Thought For Teacher

I have A LOT of thoughts swirling around from these two readings. Maybe because I feel the school year coming closer and the real live readers coming my way, also because I know I will culminate my Ed S with a research question of my own and am asking myself all these questions when I come across other people’s research: What matters to me? What do I want to know?  What questions are still out there that matter? What excites me, what could I reasonably do?  I absolutely invite response to these questions. I have been a passive receptacle in a lot of my classes, and I love absorbing it all, but I need help figuring out how to turn around and become the one asking the questions and doing the doing.  So yes, the gist of these chapters from Kittle and Gallagher is that independent reading and book groups are more impactful than whole novel reading (but they do set time aside for those as well). This fits in with the amount of love and effort Buehler puts into “matchmaking” fo...

 

  Buehler focuses a lot on the importance of teachers to develop their “matchmaking” skills to pair students to books. A lot of considerations go into this - the right book at the right time for the right kid. To achieve this, teachers need to be extremely well read and to have a mental rollodex of alllll the possible titles. This feels like such a big job, but this class has actually taught me I can consume a lot more books a lot more quickly than I thought and provided me a means to organize them. Taking it a step further, Buehler describes a teaching team who uses an ongoing chart to track the books and group them by different criteria (p.80). This idea captured my imagination.  I also teach on a team and we are expected to adhere to the same curriculum between two 6th grade classes. This means, me and my co-teacher can’t just decide to offer new choices for our class novel study because we want to - It needs to be a joining team division and all of us need to share in the ...

(Dr. K - Hope it's okay if I borrow a little of this blog space for another class!)   There were many significant concepts from the reading. I thought the "Proclamation" summed a central one up pretty well, which is to respect the children these books are for! Seems obvious, but based on the readings, we adults have a habit of viewing children and their child-like perspectives from a deficit lens. However, "Children's books merit grown-up conversation” (Proclamation). Picturebooks can also add complexity and nuance to text through the visual cues. Nodelman writes, “The pictures in picturebooks are almost always more complex, more detailed, more sophisticated than the texts are” (Nodelman 17). This seems especially true in graphic novels, of which there are many examples of gorgeous and conceptual artwork paired with simple and sometimes minimal text. In the Wondrous Wonders by Camille Jourdy, there are entire pages with no words at all and the narrative must be c...

  I like framing YA lit as asking “who we are and what that might mean” (51) because it values student readers and their experiences and asks them to think more deeply than simply entertainment. I wanted to note the four qualities of a classroom community in YA pedagogy: belief that the work is important, discussions that blend personal response and literary analysis, a sense of being known and valued, and collective investment in a shared experience (54). I have so many of these beliefs shooting around in an unstructured way, but seeing it simplified into four simple principles had me going “yes! This!” The classroom portraits were all inspiring. I thought the book tree in Carrie’s class was cute with the titles. I love valuing YA reading like this, showing the students it matters by displaying all the titles they love and giving them such a voice! Buehler talks about the student buy-in (58) which I also noted - It’s the secret magic ingredient that makes everything else in the cl...

I think the teacher who creates and employs ladders must be the most loving and hands on teacher. I really love this concept, and the fact that the author provides some samples for the lesser read. I would love even MORE examples with more contemporary texts. I am excited by the possibility of using ladders to connect students to new genres, narration styles, and to help them build confidence. My ears really perked up when Lesesne started talking about short stories in chapter 6 because I was already thinking about how to use this idea to apply to a short stories unit we do in 6th grade. It has been my project to update this unit for next year - I purchased class sets of Flying Lessons and Other Stories to add some more contemporary voices to an existing short stories unit, and ladders might be the exact way to work them in. Maybe we can get more buy in for an awesome but higher level story like The Lottery if the kids get there via ladder. Having students create ladders is also an ide...