9/24/2023: "Teaching so it matters," Smith & Wilhelm

 I want to start this by drawing comparisons to other concepts I've encountered which resonate with this text. "Smash It!"- an activity in which students generate a problem which the class as a whole is going to work together to solve - resonates well with Smith & Wilhelm's example method with which they assessed based on their inquiry question. In our theoretical application of Smash It!, we also focused on standards-based essential questions to guide what our assessment methods would be, looking at the standards relevant to persuasive forms in our grade level (9th) and the previous grade level (8th), finding the differences in these standards, and forming essential questions based on what made this grade level's standard different from the previous's. The concept here is that we are focusing on something they have not previously encountered while also focusing on what our classes are supposed to focus on. The facets of understanding are pretty clearly a related idea to language levels.

Now, I wanna' handle application a bit. There's a lot of utility here, which is always nice. You answer why you want to implement the unit, you turn that answer into a question, you provide the forum to answer that question, and you work backwards. This is something I've already implemented within previous lesson-planning, and I think the standards-based approach to question-raising is super compelling as a new teacher, especially as one who has maybe 1 text she's excited to use in the classroom. 

I really like the concept of placing the impetus of the inquiry question within the community, but that feels sort of odd to do as the traditional seat of authority in a classroom? Especially seeing as I'm white and with my own feelings of alienation from the community, I don't feel as though I really should be in a position of telling students what they should care about within the community. I think this is my own baggage, though. I still certainly could do this. For example, I could take the current state of policing in Minneapolis and turn it into a question of "how do you tell if accountability has been taken" and then could pair it with something like The Hate U Give, or even To Kill a Mockingbird. Something like that.

I don't exactly love how the chart of final products is. Not because I really disagree with how it works, but because you could apply universal design to it and make it better. For the survival example, the assignment of "make a PSA" is vague enough to include a lot of things that are separate categories. This is a nitpick. I kind of just don't get why it's here.

As someone who doesn't have many texts she's excited to teach within the classroom (at least, as far as literature goes), I'm going to use a text that is weird and different. Here's an article about anti-base protests in Okinawa and feminism. It's not really related to "Teaching so it matters," but I think that's alright because it's definitely a text that has a place as a supplementary text within many inquiry topics: war, the environment, gender, all that. https://lux-magazine.com/article/antiwar-feminists-okinawa-base/ 

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