By Shana Karnes It’s back to school time! I’m so excited! I love it. I can’t help it. Every year, I am just overflowing with optimism, excitement, ideas, and a huge cart full of school supplies. I’m usually armed with paint for my classroom, wall decals, new Expo markers, and of course, a truck full of books. Even this year, when I don’t get a classroom of my own to decorate and overflow, I showed up in my friends’ classrooms to help them paint, sort, organize, and plan. The beginning of every school year is fun for me because it is so full of hope. Hope that this year, this time, will be the one where it all comes together for me, where I feel like a great teacher, where every single student comes to fall in love with reading and writing, where everything is perfect. Of course, reality and my teacher dreams are two totally different things, but August affords me hope for the possibility that those dreams can come true. As for my students, I know that despite all of their eye-rolling, stand-offish, sarcastic banter, they are just kids who want to be happy and purposeful and successful. They all have hope every August, too, no matter how goofy they might act. I know this from reading their notebooks, writing conferences, and mid-September lunch conversations, in which I hear how they hope this English class is different, this school year is better, this fall isn’t full of drama and stress and failure. So, why would I dash all of that hope, on the part of every learner in my classroom, by setting any tone other than one of optimism on the first days of school? Why would we ever want to start a year the same old, same old way, with stacks of syllabi, xerox copies of interest inventories, the distribution of dusty textbooks, and a traditional teacher-centered dynamic in which I say what we’re going to be doing and the students all sit back and listen? It took me a few years to realize the disconnect between my summer idealism and the traditional structure of my first few days of class. No high school student is ever anxious to receive their syllabus, textbook, or homework--so I don’t really need to deal with that on the first day. When I began to wonder what kind of tone I was setting by sticking with the traditional first day activities, those activities went out the window. Instead, I tried to consider what might set the tone for a year of student-centered, inquiry-based reading, writing, talking, and thinking. Instead of passing out textbooks, we explored my classroom library. I had stacks of books sitting on desks around the room and we practiced “speed dating” with them. We shared which books we’d already read, would like to read, or had heard were good or bad. Instead of an ice-breaking get to know you activity that I’d likely forget after a week, we set up writer’s notebooks, explored funny writings and writing prompts from former years’ students, or wrote funny tweets about our summers on the whiteboard. Instead of passing out the syllabus, we talked about our learning goals in partners and small groups. I shared my own learning goals for myself as a model, then asked students to consider very specific goals in terms of their growth in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. We had wonderful conversations about which kinds of reading and writing interested us, which helped guide my planning. Instead of emphasizing the rules and expectations I had for students, I listened to what they were saying and jotted ideas in my writer’s notebook pertaining to what would keep them engaged. Hot topics in the news or media could be mentor texts. Interesting new social media apps could be writing products. The best new movie was likely based on a book I could talk up. This year, at the college level, I’ll consider what tone I’m setting with our first day’s activities. We’re going to do some yoga before we read a little from Pose, Wobble, Flow. We’ll personalize our writer’s notebooks and start the year by noting how our passions center us, and how those passions can inspire our teaching. We’ll craft parts of our syllabus together on Google Docs, negotiating deadlines, feedback protocols, and reading options.
In these activities, we’ll practice reading, writing, talking, listening, and thinking creatively, critically, and individualistically--which is exactly the tone I want to set for this year, a year that is full of promise and hope and wonder that it really will be the best year ever. What will you be doing with students on your first day of school? WVCTE wants to know! Please tell us by commenting on this post, sharing on our Facebook page, or letting us know on Twitter! Shana Karnes teaches sophomore, junior, and senior preservice teachers at West Virginia University. She finds joy in all things learning, love, and literature as she teaches, mothers, and sings her way through life. Follow Shana on Twitter at @litreader or find more of her writing about secondary readers-writers workshop at Three Teachers Talk.
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By Shana Karnes I love to spend big chunks of my summer planning ways to revise and improve my practice. The season is always so full of hope, with opportunities to reframe my thinking and help my students be more successful. But when the school year actually begins, it can be overwhelming to attempt anything from a major overhaul of your teaching to a few key shifts in practice. Every year, I read books, take classes, and obsessively jot ideas that never see the light of day when I’m faced with the reality of a fall full of fresh faces, administrative initiatives, and new courses to teach. This summer, though, I’m working with a group of amazing teachers in Pipestem, WV during a National Writing Project summer institute. As we read and write and think and plan about argument writing, we’ve come across two key changes we can make that will withstand the crush of the reality of our profession. Embrace the Wobble One of our central texts for the institute is Pose, Wobble, Flow by Antero Garcia and Cindy O’Donnell-Allen. This text makes lots of wonderful arguments for teachers to inhabit “poses” as more thoughtful, authentic practitioners through the metaphor of yoga. The idea is that when we try new things as teachers, we are trying to get into a pose. We inevitably wobble as we try to master this new stance, but eventually attain the flow characterized by doing this pose without thinking. GODA (as one of our teachers refers to Garcia and O’Donnell-Allen)’s key argument is that the wobble part of this process is not only a necessary part of becoming a better teacher, but a desirable one--we must live in the gray area, a zone of proximal development, disequilibrium, or whatever else we might call it. “The P/W/F model is not about an endpoint,” GODA vehemently asserts; “it is a framework to help acknowledge how one’s practice changes over time and requires constant adaptation” (4). It’s only by being uncomfortable, by trying new things day or week or year in and out, that we can improve as teachers. What this looks like in terms of our current theme of teaching argument writing is revising the way we think about the writing process to start from an inquiry-based place of research, then claim development, then argument articulation. This new mindset is requiring all of us to “wobble” as we try to conceive of it, and we’re wobbling in even our understandings of its many moving parts--what revision is, or what an argument can look like, or how we can use argument as a genre for developing our opinionated writing voices. As we’re flooded with unconventional ideas, mentor texts, thought processes, and assessment measures, we’re all wobbling with the confidence we’ll eventually reach flow. But once we do--some time during the school year when things are going smoothly and planning and teaching are underway--we’ll need to yank ourselves out of our newly-found comfort zones and get back into a new pose, embracing the wobble of new learning once more. This constant revision of our teaching is a simple way we can always strive to be better teachers--just embrace the wobble of continuous improvement. Become a Writer The second simple way we’ve discovered to guarantee an improvement in our teaching is to help shift our identities from mere teachers to that of teacher-writers. GODA strongly advocate for the many student-centered benefits of writing beside our learners, but there are so many benefits beyond the classroom that become possible when we simply write. Outside the classroom, GODA suggest that teachers might become more engaged in improvement by:
Taking one or more of these eminently doable steps can help teachers “enact agency and make an impact on the profession” (27). I highly encourage anyone reading this to write for WVCTE, join us for a region-specific #wvedchat on Twitter, comment on this or other blogs, or join us for local workshops like our state conference in April. These simple activities will not only expose you to ideas to keep you in the “wobble,” but they’ll let you meet and engage with like-minded colleagues as interested in improvement as you. Within your classroom, becoming a writer is equally valuable. If you read nothing else of Pose Wobble Flow, I encourage you to read the chapter on “Embracing Your Inner Writer: What It Means to Teach as a Writer.” These pages are chock full of suggestions for not only reasons to write, but ways to do it. From a survey designed to help you find your identity as a writer, to practical methods for joining writing communities on Twitter, Facebook, and even NaNoWriMo, to the ways the act of writing beside our students changes our teaching, this chapter is awesome. Because “the changes that come about within our classrooms and with our students start with ourselves,” (80), writing is a necessary first step to becoming a better teacher. I hope, like me, you’ll begin keeping a writer’s notebook, blogging regularly, and writing beside your students every time you see them in class. Beginning to inhabit the pose of a writer--although I experience wobble within this identity almost daily--is doubtless the most helpful thing I’ve done to improve my practice as a teacher.
Whether you start with wobbling or writing this school year, I wish you a wonderful end of the summer and all the joy and optimism the fall always brings as we work to become better teachers every day! What simple ways have you improved your teaching? Please share with us in the comments, on our Facebook page, or via Twitter! Shana Karnes teaches sophomore, junior, and senior preservice teachers at West Virginia University. She finds joy in all things learning, love, and literature as she teaches, mothers, and sings her way through life. Follow Shana on Twitter at @litreader or find more of her writing about secondary readers-writers workshop at Three Teachers Talk. By Shana Karnes I can be a bit of a lazy reader. I get impatient while reading, waiting for the plot to pick up, and abandon books with gusto. I leap from mystery to mystery, romance novel to short fiction, and toss in the stray nonfiction book when I’m feeling curious. When I first began making choice reading a priority in my classroom, many of my students were lazy readers, too. They gobbled up YA fiction in droves, but balked when I booktalked a classic, or an award-winning piece of fiction, or any nonfiction. Some of them refused to move beyond their genre of choice for a whole year. I knew, when I committed to choice reading, that it went far beyond just YA. I knew that all kids were capable of reading sophisticated texts, making complex choices about when and how and what to read, and that all readers have a hunger for a challenging, engaging read. But I wasn’t seeing my students living out those expectations, so I built in some structures to help them get there. Reading Challenges -- I began scaffolding students up to more difficult reading choices with reading challenges. I read about these in Book Love by Penny Kittle, but wanted to put my own spin on them as far as making very specific challenges went. So, the first reading challenge involved picking a book outside your comfort zone (which required a fun day of work identifying our own reading zones); the second challenge involved reading a nonfiction book, the third involved reading an award winner, and so on. By working as a whole class to try new books out simultaneously--me reading along with my students--everyone felt comfortable getting uncomfortable. We were all struggling along together, trying to decipher the vocabulary in a new book, or the structure of a new genre, or the style of a new kind of writer. I built in mini-lessons on these things, but I think it was most helpful that we talked about these issues in the light of being real readers--not “struggling” readers. Authentic Writing about Reading -- When I first joined GoodReads many years ago, I realized how much my reading life was improved by just quickly taking the time to rate what I’d thought of a book. Before that, I’d start and finish books and never really think about them again. Soon, I began writing short book reviews, and then long ones, first just for myself, and then for the benefit of other readers. I began reading more book reviews to get a sense of what I might talk about other than writing and characters. I wanted my students doing something similar, so we began studying book reviews--popular, funny ones on Goodreads and Tumblr; professional ones in the New York Times and the New Yorker; even famed reviewers like Roger Ebert, whose writing moves about film we applied to books. Students began tweeting at authors, writing reviews informally in their notebooks and formally for our school paper and "giving their own booktalks to one another. Nurturing a Real Reading Life -- No longer were kids feeling confined to books I handed them. They began to choose books more independently, armed with information about their tastes, their peers’, and what was popular in general. I began to see more students reading books that didn’t come from my classroom library, more students talking to one another about books, and a bigger variety of books being read in general. In my own reading life, I modeled these challenges. I read The Great Gatsby, Walden, and a few other classics for the first time in years, and truly appreciated them more during these second reads. I wrote book reviews on Goodreads, the Nerdy Book Club, and Three Teachers Talk. I tracked my reading in my notebook, on GoodReads, and on Twitter, setting goals and trying to take a moment to jot down, in quick review form, WHY I liked or didn’t like a book. These practices not only helped me become a better reader; they helped my students grow as readers, too. Anna’s favorite book of all time became the award-winning A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, while Connor was blown away by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. These books and more were chosen, read, and evaluated independently, without the confines of assignments or the too-broad sea of “your choice” to hold them back. WVCTE is wondering how you start your students with choice and then scaffold them up to more complex reading tasks. Leave us a comment, tweet us your thoughts @WVCTE, or connect with us on Facebook!
Shana Karnes teaches sophomore, junior, and senior preservice teachers at West Virginia University. She finds joy in all things learning, love, and literature as she teaches, mothers, and sings her way through life. Follow Shana on Twitter at @litreader or find more of her writing about secondary readers-writers workshop at Three Teachers Talk. |
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