Raise or Raze?

5.2 Engaging With Tensions with course goals you create

I don’t feel tension when I read through goals that I am developing for my own composition class. I think the tension I am feeling right now has more to do with college requirements and demands on me that I do not yet know. For example, what required materials will I need to use and what if I have my own academic articles that I want my students to read? How does photocopying work and who pays for it? How willing are my colleagues to collaborate and share resources, wisdom, and how much do they support each other? How many department meetings are offered for the teachers? Will I be assigned a mentor and how helpful will they be? How many of my colleagues use portfolios? What are the attendance policies and what do most other teachers do about behavior issues?

5.6

I enjoyed going through the sequence of courses for a local community college that I would love to work for. I have not found the college’s English learning outcomes or goals yet so I appreciated reading through these WPA Outcomes. I like how the rhetorical knowledge and the critical thinking, reading, and writing goals are equally balanced with five for each section. I really agree with the five for the Critical thinking, reading, and writing. I feel comfortable enough with those goals as they are. For the Rhetorical knowledge goals, I question the second goal: Gain experience reading and composing in several genres to understand how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers’ and writers’ practices and purposes. I love that last week in Eng 700 we read on genre and there is such a vast amount of opinions on genre that I wonder what the word “several” means? Does it mean 4-5? Does it count to include things like the syllabus, writing prompt, and essay as genres? I think I would like more clarification on this. Maybe it means the typical “old school” way of thinking about genre. I do agree that teaching genre is needed, I only question which genres and how many we are to focus on.

5.7

I’m very happy to have another chance to consider the Habits of Mind that we reviewed in class last week in our groups. I wonder how often these are updated because it seems to me that several of these can be combined with others – leaving room to add some newer ones. But overall, I agree that these habits are a great way to engage yourself as a teacher in teaching students. Many of these habits don’t really seem like something we can outright teach our students, but perhaps they are ways we can foster how we teach our students. We can remind students to take responsibility for their work, and to remember to engage in their learning. But when I look at the word “persistence” and think about how I would incorporate that into a lesson, it feels a little bit like talking down to the students. “OK everyone don’t forget to be persistent and keep your interest on the project you are working on.”

5.8 Parsing the Demands of FYC  (work in progress)

These questions are really great and I feel that I need to come back to this again and again.

Q#1) What do I want students to learn?  Rigor, academic discourse, close reading and analysis.
(I) Critical reading (knowledge is constructed), rhetorical reading, using sources and citing what we read in our own writing (how others’ writings speak to us). Mediation (vs remediation) (Salvatori),recursive nature of assignments (Coles)

(II) Writing process. REVISION vs. editing. Feedback. drafting. (Hull) (Bartholomae) (Elbow). invention early on. Intertextuality.  Audience.

(III) CT, group work,be creative, have fun, responsible for own learning. metacognition

so much more!

Q#2) What does my dept or writing program want students to learn? They are here for many reasons and some maybe didn’t receive the skills they deserved to have learned for a number of reasons. Let’s provide that. Theories, strategies that are current.

academic rigor, responsibility for own learning, pass the class, outcomes

Q#3) All of the same and perhaps passing standardized tests. Students are here to learn. invested a lot.  let’s teach them well.

Q#4) I can only imagine students wanting to have fun, read relevant and EASY texts, write very little and still get an “A” (so concern with grades). Perhaps repetition so that they know they are learning.  Student investment in their future.

Q#5) Goals that overlap: learning, students are valued as intelligent and capable.  Rationale for what we do.

5.10 Balancing Competing Tensions With Your Course Goals

I did not have to look any further than the first option for tensions in composition. I really feel uncomfortable with the phrase “let students play with language, take risks, and enjoy writing” balanced with “I have to evaluate their work fairly.” First of all, I have never ever had an issue with fair grading practices. I find that I am always pleasantly surprised by some student performance over others that one would expect to perform higher. I always develop a very detailed and clear rubric that I use to help me grade. I evaluate my own grading based on the criteria outlined in the rubric in addition to the student’s writing performance. I have always asked colleagues about their grading practices and asked them to share tips and strategies with me about how they grade. I also ask students to do self evaluations as well to keep my fair grading in check. Students are usually fair on themselves.

On the other side, I guess I would say that it struck me when I saw “play with language” I don’t know why but it did. It just feels so out of place to consider all of this hard work in planning and teaching to see the word “play.” I would rather have seen something like “engage students to take responsibility for ….” But there are plenty of ways engage students in Elbow-ist expressive writing. They can do journal writing, free writing, learn and write poetry, etc. Students definitely deserve a chance to let their creative lights shine – and I feel even more committed than ever to this after the Eng 700 readings on Literacy and Schooling. Some students may come from oral-based or any other different background where they really hate school-based writing and I want to make sure that I give them chances to do a lot of low-stakes writing.

5.12 Goals and Rationalesj  (this is a work in progress…)

1. Students will learn and practice rhetorical conventions and pay close attention to audience, purpose, and genre. Students will read and write about several different genres on different forms in different contexts that they will find interesting to them.
2. Students will develop critical thinking through writing, reading, and research. They will become critical readers and writers and learn that reading informs writing, and vice versa. Reading is a constructive and active process and it will help them to become better writers.
3. Students will compose effective expository paragraphs and essays. In order to support the central purpose of their writing, students will analyze evidence and incorporate the works of others by citing and paraphrasing.
4. Students will craft clear precise writings that they design themselves. They will also be engaging in revising their work.
5. Students will learn and use a variety of writing strategies and develop flexible writing processes including participating in the writing process. Students will learn invention and generating, revising, editing, and proofreading.
6. Students will engage with others and collaborate at various stages in the writing process and they will develop ways to offer and receive constructive criticism.
7. Students will develop their knowledge of genre conventions for academic writing ranging from structure and paragraphing to tone and mechanics Students will also exercise control over surface features such as syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
8. Students will engage with social justice issues such as Paulo Friere’s understanding that reading is the key to their futures.
9. Students will read and discuss challenging texts. In response to these they will write essays where they develop informed positions that engage with the positions of others. They will analyze and summarize the other texts, and write about them. Students will pay close attention to how the ideas voiced by others helps them make choices about both language and form.
10. Students will engage metacognitively with reading, writing, and speaking strategies. They will reflect on their critical thinking and on both individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge.

Rationales: It is more a philosophy with rationale mixed in. I need to work more on this:

My philosophy of teaching begins with striking a solid balance between pedagogy and practice. I intimately believe that every teacher must ground their practice in current theory and research, beginning right out of the starting gate with the classroom setup and coming to class prepared with a toolbox full of both creativity and the standard formal academic essay form.   In my classroom, the teacher’s presence fosters a safe and productive learning environment and my methods guide me in structuring a student-centered learning environment, and in how I balance classroom time in order to structure successful writing. Yet none of this would be possible without a passion for learning. I bring my own passion with me into the classroom and strive to share it with my students in every way possible.

Every student deserves a quality education, and this concept lays the groundwork for promoting equality in the classroom. I believe that educating all students is important as it promotes a more democratic learning environment. Stemming from this philosophy, I will be promoting critical thinking skills as they are essential for a college level composition class. When teaching, I use reflective listening skills and promote open-ended questioning. This in turn teaches students the power of an unanswered question by provoking meaningful discussions. There is something to be said for fostering a classroom of “rich messiness” as students engage with each other, the text, and their writing and this is how I plan to structure discussions in my classroom. Students will be given ample teacher wait time to answer questions; they will also work regularly in pairs and small groups and workshops in order for them to work through questions. This will also create space for the students with the mindset that students arrive with multiple intelligences that deserve encouragement.

As an example of how I apply these ideas in a classroom lesson, in a course on American literature where students were asked to read and analyze The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I added additional critical thinking components to this text. This process of scaffolding evidence-based argumentation helped to prepare the students to write an essay to support an interpretation of the text. 1) Students were asked to read the text outside of class and select textual evidence to support themes, issues, political movements and events relative to the historical period. 2) Students prepared their arguments along with a couple of claims for their selections. Students would inevitably develop ideas around issues such as: what did Hawthorne really feel about the Native Americans; what was Hawthorne trying to show us about truth and justice; would the same thing have happened if Hester were a man? Etc. 3) In the class, students were placed in small groups where each group was assigned a different part of the text. 4) Students discussed their findings and came to a consensus as to which text represented the group as a whole. 5) Each group presented their findings to the class making sure that each group member participated equally. Out of these group discussions, students would get to listen to their classmates, ask questions, and share their own interpretations with each other. This inquiry-based questioning and class discussion would take on a life of their own and so acting as a facilitator worked really well with this style of organization and teaching. 6) Students would develop an essay using evidence-based argumentation. Structuring the lesson plan by using inquiry-based learning is more engaging, and is based on the rationale that education begins with the curiosity of the learner.

Because writing is a recursive process that requires effort, evaluation, and revision, I will devote time to each student’s individual strengths and work to improve their writing. Writing and thinking are interdependent; they involve context and perspective because language is meaning. From this flows the idea that language should be taught in a communicative context. To support this philosophy, I involve my students in process writing. After students finish their first draft, they workshop in small groups and peer edit each other’s papers. After their second draft, students are given time to meet with me to conference about their essays. This is done during class while the rest of the students are given a reading and discussion assignment. Students must complete the STAR revision worksheet and bring it along with their essay to the conference I find that conferencing during class time guarantees that each student gets the individualized attention that they need.

I have adopted a principled approach to teaching English. What I choose to teach in the classroom will rely greatly upon what I believe are the best cognitive, affective, and communicative principles of language learning I use techniques in my lessons that explain the rationale behind them so that students fully understand how and why we are learning and doing what we do.

As this is a new discourse community that we are forming in this first year college course, students will learn and use academic language and focus on academic writing, which will empower them by granting them access to this language – the language of argument. Where content is variable, forms of thought are not and so teaching students these forms is needed. Students will understand the difference between spoken and written discourse and that there are different purposes and multimodal situations for successful language use. Students will learn a variety of rhetorical tools by learning strategies for composing because writing is more than text.

Students will be active and engaged readers and we will do a lot of close reading of literature.They will learn to think deeply about the texts we read in class and develop their own interests, and, become more aware of their own stories and histories as they connect closely with the text. I advocate critical reading skills like thinking about thinking along with other metacognitive strategies like that Reading Apprenticeship strategy of “talk to the text” that makes thinking visible thereby engaging both cognitive and social domains of learning. This is a great way to teach reading and notetaking strategies. The critical thinking environment that I promote will foster many controversial topics and provide ample opportunities for lively discussions, readings, and writings. Students will develop their own voice and understand the importance of audience and style. This is why I select texts that will be meaningful to a student’s creative and intellectual growth. We will cover topics such as literature, poetry, and standard essays. It is important to foster the creative process in addition to the standard English essay form.