The OMGs about ZPDs

I’ve noticed in my student teaching that there’s a fine line between a person’s ZPD and giving them work that is to difficult, even when scaffolded, that can lead to severe frustration and even shutdown. On the other side though, there’s giving them work that is way too simple and can lead a student to feeling bored or even insulted.

I believe that the expectations we have about our students and their abilities creates in our minds as educators what we think is their ZPD. For example, I think that I have really high expectations for the work my students are capable of. I scaffold and structure my lessons to reflect that. I ask a lot of my students but nothing I don’t think they’re capable of. I believe though that many teachers do not have as high of expectations and when they use lessons that show these low expectations and they scaffold things that are unnecessary the students lash out. When we do those dreaded powerpoints that go over terms and ideas the students already know, they become disinterested and zone out because they already know what we are insisting that they write down in their interactive notebooks. It’s the self fulfililng prophecy of a teacher having low expectations for their students so the students don’t push themselves. It’s a huge challenge in diverse classes, such as ours, to keep in mind the varying ZPDs in the room. At my school we have one of the highest ELL population in AISD. Many are new to the country, some are even new to the alphabet. How do we go about balancing their needs and what they can handle in terms of our lessons with those who are native English speakers and who have the background knowledge in ELA? In one classroom we can have students who are completely overwhelmed and frustrated with the complexity of the lesson sitting right next to bored students who swear they’ve had the same lesson on literary terms every year.

While I don’t have the answer to this problem, I do know that we have to become well versed in juggling. We have to juggle our students ZPDs and having several different activities focused on the same topic that is appropriate for all students in the room making sure they are engaged and able to complete the task within their ZPD. That is really difficult with one teacher in the room! Having an inclusion teacher or a support teacher working with ELLs is very helpful but they aren’t always there. And even then it’s difficult when they are. It’s a constant struggle we’ll have to be prepared for. I’ve had a lot of experience with having to think on my feet when I’ve taught before. It felt like something would always go wrong in Thailand and I had to have at least three backup plans. Yes, three. My ideal is to give individual attention to every student in my class. I make sure I walk around to the different tables and ask if there are any questions or anything I can help with. This seems so simple but I feel like I don’t always see this at my school. I also want to become more conscious about challenging those students who are bored and don’t need extra help, the students who finish the task in record time. I find myself focusing on helping only the struggling students but not pushing the kids who can do assignments with their eyes closed. Making sure they are also challenged is just as important. I need to make sure there are backup activities that initiate critical thinking and inquiry and isn’t just busy work to keep them from goofing off.

Freire and the concept of banking knowledge

“The more they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them.” (Freire, 73).

This quote hit me like a slap in the face. I’ve seen this passivity in action at my school. Where the students accept the way things are because they’ve been lead to believe that they couldn’t possibly know what’s best for themselves. The teachers, as authority figures, know what the students need to know and they deliver that information via PowerPoint and worksheets. When students question why they are learning concepts and terms they already know we assure them of their importance and we continue with the PowerPoint as planned. The students then passively continue filling in the right hand side of their interactive notebooks. I feel like the banking concept I witness at my school is related to my blog post about Choice Words. I mentioned that when I would ask my students a question about their metacognition, why they chose the answer they did, etc, they would automatically think they were wrong and doubt their thought process and choice. Some of them see me as the all-knowing teacher, which is flattering for my ego, but this takes away from their control over their own education. They passively watch me hand out worksheets and go over notes, that I am “an expert” in and they don’t start a conversation with questions or wondering about the validity of things such as the 26 lines for the STAAR test or why we never read novels in class. We don’t do these things because people in the higher levels of education don’t think they’re capable.  

The more we tell them “things are the way they are because we are the teachers and we say so” the less agency they take over their own educations and the less they seem to value what we do in class. I am continuously working towards a pedagogy that is far removed from the banking concept but at times, because of the environment at my school it is easy to fall into. With my poetry unit I am encouraging group discussions and a lot of creation of original poetry.  I always humble myself as the teacher and push them to involve themselves in the discussions and share their knowledge and experiences to create a different environment in my class. It’s hard at times, because they don’t seem to be used to this approach to school and it can be awkward but I feel like it’s a step forward.

All work and no play...

John Dewey’s tome How We Think was at times a tough read. It’s hard to stay focused on a text like this while working 50ish hours a week, lesson planning, grading and trying to achieve some sort of semblance of a social life. That being said, I think it offers truly valuable insight into how humans think. It addresses thinking through psychological as well as philosophical lenses and it resonates with me in how I approach my classroom.

One section that really piqued my interest was the section that differentiates work and play for children. Dewey states that “In play activity, it is said, the interest is in the activity for its own sake; in work, it is in the product or result in which the activity terminates. Hence the former is purely free, while the latter is tied down by the end to be achieved.”  I’ve been confronted this past week with how “boring” or how “fun” our lessons have been in our junior ELA III class.

I’ve shared that I have been less than thrilled with our drill-like unconnected lessons regarding narrative and expository writing sprinkled with powerpoints and handouts. It’s hard to be enthusiastic about a lesson I don’t understand the purpose of and then I have to convey that faux enthusiasm to the students. My students fail to see the purpose of the end result of our ELA lessons. They don’t see a big picture in regards as to how these lessons help them succeed in life or even just to the extent of anything beyond the STAAR test. It’s no wonder that they spend half of the class in  passive lethargy.

When I walked into my classroom on Tuesday my CT said that she wasn’t ready to give our juniors another essay to write because we have yet to finish grading the last one. We quickly put our heads together and thought of an interactive activity involving reading four expository articles and looking at their techniques to see what makes a strong or weak article and what techniques they could put to use in their own expository essays. They worked in groups taking note of the positives and negatives in each essay and then they got up and went to a poster that corresponded with the article they read and wrote their notes. They then switched to the next article. After they finished all four we came back together and discussed the positives and negatives of each article. It was the most awake and involved I’ve seen this class all semester. I asked them what they liked about this activity and one of them responded “It was actually fun, we got to work together and do something interesting for once.” Ouch. I’m happy that they found it interesting and that they had something to take away from it but it is a rough reminder of what they think about the other work we’ve done in the class.

Then again, that statement was from my student I had mentioned last week that spends most of the class with her head down and talking back to me. The way she said it made it seem like we were there to entertain her. I think there is a balance between work and play and is attainable and a lot of it has to do with cultural relativity.

Cultural relativity has really lacked in this class thus far. We’ve been reading short stories and articles that deal with children for about a month now. We read a story about children who are left unattended and a horrible accident happens to them and it was paired with an expository article about children who are laborers. We were comparing narrative and expository but there wasn’t any front loading and it felt really random. Then about two weeks later, we did the same activity again with two similar articles. The students kept asking “Why are we reading so much about children??” There was no feeling of cohesion or a theme throughout these readings. It felt like we were just putting articles in front of them and saying here, “read this and fill out this chart.” Sure, the short stories were about Latino children but there was no connection the students felt towards these stories. It was just another thing they had to do go get by to get the daily points for the day.

I guess my point is that if we use culturally relevant materials and connect them to a purpose the students can identify with more intrinsically than points or the STAAR we can more easily mingle play, (by which I mean entertainment/engagement) and work. The activity we did on Tuesday allowed them to work together, read articles they could find at least somewhat interesting (the subjects were love, the science behind basketball, the music industry, and people who have accents) and see their work presented in front of the class. We then tied the activity to techniques they could use in their writing. The students need to understand what the end result of our lessons should be but enjoy the process along the way to feel more agency in their education.

Lean on me

Somebody to lean on

A frustration that seems to be permeating at my school is a lack of community and like minds amongst the teachers. I find that the teachers I work with feel overwhelmed with a lot of the things we have to implement, like this program called Teengagement and Scholastic Reading Counts. They haven’t received training on how to implement these programs but they are expected to put all of these things in place.

The teacher next door to me is a new arrival to Texas and AISD. She taught in another state for years and she’s having a difficult time adjusting to how things are done. When we talked the other day I mentioned the Heart of Texas Writing Project. I told her it would probably help her keep her purpose in mind and it would be good to connect with other teachers who share her views on writing in the classroom. I was talking about The Dreamkeepers with her and how one of the teacher’s experiences at a 7-week conference renewed her enthusiasm for teaching. It is ironic that I told her about the book because she actually studied under Ladson-Billings.

The teacher I’m referring to in The Dreamkeepers said that the conference was “kind of like a recognition that the way I thought about teaching was all right. It was the intellectual activity, you know, the thinking.”

I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot this week. It is so valuable to make sure we are part of a community that supports our philosophies and helps us put them to practice in the classroom. If this community isn’t available at your particular school it is a necessity to find it elsewhere. It’s easy to sucumb to peer pressure or doubt yourself because of what you see others around you doing even if you know it’s not best practice. I’ve been having a bit of a hard time with the things I’ve been required to teach this semester so I’m trying my best to make sure I’m keeping my ideologies in mind and trying to implement them when possible.

This Wednesday I’m going to start a poetry unit that’ll last about 2-3 weeks. My CT thinks I should start with the beloved PowerPoint, which would be an introduction to the ideas and terms we’re going to focus on for entire unit. They are tone, imagery, simile hyperbole personification and symbolism. Do yall have any suggestions on how to spice this up? I pretty much don’t have much of a choice about having to specifically address each one but I want to make sure it’s not a snoozefest that the students can actually engage in and relate to rather than just writing notes.