Susan’s Literacy Blog

Reflecting and evaluating on the blog experience

I just finished reviewing my blog experience for the semester.  Several themes emerged.  At the beginning of the semester, I seemed to be stuck on feeling that I already knew most of what the readings had to say.  Although I felt this way, I liked feeling affirmed – in other words, I felt like the readings were supportive of my practice.  I realize that I was also feeling defensive about my own classroom – when I read about practices that I was not employing, I kept trying to think of reasons that the practices were not possible in my classroom or reasons that I didn’t believe that the practices were good ones.  However, one of the best things that has happened for me in this class is that I truly have come to realize the value of being a reflective practionioner.  Being reflective not only means thinking about what you believe and what you do as we have done in our blogs, but being a reflective practionioner also means that you take what you have reflected on and you ACT on your reflections.  While reflecting is good in and of itself, reflection that doesn’t bring about some change in the practionioner doesn’t fulfill its real function – and that is to make the reflector do things in a new and better way.   It’s kind of like assessment – assessment is good, but if we don’t use it to inform our instruction, what is the real value of doing the assessment in the first place?

I had never blogged before and I was surprised at how easily the words came to me once I started writing.  For me, the outlet of writing about what I had read was the primary benefit of blogging – not so much hearing what others had to say about what I had written or even reading and responding to other people’s blogs.  When I read an article that made me mad, I was able to vent.  When I read an article that got me inspired, I was able to go into my classroom and use the ideas I had read about.  Reading and then blogging reinforced the essence of what I read – in the same way that re-reading a story or responding to a story by drawing a picture does for the children in my classroom.  I am a person who learns by doing things – it takes me a while to internalize new concepts, but if I can take what I have read and do it, then my comprehension of what I’ve read is much greater.

I was not able to give as much time as I would have liked to reading other people’s blogs. I usually responded to the same few people because they seem to be on the same blogging schedule as me.  I also usually tried to read the blogs of the people in my PLT – it was a good way to get to know them better and feel connected.  Reading other people’s blog entries usually reinforced my own beliefs or thoughts, but every now and then I read one that made me look at things differently or at least see another perspective. I liked reading the entries of people who were not teachers to get their perspectives on what teaching seemed like to them.   I did like knowing that I was part of a community of bloggers who shared their experiences with me.

Blogging also made me feel more technologically savvy.  I liked knowing that blogging was something I could do.  It made me feel more connected to everyone and I do believe that I will miss it.

I love the way the articles, the book chapter and the video reinforced all the same practices. As a teacher, it is easy to fall into the trap of blaming families for what we perceive that they don’t do. It is good to hear the research on the reality of what most families want for their children, regardless of educational or socioeconomic background. Families want their children to be successful in life and in school. I believe that families are doing the best that they can even when it may not look like it to the teacher. I also believe that most of us are also doing the best we can to teach children as individuals with whatever experiences they bring into the classroom.

Some of the ideas that stuck out for me are:

1. the teacher is what makes the difference in literacy – in the case of making connections between the family and school, the teacher has to be the one to extend the invitation

2.literacy practices at home may be different from school practice, but that doesn’t mean the environment is “literacy impoverished”

3. it is in the best interests of children, families, and teachers to incorporate literacy experiences from the home environment into the school environment. I really like the idea of taking a field trip to the students’ neighborhood.

4. appreciate literacy practice in all its forms – cartoons, movies, bus schedules, cereal boxes and other environmental print

5. the idea of using the parents’ funds of knowledge to inform practice in the classroom

6. I appreciated that the person doing the workshop in the video acknowledged that making the effort to bring home literacy practice into the classroom seems like just another task for the teacher to do in a finite number of hours – but that she still felt that teachers should make the effort to make the connections.

A practice I have seen in a classroom at my school is having “Mystery Readers” come in. Usually these are parents, but they could be other family members (even a sibling) or a family friend who surprises the class at story time. The children love this and each family is given the opportunity to have a turn once a school year.

These articles, etc. remind me that what on the face may look to be the most difficult tasks may actually be the easiest in the long run. It seems like too much effort to reach out to families, too much work, too much time, too much of everything. But, wouldn’t it actually be easier, once you get the hang of making the connections, to have the help of families in teaching their children?

The chapter on English Language Learners was a great refresher on good literacy practice for all children. This is what we are usually doing on a good day in our classrooms. “Teachers becoming students of their students” is a great concept and practice. I like the idea of starting with the parents/families of ELLs – it’s important to build connections early and show your support. I also like the idea of looking for the similarities between the native language and English so that the child can build on what she already knows. I agree that it’s so important to show print in the native language around the classroom as a great way to help ELLs feel less stressed – as part of the whole package of creating a nonthreatening classroom.

The professor leading the seminar in the video posed several excellent questions that teachers should try and answer when teaching ELLs:

• how bilingual is the child?
• what are the literacy practices in the home?
• what are the cultural views towards literacy?
• what are the child’s literacy skills in the native language?

When the professor said that “literacy skills are only learned once”, I had an aha moment. If a child already understands 1 to 1 correspondence with words in her native language, she will be able to do that in a English. If she understands the difference between a word and a letter in print, then she will be able to transfer that skill to English.

The other concept that I really appreciated seeing in the video was support for the child’s native language and the role of the native languague in learning in general. The research I have seen supports the continued acquisition of literacy skills in the native language not only for the value to the child, family, and culture, but to the education of the child in English. Honoring and encouraging the home language and culture of ANY child is bound to make the child a more willing and competent learner. By giving the language of the ELL “status” through books, labelling around the room, etc., we enhance the learning of all of the children in the classroom. I am so glad to see this view supported – instead of seeing the English Language Learner as a deficit, the ELL can be viewed as a positive addition to everyone’s learning!

Yesterday, I pretty much finished writing the paper for my inquiry project. After reading the NAEYC/IRA position statement on developmentally appropriate practice in learniing to read and write, I decided to compare what that paper said with the standards found in the No Child Left Behind policy brief on literacy. I had still had questions when I finished my paper, but I was actually surprised that the two position seemed to be similar.

This morning I decided to read “Teacher Flexibility and Judgment: A Multidynamic Literacy Theory” from the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy December 2008 edition. This article made me question the conclusion I came to in my paper. Oh well….

Anyway, this article talked about how teachers find it difficult to “keep play with language and literature as a focus of their early literacy instruction as ’scientifically based’ reading programs, phonics, or scripted instruction take center stage.” The term “scientifically based” is a MAJOR part of the NCLB legislation. I guess I was using “research based” and scientifically based” interchangeably when they aren’t NECESSARILY so. This author suggests a paradigm in which the “scientifically based” stuff is combined with “sociocultural theories of language and literacy” to form something called multidynamic theory.

In the multidynamic theory of literacy, literacy is multifaceted, socially constructed and must be relevant in children’s lives. As a teacher, these are things I know to be true. This article leads me to believe that perhaps many of the curriculums endorsed by NCLB do NOT include these ideas. However, later in the article (p.300), the author says “We are, in many ways, all on the same page. It is a matter of interpretation and argument in terms of how we teach the foundations of early literacy success, including the roles of curriculum breath, pedagogy, and teacher decision-making outside of ’scientifically based’ reading programs.” I think that this is at the heart of many discussions teachers have about what is expected from the power that be and what teachers believe to be good practice. If how we teach literacy is a matter of interpretation, then it would be great if the decision-makers could be the classroom teachers instead of someone in an office somewhere.

I really enjoyed the running record tutorial – it brought back memories of when I used to do running records when I taught kindergarten. I thought that the author made some very good points about using running records and doing the miscue analysis. They should be ongoing assessments, they should be used to show patterns in an individual student’s reading, they should be use to PLAN FOR INSTRUCTION. Running records are not a means unto themselves, just to be put in a file. I also liked the way she talked about assessment as a 2-way conversation between teacher and student.

Like many people, I have used running records to get levels on individual children so that I know where to begin instruction and when to bump up the reading level of books, but I took the Speedy Course for learning Running Records when I student taught. Running records are not something that you are automatically good at doing  – you BECOME good at doing them after lots of practice with real live students! Even if you don’t do things exactly “right”, you can still get a lot of great information to inform your teaching with individual children.

I just have to write after the wonderful week of theater magic in my classroom of 4 year olds. I read a big book version of The Three Billy Goats Gruff with a group of 8 children on Tuesday. The children loved it and wanted to do a play of the story. We did an impromptu performance right then and there. At center time, these same children wanted to DO THE PLAY OVER AND OVER AGAIN! In my classroom, center time is free choice, and the children could have chosen whatever they liked, but they chose to do the play. Sometimes we had one troll under the bridge (we used a small table for the bridge) and the children had the idea that they could actually crawl over it while the troll knelt underneath), sometimes we had two trolls, two baby goats, one mom goat, and two dad goats, and other times we had a girl “dad goat” and a boy “mom goat”. Eventually, other kids came over to see what we were doing and they wanted to join in. The next day, lots of kids asked me if we could do the play again (even kids who hadn’t heard the story) and of course, we did it many, many times! For three days, this is all the children have wanted to do at center time! Not only do we all know the story very well by now, but the children are so excited to be in charge, to give their ideas for how to make things work logistically, and to take turns with the parts. I have boys in my class who normally only want to play with the legos and big blocks who were so engaged in this activity that they stayed in my center area for the whole center time!

Needless to say, I am excited about this. I hadn’t done reader’s theater in quite a while and I had forgotten how much fun it was. I have plans to introduce another story on Monday (I am, myself, getting a bit weary of this story since I have been the narrator/co-narrator EVERY TIME we’ve done the play for three days). I am hoping to have develop a repertoire of plays that we can draw from at center time and that the children can eventually do on their own……..

I really liked the article on read-a-louds by McGee & Schickedanz. It is easy for me to stick to the predictable texts (the Brown Bears, the Hungry Caterpillars, etc.) While I still think this are great books with value in helping children learn certain literacy skills, I am going to read a more sophisticated book tomorrow at school during my small group time and employ some of the ideas I read about in this article. I’m going to carefully pick a book, follow the components of the first read-a-loud and go from there.

As for the article on informational texts – I agree wholeheartedly with the author. I have had children who are not that interested in looking at fiction books, but who love looking at non-fiction books on topics they are interested in. This year, there is a boy in my class who loves monster trucks and I was able to find a book on monster trucks at the library for him. There are also lots of books for emergent readers that are informational and that are first readers. I like the way the author broke down the parts of using informational texts and that she emphasized using them for authentic purposes. Some of the same strategies that you use with a fiction book during a shared read-along are easily transfered for use with informational texts, especially when building vocabulary and modeling the reading strategy of figuring out “what makes sense.”

I  read the article on social contracts and found it interesting, but not surprising.  I agree with the author’s premise that children learn a “local literacy” rather than work from a “universal” set of literacy principles (p.94).  Of the nine social contracts identified in the study, the ones I found most interesting were the boundary contract, the text-ownership contract, and the texts-as social tools contract.  I was surprised that the author was surprised at activities she termed “anomalous child behavior”.  I worked  with two year olds for 12 years  in literacy-rich environments and this behavior doesn’t surprise me at all.
The boundary contract refers to whether or not the child sees the single page as the boundary of his/her writing surface.  In the article, children sometimes were unconcerned with whether or not their drawings or writing went across several pages or even onto the table.  In the text-ownership contract, the child is supposed to learn that the page of writing or drawing has value to him/her as an individual because it carries meaning and that the product of what he/she has written or drawn has value beyond the simple act of writing or drawing.  It seemed to me that it was important to the author that the children at Walker Preschool value the product of their work as much as the process.  In the same vein, the texts-as social tools contact encourages the writer/drawer to value the writing or drawing as a meaningful exchange between two people.  The example given was with the pretend mail-exchange.  In my own experiences with four and five year olds and the use of classroom mail boxes, there are always children who 1) “get” the purpose of the mail exchange, 2)those who only see value in receiving mail and who either don’t accept the idea that to get mail you have to write mail, and 3)those children who aren’t interested in the mail exchange at all and who aren’t interested in getting their own mail, in writing responses or in initiating correspondence, or even in saving the notes they do get.  In the four and five year old classes that I have taught for the past 6 years, we spend lots of time teaching about the texts-as social tool aspect of the mail boxes and even at ages 4 and 5, many children are either not interested or are not developmentally ready for this particular social contract.  Therefore, it doesn’t surprise me that 2 year olds don’t get this concept either.
I also question the appropriateness of teaching 2 year olds to place such high value on  a product, i.e., their own drawing or writing.  I believe that developmental appropriate practice requires that we take the focus OFF of products that children produce, even in the name of literacy, and focus on process.  I believe that classrooms can be literacy-rich and still teach the texts-as social contract and text-ownership contract without overemphasizing the value of taking home pieces of paper.  I believe that this is teaching our littlest children the value of self over the community before they are really ready to make decisions about when that is appropriate.
Overall, I liked this article and the message that literacy is a social contract of “shared cultural knowledge that individuals draw on to produce and use written  texts in culturally appropriate ways.”

I’ve just finished reading this article and feel like I understand what the author is trying to say.  Aukerman says that, instead of going along with Cummins’ assertion that there are two distinct sets of communication skills that children need to get along in the world (basic interpersonal communication skills (BICS) and cognitive academic language proficiency (CALP),  “…it is up to teachers to recognize that children’s existing frames of reference are the primary raw material for new learning, rather than some static predetermined academic language.”

How can language be taken out of the context in which it is used and still be meaningful?  And how can we, as educators, NOT recognize that different children bring different conceptual frameworks into the classroom?  I still remember as a child hearing a friend of my mother’s telling my mother that she was “going to give her a ring later”.  I thought that it was awfully nice of my mom’s friend to give her a gift of a ring – would it be a diamond or a ruby?  It was only later that I realized that she meant that she would give my mother a call on the phone.  Did that mean that I was unteachable or in a deficient situation?  No, I learned from the situation that a word could have two meanings and that I needed to keep that in mind in the future.  Children, whether they are English Language Learners or not, learn in this way all the time.  It’s part of life.

As teachers, do we look at individual children and say that they are unable to learn because they are not CALP proficient?  Or do we look at the strengths they do have and go from there?  For me, the answer is obvious.  As a professional, I know that best practice requires that I do my best to work with each child using the strengths rather than the deficits that he/she brings to my class.  Perhaps instead of relying heavily on assessments done in isolation such as the Woodcock-Munoz Language Survey to inform classroom instruction, teachers should use these tests as a small part of the ongoing process of figuring out how to reach a student.  In this article, Aukerman comments that Joaquin’s strengths in many areas went unnoticed by his teacher and instruction “was tailored to that perception” that he was not capable.  She goes on to say that ” The students struggled, not due to a lack of CALP, but because classroom tasks typically lacked “the essential element of relevance that characterized the situations in which students displayed their greatest competencies”.

I agree with Aukerman that the preferred model of looking at BICS and CALP is to “collapse” the distinction between the two.  “Pedagogically, there is no “prerequisite language” for success, no such things as “not enough CALP:… One must only start from where each particular child is, and work from that place with the child to help new academic material become sensible and relevant…”  That is what we need to do for ALL children – that is what we try everyday to do for children – why should it be different for children who are ELLS?

Wow, this article was depressing but real. The author is blunt and to the point in her assessment of the teaching techniques used the first classroom: “Such a narrow, limited view of reading may actually harm, not help, these learners.” As she goes on to cite the many deficits that economically disadvantaged children have as they enter the world of education, I really began to wonder how they ever do overcome these obstacles. How can a school replicate all the experiences that children DON’T have? In the section of the article titled “How to Chose the Achievement Gap”, she give a description of the type of classroom where experience, rather than drill and memorization are used to build the kind of experiences children need. Why then, aren’t all preschool and early elementary classrooms like this? The research shows that classroom B is the kind of classroom children need, but in many cases, teachers use more of the classroom A techniques (I am thinking back to Annette’s experience in a Reading First classroom.) Even the classroom of Mrs.B that we talked about last week had some of the elements of a Type A Classroom.

I believe that we as professionals, as teachers and educators and advocates for children and families have to get angry and mobilize to be heard. Why is it that educators who are in the classrooms on a daily basis are not the ones making the decisions about how literacy is taught? Why is the research pushed aside and neglected? NAEYC and IRA have position statements on literacy backed by research, so why are the policy-makers and decision-makers neglecting to do what is right for children? If teachers are the key ingredient to student success in the classroom, why aren’t teachers being listened to???? One of the reasons ,I believe, is that we live in a culture of the quick fix. The other reason is that teaching is STILL not seen as a worthy profession to be honored because in our culture, worth is equated with money, and money is power.

I guess this article got ME pretty mad!