Critical Reflection--Loewenthal

This past school year, I helped coach the 8th grade mock trial team. I worked with a group of three lawyers to guide 17 students through the competition. Many of the students were in one of my sections of ELA as well. Almost immediately upon meeting the students, the lawyers began to harp on the students about their grammar and language. They told the students that to succeed in life they need to speak “proper” English, to say “ask,” not “aks,” never “you was,” always “you were,” and a cross-examiner could never “be grillin’ me” because that is an improper expression. The students responded well to these critiques and criticisms at first, and because they so desperately wanted to win the competition, they would correct each other according to the lawyers’ standards. But, after the competition ended, so did the students’ complacent attitude about the lawyers’ tactics.

About one week after the final round (which, sadly, we failed to reach by one level), the lawyers returned to school to present the students with awards. After doing so, the lead lawyer began to talk to the students, as she had many times throughout the semester, about their futures, staying in school, and doing well in their studies. She said again, quite forcefully, “SPEAK PROPER ENGLISH AT ALL TIMES.” (I should mention that all of lawyers, as well as I, are white; none of the students are white.) One student said, “Isn’t that kind of umm racist?” It was the first sign of resistance by a student that the lawyers had witnessed on this topic.

I responded before the lawyer could speak. I did so because something about the competition having ended increased my resistance to the lawyers as well. I had endured their eradicationist approach to language instruction, an approach that dictates only one right way of speaking English (Redd, 2005). I tolerated their use of this method as an experiment: as a first year teacher I really was not sure how much of my students’ language I should change, or in what context I should try to change it, if at all, while still trying to make them better readers and writers. But hearing the lawyers speak to the students as they did at that final meeting shifted me even more toward believing in the approach with which I had experimented in my classroom: honoring students’ home, social, and other discourses, while showing them how these are similar and different from an academic discourse (Baker, 2002). I moved to the front of the classroom and explained to the students, and the lawyers, that slang and different grammatical structures are culturally important and have their place, but to remember to speak academic English in professional settings like a courtroom.

As I saw the students’ anger rise at the lawyer’s comment about language, I realized again how important it is to honor and appreciate the different discourses students bring to the classroom. These discourses are sources of identity for my students, and I think they will appreciate me more as a teacher if they see that I respect who they are. I think language is a much more sensitive issue than people, especially some educators with whom I have worked, realize, and if we want to get through to students to empower them with the skills they need for professional success, we have to earn their trust. I would not trust someone if I thought they were trying to mold me into someone I am not; I would, however, trust someone who I believed was imparting useful information that could help me reach my goals.

I think it helps to look at African American English, which after reading Redd (2005) I realized is the basis for much of my students’ dialogue, as a language unto itself. It has rules and structures the same way “standard” English does (Redd, 2005). When we teach Spanish speakers how to speak English, we translate from Spanish to English and show them parallel structures. A first step in teaching academic English is to do the same with African American English. When put into practice, this approach, the Bridge Approach, allows students to do first drafts in their own discourse and then translate them into standard written English (Redd, 2005).

I do think teachers should take some care in suggesting that students who speak African American English speak an entirely different language. After all, these students do see themselves as English speakers, and they are absolutely correct to see themselves as such. I think it is helpful for a teacher to approach lessons as though he/she is comparing two languages, as diagramming the linguistic differences in this manner could be most helpful to students’ learning. But, the issue here is how to be sensitive and effective at the same time, so it may be best to speak to the students about their use of different discourses rather than entirely different languages. Most importantly, I think the teacher needs to be sincere: engage students in conversation about why there is one accepted academic discourse, and the merits and demerits of there being only one such discourse. I would include in the debate whether it may be more worthwhile to fight the notion of there being such a narrow window of acceptance, or, would conforming and learning this discourse in reality give the students more power. I suggest such a debate because I think students should think critically about what they are learning and about why speaking “proper” English brings with it all of the issues it does.

References

Baker, J. (2002). Trilinguilism. In L. Delpit & J. K. Dowdy, eds. The
skin that we speak. NYC: The New Press.

Redd, T. M. & Webb, K. S. (2005). A teacher’s introduction to African American English: What a writing teacher should know. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Critical Reflection - Bower

Since beginning my career as a high school English teacher in the South Bronx, a number of educational issues have arisen that effect how I teach and as well what my students learn, but one issue in particular that has had the greatest effect on how and what I teach relates to the Regents Exam, New York State’s version of a standardized, statewide exit exam. This is a pressing issue that teachers face all across America, and an issue, that in my opinion, will continue to be hotly debated as long as statewide, high-stakes tests exist.

In my own experience thus far, I have found that my school administration does emphasize the importance of preparing students for the Regents Exam, but my administration does not overemphasize the test. The importance of this high-stakes exit exam is made clear, yet the pressure that I feel at certain times to “teach to the test” is self-induced. Having taught mostly seniors this past year, many of who were still trying to pass the Regents in June, I was made acutely aware of the necessity for students to pass the Regents in order to move on from high school. I had students with strong grade point averages that could have moved on to some form of higher education, yet they were in jeopardy of doing so because they had yet to pass an exit exam. It was students in these types of circumstances that made me feel that, one, standardized exit exams harm more than help students, and two, that I conversely needed to teach to the test in order to help these and other students advance in their education, and for that matter, life. I have seen students suffer from lack of success on the Regents exam, but not directly prosper from success on this exam. This is not to say that passing the Regents equates to graduation, but is an exam such as the Regents as a measure of students’ intelligence or rather a measure of their ability to take a certain type of test using specific test taking strategies?

The use of high-stakes assessments, such as the Regents Exam, are a product of the No Child Left Behind Act which exists in part to ensure that all students, including those with disabilities, have access to general education curriculum that meet certain standards (Salend, 2006). Some proponents of high-stakes testing argue the importance of these tests based on the idea that they document students’ academic achievement and identify general programmatic strengths and needs, and yet at the same time, opponents argue that the pressure to judge student learning and teacher effectiveness based on the results of standardized tests can result in educators teaching to the test at the expense of curriculum (Salend, 2006). The use of statewide standardized testing brings into question what it is that we, as teachers, are trying to accomplish in our classrooms; are we trying to teach concepts and ideas related to our subject matters that will help students prosper intellectually and personally, or are we providing students with test taking skill sets that will help them pass a specific standardized test?

The range in the debate of the merit of statewide, standardized high-stakes testing is vast, and I, as a teacher, can relate to both sides of the argument, but ultimately, I do not think that these types of tests are necessary, and in fact do more harm than good. To that point, research has shown that in states with difficult exit exams, students are 5.5 percent more likely to drop out than their counterparts in states with no exams (Glenn, 2006). This kind of evidence raises the question: What good is the use of an exam that increases dropout rates among high school students? It is my belief that as a teacher, that my curriculum should not be geared towards helping students passes a test, yet at the same time, I cannot avoid the fact in the state of New York, students must take and pass the Regents in order to graduate.

Beginning this fall, I will be responsible for teaching English to the entire 11th grade at my high school. As this is the school year when most students take the English Regents, I feel a tremendous duty to ensure that my students are as prepared as they can be in order to succeed on this high-stakes test. I am conflicted about the best way to approach my curriculum and day-to-day lesson planning. As a teacher more comfortable and inclined to teach for meaning, I fear that my approach to instruction for the impending year may not be the right fit. Having the responsibility of teaching the eleventh grade, I cannot avoid the Regents, or more subtly imbed it in my curriculum, and therefore I feel an obligation to be more overt and direct with my instruction related to the Regents. It has been argued, however, that students can benefit from instruction geared toward teaching for meaning, and McTighe et al. (2004) have contended that “teachers can raise test scores over the long haul by teaching the key ideas and processes contained in the content standards in rich and engaging ways; by collecting evidence of student understanding of that content through robust local assessments rather than one-shot standardized testing; and by using engaging and effective instructional strategies that help students explore core concepts through inquiry and problem solving” This is an encouraging argument, and one that I will take into mind as I begin instruction this fall because it allows for teaching more for meaning and less to the test. Yet, I do feel that at the same time I will also be compelled to teach more directly to the test, which in turn makes me wonder what this says about the effects of having standardized statewide testing. Are my students, as a result of having to pass a standardized exit exam, receiving a better, more fulfilling education?

It is my belief as an educator to help prepare my students for success after high school, and with that in mind, I reluctantly accept my duty to prepare my students for high-stakes testing. I have no control over whether or not my students will take the Regents, because they all will, but I do have control over how I will go about teaching and preparing my students for this exam, and my goal is to prepare my students for this test without compromising my curriculum or intellectual, emotional and personal development of my students.

References

Glenn, D. (2006). High school exit exams linked to higher dropout rates, researchers find.
Chronicle of Higher Education, 52(45), A14-A17.

McTighe, J., Seif, E., Wiggins, G. (2004). You can teach for meaning. Educational
Leadership, 11/2004, (26-30).

Salend, S. (2007). Creating Inclusive Classrooms (6th Edition). New York: Pearson.

Critical Reaction

When I began the teaching year, I had a provisional understanding of standardized tests and the role they play in our students’ lives. I knew the pressure placed on students, teachers, and administrators to achieve high test scores, and I knew that such pressure came in large part from No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Knowing this, I thought that the heavy stress placed on high-stakes, mandated testing would be something that I, with my desire to teach critical literacy, could work under. I believed that I could prepare my students for success on the English Regents exam as part of a rigorous curriculum focused on critical thinking, reading, and writing. I hoped that students would come to understand the exam scenario as the rehearsal of a series of maneuvers that bespeaks a complex, foundational critical literacy. I hoped, too, that the other demonstrations of knowledge the students undertook (portfolio presentations, for example) would be integrated with the Regents exam as part of a well-rounded assessment approach that reflected an equally well-rounded curriculum and learning experience.

My fumblings and failings as a first-year teacher aside, my thoughts, beliefs, and hopes for a successful critical literacy curriculum were thwarted by the realities of teaching to the tests. The tension between, on the one hand, high-stakes mandated testing and, on the other hand, more authentic performance-based demonstrations of knowledge is not merely one between differing but equally useful modes of assessment; rather, the tension is one between educational cultures the beliefs, values, and obligations of which are so different as to appear at war. Perhaps that’s a hyperbolic and reactionary diagnosis, but after a year of teaching in the South Bronx, I do believe that the educational culture promoted by NCLB and high-stakes testing is one at odds with the more generative, rigorous, and ethical educational culture developed by critical literacy.

So the hot-topic question for me becomes: How do we find a place for authentic critical thinking, reading, and writing in the educational culture created by the current iteration of NCLB, especially its promotion of and reliance on high-stakes mandated testing? Proponents of such testing argue that standardized tests are effective measures of essential student skills. Janet McClaskey (2001), who calls for a re-evaluation of strong negative responses to standardized testing, writes that tests "evaluate such skills as the student’s use of contextual analysis to determine a word’s definition, a real-life skill that is needed in any occupation. Since standardized tests evaluate skills instead of content, they offer an evaluation of students’ ability to think their way through a new situation, an important diagnostic tool for students as well as for colleges or employers” (McClaskey, 2001, p.90). This is indeed true, and McClaskey’s point regarding the need to equip students with college and career- relevant skills is well taken. In conversations with colleagues who support the exams, they also argue for standardized tests’ ability to measure student skills of, among other things, contextualizing and defining words and for the tests’ encouragement of a backwards-planned curriculum that emphasizes such skills. Personally, I think these skills are crucial components of the well-rounded skill set and content knowledge a graduating high-school senior should be able to demonstrate.

My concern is that the educational culture has evolved in a way that situates standardized testing as its constitutive element. At my school, where students only take English Regents exams and otherwise present content-specific portfolios, we spend so much time fighting to keep our Regents waivers that we are left with no time to develop the curriculum those waivers are meant to allow. Students can fail two terms’ worth of English and still graduate with a passing score on the Regents exam. Most damagingly, students understand the pressure they are under to pass the exam, and so they begin to see their education not as a transformative experience whereby they become more invested and active participants in their communities, but rather as a hoop-jumping exercise that gets them their “paper.”

Consequently, Julia Barrier-Ferreira (2008) contends that students start to see themselves as they are seen by teachers and administrators: as commodities. Carlo Ricci (2004) argues that standardized testing compromises a student’s ability to participate in democracy in the form of a critical engagement with its suppositions and actions. Consider the language of McClaskey’s (2001) defense of standardized testing: students learn skills necessary to their occupations and careers. Nowhere in the argument for standardized testing do we find a claim that students come away better equipped to critically interrogate their experiences, their place in the world, their position as historically and politically constructed beings.

Critical literacy supposes that language is where we come from and what we are and that the broadest categories used to frame human experience and relations (including the historical and the political) are linguistic categories first. To argue that we are linguistic beings is thus to presuppose that asking questions of discourse, of language, and of literacy is always already a consideration of how we are made up as individuals and communities and how we are located within specific power relations (Shor 1999). While standardized tests can measure a student’s strength in defining words and placing them in context or in mastering the moves of a compare/contrast literary analysis, or even in the ability to distill a written argument down to its essential claims, standardized tests fall far short in assessing how a student has learned to analyze a text or a system for its slippages, its contradictions, its ambiguities, and its position in relation to discourses of power. They do not assess how students reflect on what they are learning and why. Finally, standardized testing does nothing to promote the understanding that the aim of an education is to develop the curiosity and skills requisite to envisioning change and acting to achieve it.

References

Barrier-Ferreira, J (2008). “Producing commodities or educating children? Nurturing the
personal growth of students in the face of standardized testing.” Clearing House:
A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues, and Ideas, 81(3), 138-140.
McClaskey, J (2001). “Who’s afraid of the big, bad TAAS? Rethinking our response to
standardized testing.” The English Journal, 91(1), 88-96.
Ricci, C (2004). “The case against standardizes testing and the call for the revitalization of
democracy.” The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 26, 339-
361.
Shor, I (1999). “Introduction: What is critical literacy?” In I. Shor & C. Pari (Eds.),
Critical Literacy in Action (pp. 3-28). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Hot Topics in Education: Social Promotion by F.MacKinnon

Like many first year teachers I was shocked at the way the educational system operates here in New York City. While most of my friends and siblings thought I might be disturbed by funding issues, safety, discipline, workload, etc., I was not. Those were issues I expected to deal with as a teacher in the Bronx. What I had not thought about was what happens at the end of the year? I am a 7th grade English teacher at a phase out school in the South Bronx. “D” is my oldest student. She is nearly 17 years old, and still in my 7th grade glass. Throughout the year D gave me more grief than any of the other students. Sure, she is a behavior problem in my class, but that is not her only problem. I can count on one hand the amount of assignments she has completed for my class. She reads and writes at a fourth grade level. She would probably benefit greatly from smaller class sizes, but she is nowhere close to where she needs to be in order to pass the 7th grade. Her reading level, test scores, and lack of effort resulted in her failing my class all four quarters. In fact, she only passed two classes the entire year, physical education.
After a truly trying year with D I expected her to be the only 17 year old in 7th grade next year, but to my surprise on the last day of school her report card indicated that she had passed the 7th grade! What did D have to say about this?
“Yo, Miss Mack, I ain’t do nothin’ all year and I still pass 7th!”
Why did this happen? Because of social promotion, which is described as the process of allowing a student to move forward or be promoted to the next grade despite bad grades or test scores so that they can continue on with their peers (Thomas, 2000). As a result of social promotion D will move forward, even though she is unprepared for the tasks she will have in the 8th grade. She will have the same, possibly worse, behavior problems and a new teacher who will spend a whole year trying to adjust to these behavior issues, as all of her past teachers have done (Johnson et al, 89). She will most likely spend that year doing nothing once again, because the material will be so beyond her it will be hard for her to even attempt to catch up…and at the end of the year the cycle will repeat, and she will go to 9th grade with a 4th-5th grade reading level, and the knowledge that she doesn’t have to anything and she will still get by.
On the surface it seems quite silly to promote a student just because, but upon further research I wondered what other options we, as educators, have? If D were to be held back in 7th grade again, she would likely encounter the same problems she had this year. Her class size would remain the same, and she would not get enough personal attention. Her age and maturity level are already advanced beyond the students she was with this year, and with her attention seeking tendencies she would have the chance to impress a whole new group of younger, impressionable students.
So what is the answer? According to Thompson (335) “We need extraordinary prevention and intervention strategies to serve students and not bureaucracies of the existing educational system.” What that means is that the problem won’t be solved overnight. We need a complete redesign in the policies by which our schools are governed. Somewhere along the lines we’ve lost sight of our focus- the learner. We need to make education accessible for the learner so that we can do our job to teach them and they can do their job, which is to learn. What does that mean for right now though? Do we hold D back in hope that something miraculous happens within her that forces her to do better next year? Or do we promote her so that her self-esteem is saved, but damaged by the fact that she cannot read well enough to complete 8th grade tasks she is given? Ideally, D would have another option, an option where we stop looking at her as a lazy student with a bad attitude, and start trying to understand why this is happening so that we can do our job to teach her.

References
Johnson, J.A., Musial, D., Hall, G.E., & Gollnick, D.M. (2008). Foundations of American education: Perspectives on education in a changing world. Pearson Education Inc: Boston, MA.

The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 69, No. 4, The School Reform Movement and the Education of African American Youth: A Retrospective Update (Autumn, 2000), pp. 323-337

Slavin, R.E. (2004). Education research can and must address "what works" questions. Educational Researcher. Vol. 33, No. 1, 27-28 .

Post Critical Essay 1 by Wed July 16, 2008

SIGN IN Please.....

And then go to NEW POST to copy and paste your critical essay here in our blog.

Be sure to write and spellcheck your essay in WORD first.... then copy and paste it here


Thank you very much!

Dr KPK