Raise or Raze?

First of all, I have to say how lucky I feel to be reading and responding to the Bartholomae-Petrosky book while contemplating what I would want to incorporate into my own accelerated curriculum from the community college materials we are reading for this week.  I really appreciated how they listed the percentages of students who passed the course compared to how many were enrolled in the course. Seeing such success makes one really think long and hard about what works with this curriculum.

I am going to list things in a bullet point fashion for ease:

-the learning goals center on academic discourse. I definitely want to do the same.

-The number of pages listed for reading – I wonder about this. Should it be more? With the changes in the Common Core right now, 6th graders are expected to read that many pages in a quarter in order to get an “A.” So maybe this has changed recently.

-I absolutely love the books and the scholarly articles listed.  They all have some way of combining both personal issues of identity with academic discourse. This is something that I really loved about the Bartholomae curriculum, too.  Readings don’t have to be so distant and irrelevant to work.  As a matter of fact, research shows that if readings are relevant to students’ lives they will actually learn better.  I see based on these statistics that it is working.  I haven’t read any of these books myself, but am now interested in checking them out after this semester.  Students will love learning these materials!

-the Reading sequences are also something that I would love to incorporate. I love how active and engaging the pre-reading activities are – as well as the post-reading activities.  Given that this is a sequence, the students can learn to anticipate these activities, too, and look forward to them.  I just finished reading an article for Eng 709 on annotation and how the students, once they engaged with the text using both reading, writing, and SPEAKING, they all learned how to annotate, read more critically, engage with the materials (he noticed these same non-readers were non-talkers in class) which can help with their writing.  Their participation grades go up, and they will also gain tons of self-confidence.  Love it!

-I love how the students get to have open books for in-class quizzes.  WHy not? It gives them a chance to organize their thoughts, focuses them on preparation (take good notes! you’ll appreciate it later!) and reading skills which also has a great end product: able to focus and organize their thoughts and writings for the quizzes. The note afterwards: I like how the instructor did some reflective teaching here – tried things one way and saw that it wasn’t working, reflected on it, and changed it for everyone’s benefit.

-Not only are students engaging with the text in a critical manner, they are also talking about the materials, acting things out, which means that the teacher is using many of Vygotsky’s higher-order thinking skills. This is perfect! SO engaging, too! They are negotiating, discussing, sharing ideas and notes, and then presenting it orally to the class.  Using so many skills appeals to so many students. Some may be visual learners, some auditory, some kinesthetic…this covers all the bases.

-Essays.  I mentioned this earlier, but I love how even the writing assignments center on identity issues.  The students can’t help but engage with the materials and find ways to add their own analysis into the questions. So, looking at Essay #1, I see how the topic is interesting, it draws on the readings and the presentations, and so students are more likely to succeed.

-The same goes for the Reading Quizzes. So relevant, and it draws on all of their readings, writings, interactions, and experiences in the class.  It isn’t a new topic – something that is going to cause anxiety. It is something that they have been preparing for.  I love how it says, “open books, open notes, closed neighbors”

-For the Critical Response essays. I love how the students are given a choice. The questions are very engaging, too!! The questions the students are asked to answer are “summarize,” “discuss”. I don’t know why but it seems that saying “discuss” will make students more at ease than seeing words like analyze, synthesize, evaluate….

-The Synthesis Arguments. I love how it is titled that way to make it stand out from the other assignments. And again, the topics are relevant, interesting, engaging, and also at the same time they are academic and require critical response.

The curriculum is nicely organized and focuses on things that are relevant, yet academic.  So, I would use much of the same structure, and I am curious about the readings because maybe I could use some of those, too. The assignments are perfect!