary to the process of learning. I’ll never forget my first few teacher observation evaluations. The observers had checkmarks all over the categories for SRE and differentiation, but I had absolutely no idea what they were. They started praising me for planning this strategy and having this back-up plan for struggling students and building the lesson up from start to finish with a nice concluding evaluative summary. I just stared at her. “What is SRE?” I asked with befuddled confusion. I don’t say this to toot my horn, I mention it only because I believe SRE is a natural process of learning. Why, of course we need to prepare students by activating background knowledge and connecting to their real world knowledge. Of course we need to engage them in collaborative groups with differentiated plans for individual students based on their abilities that are charted prior to the assignment (always pushing for a slightly higher level than they are currently at). Of course they need to then create an authentic product from what they have learned, share it with others, and reintegrate their new knowledge after hearing input from others. No amount of education classes could ever teach you this, you simply need to be a student of how students learn by watching them and thinking common sensically about your own “ways of knowing” and what’s best for your students.


Post-reading:
After reading chapter three and watching the exemplar videos, I was impressed by how thoughtful some of the responses in the textbook were to multiculturalism. The ABCs of Cultural Understanding and Communication were extremely thorough and honestly quite a humbling responsibility for teachers (VV&M, 57). I can only imagine what change it would create in the entire school’s culture if every teacher would be this intentional about engaging the rich multicultural heritage of each student. Visit every home, interview every family, chart the similarities and differences of you and your students, analyze it, work on making progress and integrate what you learn into your curriculum. Wow. I think this is something I would like to incorporate into my own school’s improvement plan—it would flow quite nicely into what we’re already planning to do: our faculty, in collective groups will be visiting the homes of every single incoming freshmen this Fall before school starts. I think if we were a bit more intentional about incorporating multiculturalism into our approach and have it specifically on our radar as we visit and interact with these families it would benefit everyone tremendously.


I also really liked the SIOP and how structured it is. I do not have any experience with ESL or documented “struggling readers” yet, so I can’t say how difficult it is to implement specific plans with them, but I can definitely see how this would assist teachers in their planning (although to be honest, the protocol offered in Figure 3.1, page 75 looks almost too in-depth and would need to be modified to meet the hurried pace of planning and instruction in the daily grind that is high school).


The video that we watched from Chris Gable from Asheville Middle was very informative and reminded me of many of the ELA classrooms at the school where I teach. I was impressed with his thoroughness and deliberate intentions about supporting students with scaffolding techniques. I found his strategy of putting different reading components about Sudan (one group had history, another economics, etc.) with different groups and then coming together as a class with the full picture—this aligns quite nicely with my teaching philosophy: efficiency, group cohesion, social learning. Students are exposed to a considerable amount of information in a short amount of time, they are given the opportunity to learn in-depth about a certain component, and then they teach it to their peers. Excellent.


Layer 2:


As a philosophy undergraduate, I was required to take a year long course on the philosophical trinity: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. During that time, we read the entire corpus of Plato. Related to my “philosophy concerning discussion” in the classroom, I cannot help being changed by that experience. I see learning in fairly Platonic terms: a teacher is simply an interlocuter who draws out the truth that is already hidden inside the student and collectively we can reach closer visions of Truth through a collaborative and critical dialogue (I must say however, that I have developed a nuanced view of Plato’s “Ideal Form/Truth” that we are all supposed to be striving for, one that is more narrative-based and pluralistic). Discussion is the slow chiseling away at the giant unhewn marble in the room, slowly allowing the “truth” within to be revealed. Dialogue is learning.


With this pedagogical stance in mind, I lean heavily on the work of Mortimer Adler and the Paideia framework—I have never been formally trained in this, but imitate how I was taught by a wonderful philosophy teacher in college. In my school system, they are called “Socratic Seminars” (or Socratic circles) and I have facilitated five formal seminars with the plan of having a weekly or biweekly session in the coming year concerning our essential questions of the unit. These Socratic seminars accomplish the same goals as Reader Response and are built with the foundation of social constructivism. Reader Response would be a very useful strategy to have struggling participants to engage before and after the discussion by giving them certain roles and responsibilities. 


The more general tenets of Reader Response are also addressed in Socratic seminars because the response, the “truth,” comes from the intimately personal “truth” of the reader. Through the narration of each individual truth (Reader Response) and the act of hearing each other (not just listening as Delpit admonishes us) we will build our collective vision of truth together (i.e. Paideia video of Dickinson poetry—beautiful example of this). I use Reader Response on a daily basis in an opening segment of class I call “The Daily Dose”. Students bring in poetry of their choice and lead a reader response discussion about it—they prepare “leveled” questions, based on Bloom’s taxonomy, turn in graphic organizer that preps them for their own reader response, and face a post discussion class evaluation about what was powerful about their discussion and what we can all work on for tomorrow’s Daily Dose. I have been consistently blown away with the depth of understanding, compassion, and thought.


In planning these session for next year, I hope to utilize all of the components of the instructional model for explicit strategy instruction (Fig. 5.1, VV&M, 128). Creating awareness about the strategies we were using and explicitly stating what we were metacognitively doing BEFORE we begin appears to be the key to taking my classroom instruction to the next level. I always had post-discussion debriefs, but being intentional about laying it out before reading is a practical strategy I need to work on and integrate into my lesson implementation.


I was a little disappointed in VV&M’s discussion of how to implement this component however. Essentially they suggest a “discussion” during the strategy awareness and explanations—with no meaningful connection to what students already know, this would quickly devolve into a lecture from the teacher: “this is what we’re going to do, you better behave, and you better like it”. I would like to adapt their strategy and have “jigsaw” groups that learn about different strategies and teach it to their peers and then have leaders from each group lead the discussion—the teacher simply being a reference, not the explainer. You could also have a “Strategies Fair” (like a college/job fair) where students advocate for a certain strategy to their peers after they have done research (intellectual and experiential) and prepared a participatory presentation to their peers as they milled around the room. Just some thoughts...