Response to TPA

I like the TPA we got in this class versus the box one I have to complete for the education program. I like this lesson outline a lot better because there is not so much information that I have to include. I find the simplicity of this outline is more compatible for how I think and organize my thoughts. I like the simplicity of it because since I am writing these lesson plans mainly for myself, I do not find it necessary include every single detail of the lesson. I am more of a bullet person because I can visually see what is first, next, and then last in my lesson. That is  why I really like this outline because it is broken down into the main chunks of a lesson and all I need to do is bullet my information for each outline. I believe that for my learning style, I would for the most part be a visual learner, so when I see a bulleted outline, my mind is better able to comprehend the information and apply it, instead of it being in paragraph box form. I think the point of a lesson plan is for the teacher to have a workable outline that is compatible with the way they think. If I cannot process a lesson plan that is written in paragraph form, then it is not a useful tool for me to use. Therefore, I really like the TPA we have to do for our mini lessons because I will be able to work thought it better than the original TPA. Even though the information required is almost the same, the simple difference of changing it's visual appearance makes all the difference to me.

Response to Differentiated Instruction

When I think of differentiated instruction, I think of the section on the TPA lesson plan that asks what I will do for my students when it comes to differentiated instruction. I usually will make comments such as I will do different activities that touch on the different learning sensory, and if I have a special needs student, I will state what accommodations I will make for them. However, after reading my article on differentiated instruction, I now realize it is a deeper process than I initially thought. The article I found stresses the importance of the whole school and staff being involved with differentiated instruction. The principle or vice principle should be readily available with information and support when it comes to teachers implementing differentiation. But once the whole staff is on the same page, changes in the way teachers see their students learning start to happen. First, teachers will establish learning goals for their students and invite them to participate in shaping the classroom procedures, making choices that are the best for them, and thinking of ways to make the classroom more effective. It is important that each student works toward essential understandings and skills. I also like that my article gave examples of what differentiated instruction looks like, so that when it comes to my TPAs, I will know how to better answer that portion. The instruction could look like many things: establishing clear goals, but leaving the way of achieving them open, being reflective and responsive to the needs of the school, students, and teachers, providing support to teachers based on their needs, and having the staff create a range of levels of support for the teachers comfort. The article did mention though that in order for differentiated instruction to take place in the school and be successful, the administration needs to have a course-length development for the teachers, so that they can be aware of what differentiated instruction is and the steps they need to make in their classrooms to make this happen.

I think that this type of instruction applies to ELA because it would require the teacher to constantly make changes and do a variety of activities in order to touch on most students learning styles, and to make the text comprehensible in more ways than just reading and doing questions. ELA teachers are given a great opportunity to implement differentiated instruction because of the variety of texts they are required to teach. In order to make literature fun and meaningful to their students, the teachers need to make activities that are different and always changing, so that the students do not get board.

Response to Tovani Chapter 6-End

I chose to do the text to self comprehension strategy on page 125. I wanted to do this activity because it  allowed me to practice one of the more important reading strategies: applying text to yourself. It can be very hard to find similarities between oneself and a text. I find it hard to relate to literature from my American Lit class because all the texts were written before 1900. Therefore, doing the text to self connection while I was reading an assigned chapter allowed me to break down some of the barriers that arise when I read literature that was written a couple hundred years before my time.

I liked the way the activity was organized because it was a simple handout that required me to dig into the text in order to find passages that I could relate to myself. A really hard part with old literature is understanding what the author is trying to say, so by finding three quotes that I could relate to myself, I was also able to better understand what the author was trying to accomplish in the story. I will definitely make copies of the activities Tovani has provided in the back of the text book because I believe they will be of great use to all of my future students.

Response to Tovani Chapter 1-5

Wow what a great read! I loved the first five chapters in the textbook. Based on the information that Tovani wrote about, I was able to reflect and understand myself as a reader and also understand my boyfriend as a reader too. As readers, we are both opposites. Kris is definitely a word decoder in everything he reads, and I am a more advanced reader where I subconsciously apply reading strategies that help me with my comprehension. However, I realized that when it comes to college textbooks, I am definitely a word decoder. I realize now that this happens to me because I have hardly been told what my purpose for reading is. As a result, little comprehension happens with college textbooks.

Over all five chapters, I really liked the real world examples Tovani gave of her students because she was able to write about how she answered their questions and help alleviate their uneasiness with reading. I definitely highlighted the different reading strategies for when comprehension fails. It never dawned on me until reading this book, that there are deeper processes for comprehension instead of just rereading a confusing portion. This textbook is great because even though Tovani is giving suggestions to help students, the points she makes allow me to reflect about myself as a reader, and if I can better understand how I read for comprehension, then I will be a better asset to my students. However, the thing that will stick with me the most out of the first five chapters, is that reading is not word decoding, and comprehension cannot happen if a person is a word decoder. Reading is an intricate process that requires a lot more from the reader than simply sounding out words.

Response to A Response-Based Approach to Reading Literature

I really liked this article because it talked about some ideas we have discussed in class about the banking concept of teaching. The article touches on the idea that exists in literature where teachers have an end goal in mind for their students, and they guide their thoughts and reponses in a direction that leads them to the conlusion the teacher had in mind. The author does not agree with this form of literature teaching because it leaves little room for students to expand their horizons and think differently about the literature. Through the article, the author focuses her attention on the idea of horizon literature where students explore the possiblities of the literature. The readers are focused on going beyond the information and looking at the different characters, setting, and conflict, and how these things interact to create the story. Also, they take those same elements and apply them to the reader's everyday life. This form of "horizon of possiblilties," allows students to move beyond the surface level of the literature and the "ideal" interpretation of the story.  

When the author addressed how literature is generally taught in the classroom, I think she made some excellent points. Teachers generally go into a lesson about literature with an end goal in mind for their students, and they buil their lesson plans around that end goal. Therefore, when the lesson doesn't go according to plan, the teachers sort of panic because the class has strayed farther away and the teachers see it as digressing instead of engaging in good instruction. I think at the heart of the article, the author is trying to prove that digression from a lesson plan should be a good thing because it means the students are moving toward a horizon of the literature and not simply reiterating what the teacher hoped they would. I think that good literature teaching should promote digression and students applying the story to their lives because that is when some real literary gains will have been made. I think as a future ELA teacher, I have a great opportunity to show children all the possiblities literature can hold, and that there doesn't have to be a set end goal for them to reach. Unfortunetly though, like the article mentioned, it can be easy for teachers to have an end goal in mind which determines how the literature is taught. I hope that when I become a teacher of literature, I can foster an enviornment where students help guide themselves to the end goal of the literature because when a classroom is guided by student thinking, that is when I as the teacher can take a step back and allow the students to be self-guided learners.

Response to Social Justice

Social justice can be described as justice that is exercised towards a society and the various social classes of a society. In order for there to be social justice, society needs to understand and value human rights as well as recognize the dignity of every human being. This definition that I found on Wikipedia is a great way to lead into the article I found online about marriage and how it applies to social justice. Although I do not agree with the articles perception of social justice, I think it applies to the definition I provided above because it excludes the values for all human rights. The article stresses that marriage between a man and a woman is a matter of social justice. In the article, the author argues against redefining marriage and marriage equality because marriage as an institute protects the rights of children, and with same-sex marriages, those rights are not being protected. The argument that marriage is a social justice institute for children is supported by the fact that when people support same-sex marriage, they are focusing on marriage as a purely sexual adult institute instead of one that promotes the well-fair of children. The worry about a redefinition of marriage is that adults will think of it as only the desires of adults and those outcomes will produce bad social outcomes for children. Furthermore, the article throws in research that states children are better raised with a mother and a father. Because of all the evidence I have listed, I really think this article applies well to social justice because it is ignoring the rights of all people and their dignity. I think that this article does not address social justice as well as the author thinks it does because it is not accepting of all humans and their rights. I understand that children are a huge part of marriage, but they should not be the only focus. There is a larger picture of social justice than only marriage between a man and a woman. The article is afraid of social justice because children will be the result of bad outcomes, but it does not address that thousands of children are already experiencing bad outcomes from a marriage that involves a man and a woman. I do not think that it is okay to argue that same-sex marriage will negatively affect children because thousands of mothers and fathers already give their children bad outcomes. This article should not act as if they are supporting social justice because they are discriminating against a group of humans and their rights. Social justice needs to include all humans and their rights in order to better serve society and the well fair of humans in general.

Reponse to Critical Pedagogy

Within the first couple pages of this chapter, I read a lot of infomation that was a lot more tied to education than the two chapters of oppression. I liked to passaged about macro and micro objectives. The difference between these two is that macro is designed to allow students to make connections between the content and structure of the course and how it relates to the larger social reality, while micro is about the course content the purpose of the content. I think I understand critical pedagogy better than oppression because it focuses on how and why knowledge gets constructed the way it does and how our everday understanding is produced and lived out, and how knowledge applies to social functions. Also, critical pedagogy is concerned with understanding a relationship between power and knowledge. As the chapter discussed, there is a dominant class that hegemonizes lower cultures. By this, there is a system of power and dominance over classes that does not have the power to resist a system of educational oppression. The dominant class uses their power and knowledge to give information to the lower class without teaching them to question the system that they are in. Even still however, I am not quite sure of how hegemony ties into my understanding of critical pedagogy. Like all of our discussions so far, after class I will have a greater understanding of this article after I talk with my peers. I like collaboration over our assigned texts because each students takes away a little piece of the text, and when we all come together, there is a full picture of the article.

Response to Pedagogy of the Oppressed Chapter 2

This chapter for me was a little bit easier to understand because it applied to elements of oppression to education, instead of being abstract like the first chapter. However, the chapter seemed to lump the banking concept and problem-solving teaching too close together for me to distinguish the two. Under careful examination though, I think I can see the difference between the two different roles of teaching and how they apply to oppression.

To start, I think that the banking concept really was a part of everyday classrooms for many years, and in some classrooms, it is still present. How I remember the banking concept is "knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing." This quote applies to education because the teacher is always looked at as the beholder of knowledge and the students are the receptors of that knowledge. This can be problematic though because the students are never given the opportunities to apply the knowledge they are suppose to have received, in order to really make the content concrete. The quote also applies to oppression because the oppressors often see their victims as things who know nothing and need someone to feed them the necessary information. In this sense, oppression and education are the same thing because there is always an authority figure who throws information at listeners without making sure that the information is tangible and can be applied to the listeners' lives and knowledge. Also, in this sense the teacher or oppressor can dominate the audience and sway them to think or feel a certain way about issues.

For the problem-solving concept however, it embodies the essence of consciousness and communication. In this concept, the teacher's role is to create dialogue in which the students and the teacher learn together and are jointly responsible for their growth. This is an important factor of problem-solving because it stimulates true reflection and action upon reality. This idea is really important for decreasing oppressio in education because through problem-solving education, people develope a power to critically look at the way they exist in the world and that the world is in transformation. Being able to think like this, allows individuals to not beecome victims of oppression because they are able to think for themselves and realize that they are not "things" of the world, but active parts in it.

Response to Pedagogy of the Oppressed

This weeks reading was very different from anything I've ever read before that could apply to education. Some portions of it were kind of confusing, but for the most part, it was very insightful. At first, I thought it really applied to people in poverty and countries with over controlling governments. I think it applied to impoverished people because poverty is a very difficult cycle to break apart from and more often than not, there is a government or wealthy population that has forced people of lower status into molds where they can be oppressed and controlled by people who have more than them. Also, the article described victims of oppression as thinking they deserve that treatment and are unaware of how badly they are being treated because they have learned to identify with the oppressor. On a different note, that last sentence also to me described Stockholm Syndrome and how it is a real phenomenon.

I think that the article really related to people in poverty and that in turn directly relates to education because poverty is a real issue in our education system. Oppression directly relates to education because there are thousands of students who are in a cycle of oppression with little roads to get out of it. Minorities and students of poverty are daily oppressed because they have few outlets for bettering themselves and people who look down upon them verbally speak against them being able to better themselves.

During our class discussion, I hope to have a better idea of how oppression applies to education and the processes we as future teachers can go through to try and fix the cycle of oppression that is evident in our country and education system.

CCSS Reading Standards Response

I'm not going to lie, but the CCSS are difficult to read and understand. However, from what I can gather, I think that the creators of the standards have very high expectations for our students. It appears that there will be no room for slacking because every skill in each grade level is crucial in order to advance smoothly to the next grade. On the plus side of this, I think the reading standards will be a great way for students to be better prepared for the rigorous reading amount they will encounter in college.

To continue, I mainly focused my attention on grades nine-twelve because I am placed in a high school classroom, so I felt it was best to familiarize myself with them. I initially noticed that with both literature and informational texts, each skill builds upon the other and increases in difficulty with each grade. For example, in RL.9.2, it says "determine a theme or central idea of a text" where RL.11.2 says "determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text." This is just one of the many instances where a great level will one up the previous one, while still keeping the same standard concept.

I also noticed that there was specific reading material listed required for certain grades. For example, 11-12th graders are required to read one play by Shakespeare and one by an American dramatist. This falls under the craft and structure section where students will determine the meaning of words as they are used in the required text and analyze in the impact certain word choices have. Currently, to meet this standard, my 11th grader American Lit class, the students are reading  the play The Cruicible.

Overall, I feel like the CCSS have great intentions and will really prepare the students academically, but they are also difficult to understand, and some of them, I would have trouble applying.