Kelly Gallagher's "Readicide"

Kelly Gallagher has put to words exactly how I feel about standardized testing. Approaching standardized testing from the mindset of a student, I have long felt that the use of standardized testing within schools as it currently stands has done more to detract from my actual learning than it has to benefit it. Classroom after classroom has spent valuable time teaching me how to read through trick questions to figure out what they are actually asking rather than teaching me the material that the test is supposed to be assessing me on. Just as Gallagher says, the overemphasis on test-taking is detracting from our students growth as not just readers but also as scholars of other areas as well. When reading through the lens of taking a test, students will be uninterested in what they are reading and thus the quality of their learning through that reading will deteriorate. One thing that Gallagher makes a point to mention is that he is not against having standards for students to reach towards, but the problem lies in there being too many standards for a student to have time to truly grasp at any of them. Teachers are forced to prep their students as much as they can for these tests and ensure that enough of them pass or it reflects poorly on the teacher. This time spent in forced preparation takes away from weeks worth of valuable learning time where the students have actual opportunity for growth. Gallagher also makes a point to mention how standardized testing doesn't do anything to help students who are struggling with their reading, rather it forces schools to set aside their struggling students need for more help. In pretty much every way you look at the equation, standardized testing as it is right now only detracts from students learning and their abilities as readers.

Cris Tovani's "I Read It, But I Don't Get It"

As my current self, I love to read. As soon as I see a book that I might be interested in I hop on to Amazon.com and buy a copy to throw on my bookshelf. It is rare for me to find a text that I struggle with. However, I have not always been an avid reader. All through high school I found myself completely bored with reading. I hated to read back then, so sitting here now reading through Cris Tovani's book "I Read It, But I Don't Get It," I can really sympathize with struggling readers or students who are merely uninterested in reading.
What I really appreciated about this book was the strategies it supplied for teachers to help students who are struggling. One such strategy which I felt was of particular use was the strategy of connecting the reading with the struggling student's own life. This helps them to feel connected with the text which will make it easier for them to follow along and grasp the concepts presented within it. It may be difficult for students to make these connections between their lives and the text, so the teacher must help to facilitate them.
Another thing that the book talked about  which I thought was important was that teachers must be good models at reading for struggling students to get a better idea of how they should be approaching the text. Reading is more than merely understanding each word and sentence, it requires the reader to make connections between each individual piece of the text. While this may come naturally to us English majors, for students who are struggling it is much more difficult to make those connections.

Teaching Social Justice in Theory and Practice, by Caitrin Blake

This article opens with the line, "Historically, classrooms have been the stage for social change, providing a venue to promote and accelerate new ideas." Classrooms are not merely a place for education, rather they are a place for empowerment and development. Caitrin Blake defines social justice as "hope to build a society in which individuals have equal access to resources and receive equitable treatment regardless of their race, gender, religion, sexuality, income level or disability." The way to do this in the classroom, she adds, is to foster conversation around these topics. The thing that stood out most to me about enabling this conversation and making it effective was changing the classroom dynamic to ensure that students view one another as "co-learners" rather than as adversaries when discussing these issues. This allows students to not be afraid of disagreeing with one another as well as not viewing each other negatively when they do disagree. The article also encourages teachers to explore classroom ideas from diversified viewpoints. Rather than viewing the Civil War from a exclusively white or black perspectives, one should include every perspective they can. This allows for students to have a better understanding of people who come from different backgrounds than they do and opens their perspective. Turning the classroom into a community of discussion provides for a way for the students to feel safe when talking about their ideas and viewpoints, which is necessary for them to understand each other and for their ideologies to evolve and expand.

Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s "Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom"

The part of this article that I found to be the most interesting was the section on teaching hip-hop music and culture in the classroom. In urban environments, things like hip-hop and rap have a tendency to be very popular. In the same places, education often suffers. It was phenomenal to read in this article about how they combined hip-hop with the English classroom in order to help students understand the material they were working with. Hip-Hop and rap are very frequently underappreciated, being considered by many to be of lower culture and not of any literary value. However, in reality they are of the same high culture as the more archaic literature that is found in a standard English classroom. Elevating something like rap or hip-hop which students enjoy and connect with and using it as a tool for them to work with in order to grasp the same material makes it much easier for them to complete the tasks and much more interested in actually doing the work in the first place. I would be ecstatic to adapt a lesson like this into my own classroom in the future.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Chapter 2

This article really struck me when it talked about how teachers talk too much. For several years now I have begun to pay attention to the different ways in which teachers teach. In my own experience as a student, I have found that teachers who really heavily upon lecture and directing all of the instruction themselves end up falling short in helping me to retain the information which they are trying to convey. I find myself getting drowsy at their lengthy speeches, and my mind has a tendency to wander. However, when teachers ask of the students to participate more in the lecture and transform the lesson more into a discussion, then I find that I really flourish. Discussion in the classroom where students lead a lot of the lesson themselves seems to be, at least for myself, a much superior method of teaching. It provides the class with many differing interpretations and reactions to the same information and allows students to individually expand upon their own ideas, rather than everyone just sitting and falling asleep to someone standing and talking at the front of the room. The idea presented here that teachers talk too much really resonated with me because I have already felt for some time now that is the case, and that needs to change. I would be happy to read more on the effectiveness of discussion based classrooms and ways for the teacher to avoid lecturing.

Assessing and Evaluating Students' Learning

I found this article to be very useful in coming up with ideas for assessment when it comes to the English subject. In most other disciplines, assessment is done through written tests, either short answer or multiple choice. However, this type of assessment doesn't work quite as well with English in my opinion. Some of the alternatives the article talks about are evaluating journal/blog responses, and evaluating formal essay writing. The journal/blog responses are an interesting mode of assessment to me because they provide a constant method of assessment of student improvement as the course goes on rather than just at the end of a unit. The formal essay is useful because it gives students a chance to write more, which is always good, and it tests students' abilities in whatever area you are assessing at the same time. The article uses the example of asking students to infer a story's thematic meaning, and in their essays they have to think deeper than just writing a summary of the story. This forces the student to examine the text thoroughly and come up with their response based upon their own interpretation and then use the text to prove their interpretation. I also found the "reader based" descriptive responses to be an interesting concept. They provide the student with the reader's feelings about their writing, and using that they can infer what they need to work on or what they need to change in order to properly convey what they were trying to get across.

California State Universities Expository Reading and Writing Course Assignment Template

One thing that stood out to me in this text which I had not considered before was the concept of "prereading." I am sure that many people instinctively do this before engaging in a reading activity. However, I think it is also important to state this overtly and to be certain that students engage in it prior to reading a text to be discussed in the classroom. Prereading provides the students with a framework for what is going to be talked about within the text as well as class discussion, so they know what they need to be looking for and be prepared for. The many steps of prereading, such as exploring key concepts and understanding key vocabulary, ensure that every student will be on the same page and be able to understand the text as they read it.
I also found the angle they took on reading in this text. The way the text discusses examining the structure of the text in order to gather more information is very eye opening, and would be a useful tool for teaching students how an argument or discussion should be structured to be effective. It also points out the importance of marking down questions to clarify pieces of the text which you do not understand, which I think is a useful tool for sparking discussion once the class has gathered to speak about the text.