On Twitter this weekend, Heinemann Publishing quoted Kylene Beers: "You can not improve competence until you improve confidence". This is a reality from the get-go in my classroom. My students walk in with little confidence in their abilities as students, and some of them, with no confidence in themselves as people. They have struggled in school since they can remember; have been in remedial reading classes for years with no hope of getting out; and they have forgotten any strengths and love of learning they may have started out with. They do not see themselves as people with purposes, but as failures.
My job in Literacy Seminar is to awaken my students sense of purpose, their strengths, their desire to learn and grow, before I worry about their fluency, their comprehension, or their miscues. Luckily, authentic literacy work does all that. Reading about characters helps human beings learn about themselves. It teaches us to empathize, to understand, and to look deeply into our own lives and see what is there. When I help my kids find books they connect with, they have a chance to envision themselves in new realities - similar to their own situation, but perhaps with different paths or outcomes than those they have considered before. The same goes for choice of topics and styles in writing. When students pursue their own questions and explore their own thinking in their Writer's Notebooks, their sense of self, their sense of being a human in this world with something meaningful to contribute, grows.
The way I see my year unfolding is this:
- We begin with narrative, the power of our own stories and those of others. We study characters in short stories and novels as we write our own truths. We look at characters' beliefs, their choices, the impact of life on them. And we do the same with ourselves. What events have impacted us deeply? How do we make choices? What shapes our lives? Who and what guides us? What do we need to learn? Who do we want to learn from? Our writing is primarily in our Writer's Notebooks, but also might extend to blogging. We choose pieces to publish in various ways, depending on individual desires.
- Then we turn to more nonfiction/informative work, where we decide what is worthy of study and who our teachers and mentors will be. What nonfiction texts do we want to explore? Who are experts we could study and learn from? How can we reflect on and share our learning with ourselves and others? This work might also lead us to more in-depth studies of fiction - authors who call to us because they create characters we connect with; genres that fit what we wish to learn; media texts - podcasts, videos, audio texts that meet our needs. We write to explore and expand our thinking, and we also write to share our learning with others, both in class, perhaps with buddy classrooms at a nearby elementary, and on-line.
- Finally, we are ready for argumentation, impassioned with purpose - primed to dive into causes we have discovered we care greatly about - we want to educate other people and get them to consider making changes. We continue our reading and learning from books, but extend our writing to include larger audiences of classmates, the community and on-line.
My time-line feels uncertain at this point. I love Gallagher's structure of: swim, study, emulate. Will this journey be cyclical, weaving from one to the next at student's own pace, or will it need to be more structured with whole class studies and guided lessons? Will it be a combination of both? I don't want a rigid, "must-be-adhered-to" timeline where we all feel pushed by deadlines. I want students to have more control than that. But I also want to meet kids' needs. And, sometimes, an umbrella structure with classroom energy poured into a certain type of learning helps more. More thinking to do on this...
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