Hailey's English Adventures

Even though Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide was published in 2009, I feel the book is still relevant in 2017 classrooms because “teaching to the test” has remained a prevalent notion in schools.  One of my favorite parts of the book was about “Establish a book flood zone” (52-53) and the inclusion of Appendix A: 101 Books My Reluctant Readers Love to Read (119-124); he mentions he has over 2,000 books in his classroom because he believes in bringing the library to his students (53).  In high school, my AP Language Arts teacher had the same line of thinking and had her own Classroom Library.  Students could check out books from her library to encourage reluctant readers to find books that they might find interesting.  I plan on having my own classroom library as well; I’ve started an Amazon Wishlist for a classroom library, so I liked reading through which books Gallagher’s reluctant readers enjoyed because I want to add them to my list to create a diverse library of...

 A couple people asked for me to post this so they can easily find it.  This graphic is a great source that I'm using with my ninth grad students to be able to understand and determine if a website is credible or not.

I found Tovani’s book to be very information AND applicable for the classroom.  In my practicum, I have a couple of students who are reluctant readers, and my mentor and I are working on different strategies that might help when working on reading with these students.  I think Tovani gives a lot of different tips and tools to use, and I like that because it gives teachers options; there isn’t a one size fits all approach to helping reluctant readers.  Even in my class, the reluctant readers are different from each other because student A doesn’t like to read period, student B didn’t get a lot of reading instruction in their old district, and student C doesn’t find the chosen literature to be worth reading.  Therefore, these three students are either resistive readers and word callers.  “Resistive readers can read but chose not to.  Word callers can decode the words but don’t understand or remember what they’ve read” (14).  And since these students are...

For this week’s blog entry about social justice, we were given the opportunity to consider what social justice is and why it’s important to have in classrooms.  I selected an article from Edutopia titled: “Creating Classrooms for Social Justice” (link to the article below).              I really liked this article because the author defined what social justice looks like in a classroom and to a teacher, and she also gave a couple tools and examples for teachers to create a classroom where social justice is established.  According to the article, “Social justice is recognizing and acting upon the power that we have for making positive change.”  In this case, social justice would be teachers using their power to recognize that all students deserve a chance to be in a classroom that values them and creates a positive environment.  The reason social justice in a classroom is important is that it provides st...

This article had a lot of good information and I think it pairs well with our other reading from Freire.  The authors’ point with the article and research was, through incorporating student interests and knowledge into a curriculum, student motivation and, in turn, student engagement is more likely to increase.  Also, if students are interested, motivated, and engaged, their academic and career success will be strengthened.  They went into depth about different units they did with their classes over the course of the year; I liked how they were diligent about being aware of student interests and backgrounds in their units.  For example, my favorite was: “The unit opened with a collective viewing of A Time to Kill (Schumacher, 1996) and ended with a classroom court trial to decide the fate of Bigger Thomas.  It is important to state up front that we watched film not merely as entertainment but as an intellectual activity” (18-19).  I liked this activity be...

This article was a very difficult read and I had a hard time understand the points being made because of the language Paulo Freire used; however, regardless of the language difficulty, Freire makes some very good points about how students should be viewed.  He talks about the “banking concept,” which, as far as I’m understanding his description, means students come into the classroom with little to no knowledge and the teacher is the expert expected to fill students’ “piggy band” with everything and doesn’t consider students’ presence in the world.  Freire points out that the banking method is a traditional approach to pedagogy and has an element of oppression because students aren’t considered creators of knowledge, but rather spectators.  He says: “Oppression --overwhelming control -- is necrophilic; it is nourished by love of death, not life. The banking concept of education, which serves the interests of oppression, is also necrophilic. Based on a mechanistic, static...

This article has been my favorite read so far!  I loved how detailed it was about many different types of assessment and about how each assessment is designed to assess students.  One of the biggest things I took away from the reading was that the way you wish to assess your students is influenced by your classroom philosophy.  In my practicum, Central Valley High School is 80% assessment so teachers believe in using as many different types of assessments, which I also believe.  This helps keep students engaged and try to avoid them getting bored or discouraged from taking a lot of objective tests.  Assessments can be anything from a short in-class writing assignment where students are graded on their ability to correctly writing a “chunk” paragraph (topic sentence, lead-in, quote and citation, and link/transition) to 10 multiple-choice questions to unit tests to unit essays.  Therefore, we have a variety of different assessments we use to determine what o...

Okay, let’s talk about the edTPA and lesson plans!  While writing out all my lessons plans in TPA format has been very tedious, in my opinion, I understand the importance of the lesson plan format.  One of the purposes of the TPA is to help us learn how to internalize all the information we fill out on the form; it makes us think about the lesson, the needs of the students, is what we are teaching backed by research, how to make past and future connections, how parents and the community are connected to what’s being taught in the classroom, etc.  This internalization process takes time and practices which is why we, as teacher candidates, fill out so many TPA lesson plans.  I don’t necessarily like doing the lesson plans because finding research that backs the lessons and remembering what all needs to be in Academic Language can be time-consuming.  However, like I pointed out above, the information the TPA lesson plans causes us to think about as a teacher is v...