Photos from the Classroom: What’s Happening Here?

Photos from the Classroom: What’s Happening Here?

Annotation.

One of the biggest points of conflict when I am teaching a text is that I require annotations. Students tend to hate being required to annotate a text as they read. Our Director of Studies recently shared an article with the English Department about the purpose of reading a text as a class, for the purpose of learning. The article is High School Reading as an act of Meaningful Aggression.

Generally speaking, the 6th graders I teach are much easier to convince and persuade. They are still at an age where they completely trust adults, and they believe that everything I tell them is in their best interest. Teaching them to annotate, on a very simple level, comes with a little bit of uncertainty, but they come around rather quickly.

My 7th graders are the ones who push on me the most. They push back about most everything, but the topic of annotation is particularly triggering for them. Recently, I wrote this quote from the article I mentioned above on the board for my 7th graders:

I want my students to see reading … as something combative, vulgar, assertive—a constant back-and-forth between reading and rereading, moments of stepping outside the text then coming back and battering at it with questions. Something better done in a flak jacket than pajamas.

We talked about this quote, and the difference between reading book for fun, and reading a book for school. There is certainly a time and place to read in your pajamas. And, there is a time a place to use a text for something more, and that place is in the classroom.

7th grade is an interesting year where students start moving from learning to read to reading to learn. These annotations, and the act of annotating—reading, rereading, thinking, and asking/writing questions—contributes to this process.

Annotation is a skill that is new, and giving students direct instructions for what to annotate, especially in these early years, is important. I give mini-lessons on a particular skill—poetic sound devices, for example (we are reading Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson, which is written in verse). Then, I assign a section of reading in the book and require students to annotate the particular sound devices they find. In the discussion of the text in the following class, we will interrogate the why behind the use of sound devices.

As we move through the text, I will require them to go from just finding and labeling these devices, to writing a question or a deeper meaning in the margins of the page next to the passage.

The discussion comes from their annotations. I might have them get into small groups, compare annotations, and come up with discussion questions about how the sound devices create images, and how that impacts our experience of the text, for example.

This act of comparing annotations also has students see the text through other eyes. It gives them new perspective.

Additionally, annotations they write may later provide more ease for finding evidence for arguments in discussion and writing.

Finding meaning in what we read and learning how to responsible talk about it is one of the skills we teach throughout the years in English and Language Arts. The hope is that through the years, annotating a text to interrogate it will become second nature.

I am an introvert, & books that changed my teaching

I hate busy, and I am an introvert.

At Headwaters, as with many other school, October is quite busy. And now, here I am—4 weeks since my last post—getting to sit down, take it all in, and reflect a little.

I hate when people complain about being busy, because we are all busy. At the beginning of this week, I got a little overwhelmed with work. I may have even complained a little about being busy.

And now I pause after a frantic month. I feel sad that I have not taken the time to reflect over the last few weeks, especially because of how full they were. I know how important it is. I have not reflected about my teaching or leadership practices. I have not been following through with all of my commitments. I have been overwhelmed. But, today is a new day. I am caught up, and I am ready to think and reflect.

This week, I was challenged to reflect about some texts that have influenced my teaching practice over the years. The first one that comes to mind is Quiet by Susan Cain.

I am not sure if it was the timing of when I read this book, or the content of it, or a little of both. But this was the one of the first memories I have of truly grasping how different each of my students is. Each has different learning needs, and different human needs.

This particular text is about introverts living in an extrovert-led world. This book impacted me on a personal level, too. Before I read this book, I had been an introvert posing as an extrovert. It was reading this, and identifying with other people like me, that I realized...I am an introvert.

I never allowed myself to identify as an introvert because I didn’t feel like it was socially acceptable to do so. Additionally, no one had ever talked to me about it before. I thought everyone was an extrovert, and I was just weird.

In identifying myself as an introvert, I then developed more space for the children in my classroom who identify that way, too—even if they didn’t do so outwardly (as most introverts wouldn’t).

Historically, participation grades had been something I thought to be insanely important. My thinking was that if you didn’t speak up in class, you were not participating. And if you were not actively participating through speaking, you weren’t contributing.

I now realize how completely wrong that is, and I teach accordingly.

Here are the two biggest shifts I made as a result of these discoveries.

1. I need alone time, and I make time for it. No exceptions. Luckily, I married an introvert, and we both respect our heavy need for alone time. Though it is very hard to come by, we both wake up early in the morning to get it.
2. Students do not need to speak up in class discussions to participate. I give many different opportunities to participate. Independent thinking time and partner or small group sharing always happen before a larger class discussion. Also, my questioning techniques have changed dramatically. I allow more wait time, and raised hands mean almost nothing in my classroom. People still raise their hands, but I deliberately try to call on each of the students in the room equally.

I not only allow space for the introverted student, I honor it, and often praise it.

In terms of more ways for how to get all students to participate without just speaking up, I use Total Participate Techniques. Years ago, we had a staff development workshop centered around this text, and it was incredibly useful. There are many different techniques: some familiar to most teacher, many are not. One of my favorites is a Board Splash.

This realization around introverted-ness impacts how I relate to each of need of each student. Everyone learns differently, and each student might need a different technique for how to express that learning.

Beyond the Introvert

I am know around my school for being strict, but I bend the rules more than most people think. Learning differences and accommodations are not something else for teachers to do, they just give us more tools for how to provide tools for learning, and to assess the knowledge we want our students to know.

Introvertedness, Extrovertedness, Fast-Reader, Slow-reader, Good Speller, Bad Speller, Dyslexic, Dysgraphic. None of these need to exist as labels. What comes along with these “labels” are tools for teachers and learners. They provide more avenues for us to understand one another.