Raise or Raze?

8.3 The pair that I found the most tension with – wasn’t really a tension per se. It was that I really feel that both sides of the spectrum are equally important and because they are – I cannot choose between them.  I feel that lots of time is NECESSARY for students to spend lots of time discussing the readings  and engaging in strategies and other activities that revolve around the reading. This points to theory: Salvatori, Coles, Bartholomae and Petrosky – all support how reading, writing, and speaking are interrelated and due to the discursive nature of these things we need to make sure that we spend a lot of time on all of them.  The other side of the spectrum says to make sure to do a lot of workshop activities during the semester. I feel that this is also equally important: involving students in the writing process. Spending a decent amount of time (not just talk about it) on each stage of the process means that students need to be workshopping and peer editing and reviewing each other’s essays.

8.6 Engaging with tensions about multiple learning objectives and multiple assignment. I didn’t find that any learning objectives were difficult to map onto assignments.  I did find that there was much much more that I wanted to do during a semester and I could not put them into the 15 weeks. I wish that there was some more guidance or information available to us on which things to choose – how to rank what we choose…so that we know which things we can choose to put into our semester.  Because I have a couple of secondary teaching credentials, I feel very comfortable planning and designing courses – especially beginning with generative questions and then working backwards from the planning perspective. Backwards planning really makes sense to me.  I also feel confident thinking about activities in terms of performances and assessments. Perhaps the secondary and postsecondary worlds of academia are growing closer than I had originally thought.