Reflecting

In the past 3 months my view of ELA in the middle school classroom has changed significantly.  When I started this class in September, my thoughts were that ELA would consist primarily of reading novels, writing book reports, and studying boring poetry.  How wrong I was!  With Nancie Atwell as a guide, and several new strategies up my sleeves, I feel that I now have several tools to make my ELA classroom a fun and engaging learning environment. 

For starters, oracy is much more important than I had thought, and there are so many engaging and exciting activities to incorporate oracy into learning and make it fun.  For example, in class debates, creating a class podcast and reading books to younger students- even better if they have made these books themselves.  Another thing I would like to try is to have kids play the “um, uh, like” game, where they are given a random topic to talk about for 20 seconds without saying um, uh or like.  They could do this in small groups, several times throughout the semester, and I think it would really help with oracy.

I think it is very important to make learning interesting, and incorporate new activities.  When reading the case study on Page, I felt such a connection to her.  I felt exactly the same way about ELA throughout school.  In my younger years, I loved to read and write, but as I got older, and started to find the curriculum boring, I stopped putting forth my full effort, and wrote only to complete the assignments, definitely not to the best of my ability.  I think teachers have to be more creative in teaching ELA, and be constantly introducing new activities to encourage learning in a fun and interactive way- another thing that just didn’t happen when I was in school.

Nancie Atwell introduced an interesting concept with her writing workshop approach.  As much as I like Atwell’s idea of a writing workshop, and would love to try it in the classroom, I have my doubts that it would work.  I think there would be too many students who would not be able to focus individually and would need constant support and prompting from the teacher.  Luckily, I have also learned several ways in which to prompt students to write, and I think these are going to be extremely helpful in teaching ELA.

I think the most important things I have gotten out of this class are the strategies and games.  I think the writing experiment where the teacher reads three poems and afterwards students jot down words they remember from the poems, then write their own poem out of those words is a great activity, especially for a class that struggles with finding their own topics to write about.  Also keeping a writing territories booklet to jot down important memories, places or events that could inspire a story is a good idea.

The most important thing I have learned is that there are ways to make learning fun, and this is my goal as a teacher.  If I can make learning fun, my students will learn to enjoy reading, writing and speaking without even realizing.  

Writing and Representing

Writing is a very important aspect in the British Columbia ELA curriculum.  According to the BC IRP’s, Writing and Representing account for 30-45 % of the ELA curriculum in grades 6 and 7, approximately a 10% increase from previous grades (IRP, 8).  Therefore, it is evident that as a teacher, these are important years to engage students in the writing process.

When I think back to ELA classes from my own middle school experience, all the writing I can remember relates to book reports, and maybe the odd poem.  From my personal experience, I find that I can relate to Penny Kittle in her article “The Importance of Choice.”  Kittle believes that having students respond to literature through writing creates deep readers, and makes sense most of the time.  However, she also believes these are merely writing exercises, and that they hold little importance to the students.  Students complete the exercise without much revision, to get a decent grade, and learn very little in the process (Kittle, 209-210).  This is exactly the approach I took on writing to get myself through high school, and most of university.  Kittle’s main suggestion in getting student’s to enjoy writing it to connect them to their passions, and have them write about subjects that are meaningful to them (210). 

As a future ELA teacher, I think there are several approaches that could be taken to teach students about writing and representing, and help them to enjoy it in the process.  Nancie Atwell, author of “In the Middle,” uses writing workshops in her ELA classroom, in which she allows her students to write about subjects of their choice, and in whatever format they wish.  Like Kittle, Atwell encourages her students to write about subject material they are passionate about or personal experiences they have undergone (Atwell, 71).

While I agree that writing about your passions could be beneficial to engage younger students in writing, I have mixed feelings about this teaching technique because I think it is somewhat unrealistic in the real world.  Students do not always get to choose what they write about.  To get through high school and university, students have to take a variety of subjects, and pretty much all of these subjects include some form of writing which students have to complete to pass the course.  It might be writing a lab report for Science, an essay for History, or a book report for English.  Surely the student is not passionate about all this subject material, but they will write the paper, put in a haphazard effort, and pass the course.  I suppose that by learning to write about subjects that are important to them, students will acquire the tools they need to succeed in forced writing. 

I think my teaching technique would be a fine balance between Atwell’s writing workshop style, and the old-school style of writing book reports that I grew up with.  That said, from a teacher’s point of view, I certainly agree with Kittle in that choice feeds the teacher (211).  It would be much more interesting as a teacher to mark 28 papers on various topics, rather than 28 papers on the same novel! 

I think the most important thing in teaching writing to middle school students is just to encourage them.  Encourage them by sharing ideas, suggesting topics, or having them orally tell you what they are trying to communicate in their story.  As Atwell says, “they need teachers who will guide them to the meanings they don’t know yet by showing them how to build on what they do know and can do (218).

Atwell, Nancie. In the Middle:  New Understandings about Writing, Reading, and Learning. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1998.  Print.

Kittle, Penny. “The Importance of Choice.” Adolescent Literacy (2007): 209-212.  Print.

English Language Arts K to 7: Integrated Resource Package.  British Columbia, Canada: Ministry of Education, 2006.  Web.

Podcasts in the Classroom

Once again, the focus turns to integrating technology in the classroom!  Not that I necessarily think this is a bad thing, it’s just that I continue to be amazed with how many of our classes seem to focus on this subject.  Last week in ELA we had a class discussion on various ways to use podcasts and voice threads in the classroom.  I love podcasts, and listen to them almost every morning, but had never thought about using them as a tool in teaching by having students create their own.

After hearing about Radio WillowWeb in class, I looked them up, and listened to some of the incredible podcasts created by the Willowdale Elementary school students in Omaha, Nebraska.  In these podcasts, an older student generally acted as the host and interviewed younger students about various topics including the Olympics, President’s Day, and endangered animals.  I think kids would love to do this type of activity, especially if they knew they would build up an online audience that included their family and friends.  I also think students would take great pride in their work and research knowing they would be recorded and broadcast for the whole world to listen to.  Podcasts would also be beneficial for school and class bonding. 

I believe there are several ways in which podcasts can benefit students.  For starters, they are a great way to get shy students involved.  A shy student may not want to public speak in front of the class, but may be a great speaker and have brilliant ideas if they could speak into a microphone with only a few people around.  In the form of podcasts, students could broadcast the news, hold debates, read stories or discuss various worldly topics as the Willowdale students have.  Another amazing way in which podcasts could be used is to communicate with sick or injured classmates.  For example, if a student was diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing treatment in Vancouver, how amazing would it be to have their classmates send their well-wishes or read stories on podcasts that the sick child could listen to?

There are many benefits to using podcasts in the classroom, and I look forward to exploring them when I become a teacher.

ABC's and IRP's

Now that I’ve completed my first month of classes, I feel like I am really beginning to grasp what teaching is all about.  I visited a middle school with my seminar class earlier this week, and we have begun making lesson plans in several of our classes.  I had never heard of the Integrated Resource Package (IRP) a month ago, but now I have read over several of them and can see what a valuable resource they will be for me as a teacher when it comes to planning lessons.  That being said, with the set-up of the IRP’s and the subsequent Prescribed Learning Outcomes (PLO’s) being so broad, I think they would be an even bigger benefit to the experienced teacher who has already created numerous lesson plans.  

As a new teacher I am a little apprehensive of the freedom the IRP’s give me in lesson planning and teaching.  I think it could be beneficial for beginner teachers to have the IRP’s a little more structured and detailed.  However, once I have a few years of teaching under my belt, I’m sure I will appreciate the IRP’s for what they are.  Only time will tell.  I do know that I cannot imagine NOT having an IRP or PLO to base my lesson plans around.  As a new teacher, I would be completely lost.  I look forward to exploring the IRP’s in more detail as we create more lesson plans in the coming weeks.

I expect the ELA students of today will all have strengths and weaknesses, and will learn at different paces and through different strategies.  The middle school years can be a challenging time for kids, and I think that as a teacher it’s important to remember this and to try and be understanding of individual’s needs and learning techniques.  The current IRP’s are vague, and I like that.  They allow the teacher to spend more time on certain concepts that the student’s don’t understand, yet they still list the PLO’s, so the teacher knows what his students are expected to learn by the end of the school year.  The IRP’s act as a great framework for ELA lesson planning, while still allowing the teacher freedom of choice to engage their students in unique ways of reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing and representing.  They allow us, as Robert E. Probst says, “to find ways, as Tom Sawyer did, of luring the kids, not into painting a fence, but into serious conversations.”  That is why I think the IRP’s will be such a valuable resource.

Probst, Robert E. “Tom Sawyer, Teaching, and Talking.”

Welcome

Welcome to my blog!  My name is Jill, and I am new at this whole “blogging” thing.  To be honest, the only reason I’ve started this blog is because I am required to for a Literacy and Language Arts class that I am currently taking.  I am excited though to be discovering the blogging world, and I am also excited to be back at university!  I am going to be a teacher.  I am enrolled in the 16 month, post-degree professional practicum to become a middle school teacher, and while the program is intense, it is also thoroughly enjoyable thus far. 

For the past 4 years I was stuck in a rut, working a job that I disliked.  The thought of going back to school to become a teacher was always in the back of my mind, and this September the time was finally right for me to seize the opportunity, quit my job and return to school, hence the name of my blog- Make hay while the sun shines. 

I liked Language Arts when I was in middle school.  Some of my favourite all-time novels (most importantly, “The Chrysalids,”) were ones we had to read in grades 6 and 7.  I think the middle school years are very important ones to try and engage kids in reading and writing.  With the evolution of technology, I expect English Language Arts in the middle school classroom nowadays will look, sound and be quite different than it was when I was in middle school.  I definitely think it will be more interactive it used to be, with a lot more multi-media in the classroom rather than a sole focus of reading and writing.  I hope the classroom will be a comfortable and inviting place where students can enjoy their learning experience.