David Kerwin
AED 669, Spring ’10
Dr. Masselink
Field Analysis
The classroom I am observing this semester is Mrs. Colleen Kiah’s English class at Liverpool Alternative High School, also known as The Career Academy. Mrs. Kiah (she prefers to be called just “Kiah”) teaches three ninth grade classes and one twelfth grade class. The students who attend this school come from different school districts: North Syracuse, Liverpool, Baldwinsville, Fayetteville-Manlius, and Westhill. Students are recommended to this program by their home school guidance counselors and administrators. Generally, though each case is different, students are recommended to The Career Academy due to failure to thrive in their other school’s environment. This could be for a variety of reasons: excessive absences, issues with bullies, a need for a smaller/more personal environment, and so on. Though sometimes the students have a background of serious behavior issues, the school is not for students for whom that is the sole issue. While this school is not a special education program, the population of this school is approximately 48% identified, which means they have either an IEP or a 504 in place.
I go in twice a week to observe Kiah’s class. My visits tend to happen on Monday’s, Thursday’s, and/or Friday’s. This school schedules it’s classes in four blocks that last the entire day. I focus my observations on the first two blocks that happen in the morning (two ninth grade classes), although some of my observations have been from afternoon blocks as well. It may be important to note that there are several students in each class who have taken this class two or three times already and are much older than the other students.
Kiah’s ninth grade class spent a major portion of this time period reading and studying the book Maus, a graphic novel writtenby Artie Speigleman, and have recently moved on from this book to a unit on Roman Influence. Her twelfth grade class read Fences, a play by August Wilson. Class sizes are small in this school, and none of Kiah’s classes exceed 15 students.
1a) What specific language outcomes or objectives was the teacher working towards? What reason(s)/rationale were students given for engaging in the activities at hand? Be specific.
- Over the course of my observations with the ninth grade classes, I don’t notice a lot of language objectives/outcomes being worked towards. I don’t see any lessons on how they are supposed to use language through their reading or writing. Kiah mentions that the students will be looking into different aspects of the graphic novel, but she doesn’t give language objectives for the students. Kiah tells the students what they will be looking at during the lesson, but none of them seem to involve the study of language. During the days that the students were to complete vocabulary worksheets, there was no mention of why students were doing this or what Kiah’s motivation was for selecting the words on the page. Students simply define the vocabulary words with a partner and also indicate the part of speech the word is. One thing that Kiah does is well is contextualize the reading for the students. To motivate them for the reading they must do, Kiah tries to make the novel as personal as possible for the students by having them imagine what it must have been like to go through something as horrible as the Holocaust (what the novel is about). Kiah makes it clear that understanding this novel will give them a better perspective on people who went through the Holocaust and tells them that it should motivate them to see things from different perspectives in their own lives. Kiah also mentions on a regular basis that their grades are important to their “getting out” of this grade, as well as high school, and into real life, which is part of the rationale for engaging in and completing the activities.
1b) Were the objectives and rationale substantial, relevant to all students, of intrinsic worth? Why or why not? If no adequate objectives were stated or implied, identify two or three that could have been identified.
- Objectives and rationale for the lessons learned in Maus have some intrinsic value for the students. However, the objectives are rarely language related. I haven’t seen any grammar lessons the entire time I have been here and vocabulary skills lessons are rare. There are overarching objectives such as “seeing things from someone else’s perspective,” but this doesn’t utilize language. She could have pointed out that understanding someone’s particular dialect or level of English is an important part of understanding someone else’s perspective. There have been some other opportunities to introduce to the students some meaningful language objectives that Kiah is missing. This school that she teaches at prides itself on preparing students for the real world (I have the feeling that not a lot of the students are expected by themselves or their teachers to go onto college), yet the importance on language building and the impact it can have on student’s lives isn’t being emphasized. There is a class that students take called “Life Skills” but there is no greater life skill than having power over language. In the essay Some Thoughts on Teaching English, Robert Pattison states, “all citizens should have access to the language of power. As presently taught, English alienates the already disadvantaged from the chief vehicle of self-knowledge and social order—language” (36). Language isn’t exactly viewed this way, based on what I’ve seen in the limited time I’ve had in this classroom. An objective that should be given to students here would be that learning how to use and manipulate language gives you power. The language used in Maus by the Nazi’s gave them power over other groups of people. The power to speak, read, write, and listen in more sophisticated ways that get you jobs, and enables you to change the way people think. An objective of her lessons should be to get students to be what Larry Andrews calls “reflective users” of their language (6), in which they reflect over language and its uses. Students do this through a wide variety of language explorations and writing exercises in order to develop metalinguistically—vocabulary explorations, sentence combining, and a wide range of meaningful grammar lessons should be a daily ritual in this class.
2a) What instructional formats did the teacher use? (verbal, visual, kinesthetic modes; inductive vs. deductive teaching; critical questioning; impromptu mini-lesson; large group, collaborative, individual instruction, etc.) How much preparation/critical thinking was required on the part of the teacher? How much and what kind of preparation, critical thinking, participation, discovery, and/or reflection were required of the students (discuss at least three from this list)?
- Kiah teaches using verbal and visual formats. She is either taking students through a particular worksheet (some samples can be found in the Appendix) while speaking to the class about the elements of the lesson or she is teaching while using her projector and smartboard tools. Kiah teaches most of the time with the class as a whole (which can be anywhere between 8-15 students). With the project that the students have been working on in the computer lab (movie posters of the book they read), the students work individually. During these times, students are often on sites that are unrelated to the projects they are working on. There is no critical questioning, inductive/deductive teaching, impromptu mini-lessons, or collaborative work with language lessons from what I have seen. Kiah created mini-lesson worksheets on vocabulary that require her to create sentences that would reveal the meaning of each individual word (see Appendix). I get the sense that she goes into lessons thinking about what these students will get and what they won’t get. This is a problem with teachers sometimes—they assume too much. How does she know the students will not get how to go deep into language lessons if she does not try them with the students repetitively? Why does she not make it a part of her daily routine with the students and replace it with the minutes wasted chatting with the class (which tends to happen every day).
Students often come unprepared for class. They do not have paper or pens sometimes in order to participate with the class. Students come in as clean slates, ready for knowledge to be thrown at them. Students are not always motivated to participate either. Students are from time to time caught listening to their iPods and text messaging while Kiah tries to teach. Reflection is never a part of the daily routine. With the literature lessons or the few vocabulary lessons I have seen, reflecting on what learn in class hasn’t happened yet. The vocabulary is defined (those who have decided to actually do the work) and it is filled into the sentences, and then it is turned in for a grade. In this way, words are not learned. The words have little intrinsic meaning to the students. They are contextually related, which is a good thing. All of the vocabulary is pulled from the texts they are examining.
2b) What impact did the lesson have students’ language development? What effects did the teacher’s instructional format(s) have on students’ learning in general? What alternate learning formats might have allowed for more preparation, critical thinking, participation, discovery, and/or reflection on the part of the student?
- What limited language study that goes on in this class is not impacting students’ language development very much. Students know that they need to write well and use good grammar in their assignments, but that first requires Kiah to instruct more thoroughly on language. Kiah’s instructional formats don’t keep the students engaged in what they’re learning. It’s a daily struggle to keep them more interested in their study guides and projects than what they’re playing on their iPods and phones. Kiah complains that some of her students actually make some of the grammar mistakes in speech and writing that characters in Fences do. Research has shown that “systematic practice in combining and expanding sentences can increase students’ repertoire of syntactic structures and can also improve the quality of their sentences, when stylistic effects are discussed as well” (Slate Starter Sheet #3). The way to improve these skills would be through studying of these syntactic structures day in and day out and have students apply them in an authentic way. The students should use their new syntactic skills in a writing piece that examines a current event through a critical lens, and not to make a movie poster that requires little writing. Students would be able to apply those critical skills to their everyday lives.
3a) What opportunities (scaffolded exercises, journal entries, drafts, etc.) were the students given to apply and/or practice and reflect upon their new knowledge before the final assessment? Be sure to include copies of any worksheets or assignments.
- The main focus during their Maus unit is reading comprehension. A majority of some classes are spent recapping what happened in the chapters the students read since the previous class. She assesses this by having the students fill out study guides that ask students what happened in the book. There are some questions that go deeper than content knowledge. However, none of these questions incorporate a study of language--only the study of literature. There is a small section on vocabulary that the students need to fill out. Now, this does ask students to look at difficult words from the book, but it asks them first to define the word (which requires students to get out a dictionary) and then they must fill in sentences with the appropriate word from a word bank. This is turned in for a grade. Other than this, the teacher does not make it clear to the students what is happening with the language used in the book. I had the opportunity to teach a lesson on vocabulary that was much different than her lessons. Students practiced a number of different approaches to learning words and I feel they responded pretty well to them. They were to use these words in a recommendation letter based using their new words later on (Kiah wanted to wait on the writing assignment until they have practiced the elements of crafting a recommendation letter). A result of this vocabulary exploration is included in the Appendix.
The students have a culminating project in which they construct movie posters advertising for an imaginary movie version of the book. The rubric makes it clear that students must use words that draw the viewer in. This requires that the students chose their words carefully, but it doesn’t explore language beyond that. Students in the twelfth grade class receive a similar study guide packet with identical vocabulary worksheets (with the exception of drawing from a different text). The packet does come back to these words repetitively using slightly different approaches and requires the students to write sentences using them. In Fences, there is a lot of southern dialect that the students have trouble reading. Kiah does not give any instruction on the intricacies of this dialect or implications of composing a play in this way (See Appendix for a sample). Both classes are assessed using an online vocabulary test. The students sit at the computers and pull words from a word bank and plug them into the correct definition. They sit right next to each other and are barely separated by an arms length, making it easy to steal a glance at their neighbor’s computer screen.
3b) Were the opportunities for application of and reflection on new knowledge effective or ineffective? Why? How could these opportunities have been improved? If students were not given meaningful opportunities for practicing or reflection, what kinds of opportunities could have been provided?
- The opportunities for application and reflection upon new knowledge of language do not seem very effective, considering a) there are not a lot of language lessons being taught, much less being applied and reflected upon, and b) the only way students are able to apply their new knowledge has been through completing a worksheet or completing a vocabulary test. Applying new vocabulary in the form of an online quiz is not an authentic way for students to try on their new language. Pattison says that “formal English is a second language for students…it is a radically different level of language” (35). The students in Kiah’s class should be working this language into authentic writing assignments that practice the new words they come across as opposed making to movie posters that do not incorporate any new language acquisitions.
Students in her senior English class are missing some prime opportunities to study the intricacies of dialect through the study of Fences. Nowhere in the lessons that I am observing have I seen Kiah go into the comparisons between the way the characters are talking and the way the students talk. No clear distinction is made between what a dialect is and what Standard American English is. James Williams, in chapter five of The Teacher’s Grammar Book, defines a dialect this way: “When the variation occurs within a given language, we call the different versions of the same language dialects” (241). A lesson on how, why, and in what ways the English language varies would be an excellent addition to this unit on Fences. There are also implications for students’ social and professional mobility based on what type of dialect they speak. In the book Why Good English is Good for You, right before the essay by Pattison (Some Thoughts on Teaching English), there are some excellent examples of writing assignments that allow students to apply and reflect on language issues concerning dialect. For example:
“Simon says that ‘you are going to be judged, whether you like it or not, by the correctness of your English as much as by the correctness of your thinking.’ Write an essay about an occasion when you judged people on the basis of their English—or an occasion when you were judged on that basis. Describe how their language prejudiced you for or against them” (32).
Students could write about the language in Fences and how the dialect in it is a source of prejudice from others. They could also reflect on the way that they as students speak and how others view them because of it.
Kiah says that these students are not used to in-depth study of language, that “the way they learn language is through ‘whole language-learning.’” I’ll paraphrase what she meant by this based on how she explained it. Kiah is telling me that the students have been used to merely being immersed in language through reading, and teachers have expected the language to come unconsciously. Are students at this school not being exposed to in-depth language lessons because they are hoping that language just seeps into them unconsciously? Studies show that a majority of what we learn about language does happen unconsciously, this is true. But Alice M. Roy points out: “while we could learn everything in language unconsciously, given enough time and interaction with native speakers, we can also learn some things consciously with the guidance of a teacher in the role of a facilitator.” Students can learn complicated as well as uncomplicated elements of language when they are exposed to them enough and able to apply them enough: integration, repetition, and application (class notes).