CI5461: A nod to this, an homage to that

The Jenkins article, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century, besides being a mouthful of words, bridged "new" and "old" literacies more meaningfully than anything else I have read. As I listed off its recommended skills - play, performance, simulation, and so on - I realized that these aren't actually new at all. What is new is the technology and the way we can enhance those experiences. Well, maybe not enhance. But we can match them to our students in a more current way, and that immediately helped make sense of new literacies.

Technology is too often, I think, presented in a manner that is daunting for teachers despite the best interests of its proponents. Integrate this because it helps with learning goals. Try this out because it engages students. Yet what has been missing is this piece: The skills remain the same, but the medium changes.

CI5461: Pass the duties

This week's readings addressed what had become my primary concern about writing instruction, and that is: editing instruction. I feel great - great, I tell you - about coaching students individually and as a class. But when I am removed from that equation and I am left with peers helping peers, well, what am I to do? Can I assume they will be able to help each other? These readings spoke to these concerns and ameliorated them to a certain degree.

First, I am quite sure that if I let them adrift into the Caspian Sea of writing without so much as a paddle, they will have no direction, become distracted and eventually start playing cribbage (provided they know how to play, happen to carry a travel-sized board on board and don't capsize in what can be a very rough sea). So, I know I have got to give them paddles, checklists, helpers, something to keep the editing process going. I liked VanDeWeghe's chart of peer response types, because I could show it to students and guide them toward the "reader's needs" and "writer's strategies" edits. I could also model such commentary individually and as a class. Additionally, I think it will be important to employ peer editing sheets to keep the process guided and on task, because chaos can really soak a great editing day.

CI5461: The exploration of grammar

This week's readings fueled me up and readied me to launch into teaching writing. So inspired. Here's why: They demonstrated how grammar can be explored rather than taught.

I take insignificant umbrage with teaching grammar explicitly, but I want to celebrate it in context so much more. As I read the Bush article, I wrote "SHOW EXAMPLES" and "TEACH THRU STUDENTS" just as you see the phrases now, and I rarely use capital letters outside of sentence starters and proper nouns. Illustrating grammar rather than teaching it, per se, must make the rules so much more germane for students. If they see how a classmate utilized repetition - perhaps unintentionally - they will buy into its applicability so much more than if I taught it without context.

I also loved the point late in the Bush article to get away from always pointing out errors in sentences. Rather, find examples of good writing and ask students to highlight what's right about it, what they like. Such positive examples doesn't mean we shouldn't correct errors, but they should be balanced so writing doesn't seem like a gauntlet of rules. This would be all the more effective if it was a classmate's writing, the author not revealed until after the exercise. What a self-esteem boost that could be.

CI5461: Teaching with sources

On Page 102 of Romano's book, "I scribbled this note: It seems really crucial to teach from something - examples of what you are saying. Like a reporter, you need interviews, data, something to write about so it doesn't become about you." I realized at that moment that learning gets really boring (and tends to cease) when the teacher just blabbers without concrete examples or sources. When that is taken into account, teaching makes more sense to me.

I am not great at talking without details. I ramble and tend to be at my worst argumentatively. It is when I have found evidence - a quote, a stat, at least an anecdote - that I feel confident that what I am saying is worth saying. In the spirit of that, I offer this quote, which unlike the previous one in this post is not from me. Says Don Murray, quoted on Page 131: "Readers read to satisfy their hunger for information - specific, accurate information they can use."

Why would students be any different? We are charged with teaching them, and in so doing, we owe them something more tangible than a really important thought. I am delighted to see so many useful examples of multiple genres in this Romano book, and I marked a number of them so hopefully I can use them in my own classrooms.