Teaching English to Adolescents Learning Letter

            My largest and probably most influential discovery in this class came early on in a class discussion. The discussion involved the role of the teacher in a classroom. The idea presented was that the teacher is the LEAST important person in the room. Take all hubris away from the teacher and you realize how true this is. As a part of a classroom it is the job of the teacher to recognize how important the students are and to try to facilitate their ideas and their voice more than anything else.

            Another large foundational learning moment for me in this class was the idea that silence in a classroom is okay. I am a remarkably talkative person and so I commonly want to fill silence and even go as far as to answer my own questions, but me talking makes no sense if I am the least important person in the room. I have already begun to implement this to great success. Even my freshmen had a wonderful discussion last week while I merely asked a few questions and let them lead and fill the silences on their own. My discussions have been remarkably successful with this idea of who is important in mind and though simple, it is one of the best things I have learned in school.

            Writing a unit plan was eye opening for me. First because I came into it thinking it would be a breeze. I had a hundred ideas and felt like I would breeze through it. I did not. It turns out three weeks is not enough time to read a play and have a hundred ideas. My final product is good, and I am happy with it, but I wish I could teach a class just on Shakespeare.

            Teaching in front of my peers was a good experience. I used exceedingly simple objectives and I think it went well, I plan on simplifying the objective writing for my classes at Riverside. Watch my peers teach was great too. I saw many strategies and types of handouts I will use. Many teachers had me draw. This is not something I would think to assign, but it went well and I am now highly considering this as a viable way of synthesizing ideas on paper.

            Overall this class gave me insight into many ideas. I will keep all the writers in mind from Friere to Judith Langer. I also think Readicide will be a word that will be in my vocabulary forever. Tovani also gave me ideas I have already used for reading guides. This class boosted my library as much as anything else. I felt ready to teach before this class, but really without it, I would have had several major flaws in how I look at the classroom in general. I think this class coupled with The Composition Process have made me far more prepared in ten weeks than I ever could have imagined.

Fall of The House of Usher TPA Lesson Plan

1. Teacher Candidate	Ross McCrorie	Date Taught	11-20
Cooperating Teacher	Sheila Messick	School/District	Riverside
2. Subject	12 English	Field Supervisor	Beth Phillips
3. Lesson Title/Focus	Usher	5. Length of Lesson	45 minutes
4. Grade Level	12

6. Academic & Content Standards (Common Core/National)	CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.6 Analyze a case in which grasping a point of view requires distinguishing what is directly stated in a text from what is really meant (e.g., satire, sarcasm, irony, or understatement)
7. Learning Objective(s)	Given Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher students will analyze the point of view and how it affects the meaning of the story by discussing aspects left out by the narrator and details found to be important. I can find vague points in the story and begin to fill them in with my own ideas. I can determine who is telling the story. I can hone in on details that are more specific than the rest of the story and discuss their importance. DOK:3
8. Academic Language demands (vocabulary, function, syntax, discourse)	Interpretation Point of view Narrator Understatement These terms will be introduced in the introduction and written on the board. A short discussion will take place about interpretation to ensure students understand that multiple interpretations can be correct.

9. Assessment

Students will fill out a graphic organizer that they will keep, but the teacher will check off that it is filled out at the end of class. This formative assessment can help shape later lessons on Poe. **Attach** all assessment tools for this lesson

10. Lesson Connections

This lesson is based on the Marzano framework of guided instruction. This means that beyond direct instruction students will be guided to find their own conclusions. The lesson builds on the student’s ability to discuss and interpret literature. These skills are established, but need to be honed by using a variety of texts. Poe gives a great example of a narrative that is open to many different interpretations. This lets students compare ideas and requires them to be open to all interpretations.

11. Instructional Strategies/Learning Tasks to Support Learning
Learning Tasks and Strategies Sequenced Instruction Intro (5 Minutes) introduce the topic and goals. Discussion small groups (15 minutes) Students will break into small groups and discuss the following questions. What parts of the story were vague and hard to understand? Why? What do we know about each character? Use your graphic organizer to list examples. Whole group Discussion (25 minutes) Walk through the story and ensure understanding of story elements and any vocabulary. Discuss elements of the story while finding ambiguity within the language. Give the class time to compare what they know about the characters and the gaps in the narrative.
Teacher’s Role Teacher will create the discussion and facilitate what the students say and interpret about the story. Teacher will ensure no legitimate interpretation of the story is rejected by the students.	Students’ Role Students will discuss the story and find examples in the story that are open to interpretation. Students should look for gaps in information provided by the narrator. Students should listen to each other and build on ideas that are brought up. Students should encourage each other to interpret the story and try to find evidence to support each other.
Student Voice to Gather During the discussion the teacher should make sure that students are actively discussing the point of view in the story. Teacher should ask the question: what can you do during this lesson to ensure we meet the goals? Example answers might be: Finish my graphic organizer.  Listen to my classmate’s interpretations.  Ask questions about story points I don’t understand.

12. Differentiated Instruction

Plan Visual learners will benefit from finding actors to pair with each character. This creates a visual representation they can use to guide their reading of the story. Auditory learners will benefit from the introduction and any lecture based learning. Tactile learners will benefit from the graphic organizer and the notes they can take. Kinesthetic learners will briefly be on their feet to join small groups for discussion. This briefly gets their bodies involved in the lesson and can benefit anyone who is restless.

13. Resources and Materials

Plan Marzano, Robert J. The Art and Science of Teaching a Comprehensive Framework for Effective Instruction. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2007. Print. The Fall of the House of Usher By Edgar Allan Poe. Matthews, Brander. 1907. The Short-Story." 10. The Fall of the House of Usher By Edgar Allan Poe. Matthews, Brander. 1907. The Short-Story. N.p., n.d. Web. 14 Nov. 2014

14. Management and Safety Issues

Plan Teacher’s role is to ensure the class stays on topic without side conversations. Teacher can use proximity to ensure students aren’t on their phones or talking on the side. Anyone who actively disrupts the class will be asked to read in the hall, teacher will check on them and potentially ask for additional work since they missed discussion time.

15. Parent & Community Connections

Plan Assignments will all be posted to the class blog. This makes our progress in class viewable by the parents and interested community members. The gradebook is also available online by the Skyward grading program. Parents can check their student’s grades online at any time.

Assessment Strategies

Assessing student learning is one thing that can be pointed to quickly when a teacher is struggling. I myself am dealing with a teacher who has not assessed my work and I have been in the class for 7 week. How am I to know if I am where I should be? It’s too easy to teach and teach and pour out information and assume the students had soaked it up, when really there is no accountability.

My favorite form of assessment is short speeches. It is far easier to tell if a student has put in the work when they are talking about something. Discussion can help or even be a formative assessment leading up to a speech, but the speech itself is a great way to tell if standards are met. Writing and quizzes are also helpful assessments, but both can be plagiarized or in some way fudged while a speech is just you and your voice.

The toughest thing about assessing a speech is writing a rubric. Some rubrics are far too generic and some are too vague. Specificity is crucial to a good rubric. It should also fit the goals and standards that have been set throughout the unit. I had a rubric that I thought was great until I realized that a student with a great introduction but only a 1 minute speech still got a passing grade. My rubric stressed introduction but not length or development of ideas. I had several students pass with speeches that were barely 2 minutes long, but the rubric is the law in my mind once the students have it.

I will always use writing in my classes, but not so much as a final assessment, that can put too much stress on it and take away from the important part of writing, which is the process. I much prefer having my students get up and talk.

Katie Brown Visit

            Katie Brown, the Washington State Educator of the year takes a bold stance when people ask her when she will become an administrator. As the 2014 teacher of the year Katie is clearly in her prime as a teacher, but based on her blog, it seems like everyone wants her to move up the ladder already. I agree with her sentiment on the matter however, why should she stop teaching? She is innovative, energetic, and creative by all accounts; why ask this person to leave the classroom?

Katie is an English Language Learning teacher in Bellingham. She quickly became a celebrity however after winning the award. She has thrown out first pitches and even gotten to meet the president. As a budding teacher myself I love watching the successful and laudable teachers get recognition, but I am sad to hear that she is being asked so often to leave teaching. Administration is a noble calling, but not one I have even remotely considered as a teacher. My place is in the classroom with kids.

I look forward to meeting with Katie tomorrow. I am curious about her methods as a teacher and what specifically got her recognized as a standout teacher. I am also interested in her time in Alaska. She has spent time watching Native Alaskan elders share their cultural traditions. As an Alaskan and someone who has spent substantial time in rural villages I am wondering what educational knowledge she gleaned from her time there.

It is a fantastic opportunity to get to meet with Katie and learn from her. I am glad Eastern facilitates these opportunities for the teacher candidates to see successful teachers at work in schools and in our own college classrooms.

Readicide

When I was 16 years old and a sophomore in high school I got in a horrible argument with a teacher. The topic of the argument was valid, but for now lets just say it wasn’t important. That week I had a counseling session with an assistant principle and I was moved to the only English class available. The class was clearly a much lower level course.

            Two things stood out to me about the course I had been moved to. First, We never had reading to do at home. We listened to Huck Finn on tape and rarely asked to write anything of any depth. Secondly, an entire week was devoted to “test taking skills” before the High School Graduation Qualification Exam (HSGQE). This week was devoted to ruling out bad test answers and trying to find clues in the text. I’m foggy on the details because my sixteen-year-old self could care less what these “low level” students were learning. One thing that is clear though, is that the most important thing to this teacher was the upcoming test. He sat at his desk while the book on tape played or he talked about the test. I really remember nothing else about him as a teacher.

            This is important because almost all the students in the class were victims of readicide. This teacher was making reading a chore. He made it so that students were looking for the answer and even if they didn’t have the answer that was okay if they had the skills to make a good guess. The diminutization of the importance of actually sitting down and reading is enormous in schools. Not only are we telling them they don’t have to, but some teachers are teaching them how to NOT READ!

            I end this post with a simple question. Why can an upper level student be handed seven interesting books and asked to chose one to their liking, while a lower level student is spoon-fed something they will inevitably hate since it’s delivery is fit for a 7 year old? Why do we not treat all students as capable readers with personality and opinion? “I only read books I got to choose in high school” is a common saying. Let us keep it that way.