Video: An Ordinary Moment in a Classroom - Thinking about Discourse

I love zooming in on what children speak about when engaged in conversation.

In this video, two fourth grade boys problem solve, sharing their enthusiasm. (Begins 24 second in.)

Creating Conversations Worth Having at School: Leading with the Heart

Community is Infinite (M.A Reilly, 2012)

I am engaged with primary grade teachers in a workshop when one says, "If I run over the scheduled time I will be written up. Teachers cannot deviate from the posted schedule." 

Another adds, "I was told by my principal that I had to time students when they read and that a running record without it being timed is wrong." 

A third chimes in: "I realized my students were struggling and instead of continuing in the small group as a guided situation, I read the story to the children and we discussed it. I was told  that I had done the lesson wrong and not to do it again."

As I think about these comments and the potential conversations that are needed, I consider that the first important act in this work we are doing with inner city primary grade teachers and school administrators is to bear witness and listen.  The second is to remember that what I write here is more for my benefit than anyone else.  These are lessons I need to remember because it is  often easier to slip into evaluative discourse when confronted with the complexity of teaching and learning. At such time, I know it is hard to lead from the heart.

My response to the group today was a request that they begin to contemplate how they might initiate a change in the discourse at school so that richer and more complicated conversations can happen between and among faculty.  There are compelling reasons for everyone--students, teachers,  administrators, and coaches--to work and situate ourselves as learners.  In order to prevent reading and writing difficulties with children, we will need to problematize the work of teaching and learning through critical and caring conversations.  To do this well requires that we exercise our imagination and become (other)wise.

Listen to Maxine Greene (2007) who in a lecture on the imagination writes this:

For John Dewey, facts are mean and repellent things until imagination opens intellectual possibility...It is often said that imagination is the capacity to look at things as if they could be otherwise; and, surely, if we ourselves might come to a point of being yet otherwise than we have become, our altered perspective might well enable us to break with a fixed and one-dimensional view and look at things as if they too could be otherwise. 

Our capacity to become (other)wise is connected to imagining--to pausing and wondering why the administrator or the teacher did or said X.  Imagining and inquiring opens us to the possibility of richer conversations than those that are gotten when commands and counter-commands are uttered.

We have so much to learn about, from, and with one another--especially when we are trying on new or revised ways of teaching and leading.  Again, turning to Maxine Greene and listening carefully can be helpful. She closes the speech by saying:

To be enabled to activate the imagination is to discover not only possibility, but to find the gaps, the empty spaces that require filling as we move from the is to the might be, to the should be. To release the imagination too is to release the power of empathy, to become more present to those around, perhaps to care.

And so tonight as I think about the complex work at hand--how deeply the administrators and teachers and those of us working as coaches care about the children and the work, I am wondering how to nudge the discourse from one that is overly steeped in evaluative language--to one where the heart leads and our capacity to become (other)wise is strong and unwavering.

Resources for Teaching Argumentative Reading and Writing

from I'm Not Quite Jack

Research

Developing Argumentive Discourse & Writing

View more PowerPoint from Mary Ann Reilly / Blueprints for Learning, Inc.

Resources
Argument Handout from The University of North Carolina @ Chapel Hill
Classical Argument
from English Language Education: Argumentative Texts
OWL: Purdue Online Writing Lab
The Toulmin Model of Argument
Education for Thinking
One Good Move

Lessons
Selecting Evidence to Support an Argument (HS) 
Writing Argumentative Texts
Introduction to Textual Analysis 2

Texts
The American Forest - John Muir (The Atlantic, 1897)
Guns Don't Belong in the Hands of  Administrators, Professors, or Students - Jesus M. Villahermosa, Jr, (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4.18.2008)
Lecture is Dead, Take 3 - Murray Jensen (American Biology Teacher, March 2007)
Bibliography (with links) to argumentatitve essays for middle schoolers

Talking in Class: A Look at First Graders Engaged in Word Solving

The news has never been good about the number of minutes per day children at school get to speak, let alone engage in sustained discourse (Cazden, 2001; Dillon, 1985, 1994; Goodlad, 2004).  When learning at school was understood as the transfer of information from a teacher to students--the need for conversation appeared less important. We know that learning is far more complex than the transfer myth suggests.  Teacher talk dominates classroom discourse through lecture and the initiate-response-evaluate (IRE) model of questioning. Both of these remain staples in many classrooms, especially where the transference of information is still considered the main task of the teacher.  In contrast, the video included in this post offers an antidote to teacher dominated conversations.

One of the highlights from the CCSS is its emphasis on structured conversations. The CCSS authors write:

To become college and career ready, students must have ample opportunities to take part in a variety of rich, structured conversations—as part of a whole class, in small groups, and with a partner—built around important content in various domains. They must be able to contribute appropriately to these conversations, to make comparisons and contrasts, and to analyze and synthesize a multitude of ideas in accordance with the standards of evidence appropriate to a particular discipline. Whatever their intended major or profession, high school graduates will depend heavily on their ability to listen attentively to others so that they are able to build on others’ meritorious ideas while expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

In the classroom video below,  Michele Damiano,  leads her first grade students in an inference lesson through an interactive read aloud.  It is important to notice how explicitly Michele models and how engaged the children are in problem solving in order to understand words from the read aloud. The interactive read aloud offers an antidote to teacher dominated conversation while illustrating what a structured conversation can be.

Are unConferences A Manifestation of Plato's Allegry of the Cave?

I have no doubt valuable understandings can and do happen at unConferences.  It is a powerful learning format.  I have experienced this, learning about search engines and interesting ways of collecting and displaying web sites. Inherently practical information I will certainly use.  I like the idea of UnConferences, the spontaneity, the potential range of interactions, and the thoughtfulness of the convener who may use a range structures like Spectrograms or Community Mapping,  to solicit and map interactions and responses.

An interesting description of unConferences here states:


The Creative unConference favors a flexible, participant-driven format that values energetic dialogue over talking head presentations. Unlike a traditional conference, where topics and speakers are set by organizers months in advance, unConference participants create the agenda and act as the session leaders. This allows all participants to have their voices heard and engage up to the minute ideas. 
During the unConference, session topics can be added or modified, responding to the needs of its participants in real time. Participants are encouraged to move from one presentation to another, engaging with their colleagues. Simple guidelines put forward at the event help this all happen smoothly.

Hmm. I wonder about those simple guidelines and how energetic dialogue is ensured.  At a session I attended (and left) at an unConference, the discourse resembled teacher room chat at its worse.  I wondered then and now if it didn't also serve to solidify misconceptions, racially charged stereotypes, and poorly imagined practices. And still I also imagine that for the majority of people in the session they might well describe it as energetic dialogue. Yet, for me it was more like Plato's Allegory of the Cave, specifically when Socrates says to Glaucon: “And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them? ”

It is foolish to confuse perception with sight. During the session, one teacher spoke of social Darwinism as truth, while another stated that literacy performance was "set" by the age of 5 and there was nothing schools could do to improve the matter. I heard talk about reports that no one in the room had actually read, yet everyone had an opinion, even after admitting to having not read the report.  Allow me to paraphrase some of what I heard before leaving the session:

You know. It's like Darwin. You know him? There's always some kids who just can't get it.

What's bad about teacher evaluation is they're going to put your name on the Internet and how are you going to find another job? They'll know your kids didn't do good.

If you teach in a wealthy school district your kids can learn. If you teach in (insert poor community) we get the kids who can't. Is that fair to us?

I know we all teach exactly the same. I steal their worksheets and use them.  It's the kids you get that make the difference. 

My kid (5 year old) has 1000 books. My neighbor's kid (5 year old) has 1.  You can't make up that kind of difference in school.

The kids come to us blank. They have had no experiences.

The beliefs being uttered and unchallenged were shocking.  When I asked the group to focus and comment on their own practices, they did not do that and I wondered why. Instead they continued expressing their beliefs about NCLB, working conditions, evaluation of teachers, ill preparation of students via their lives, etc.  The discourse exchanged was an embarrassment, personally and professionally, especially as:.

I reject social Darwinism. 
I reject the belief that poor kids aren't intellects and aren't creative.
I reject the belief that even if a teacher uses the same worksheet as another, that the learning in the two classrooms is the same.
I reject the belief that learning potential is ever set, let alone at age 5.

I reject the belief that students arrive at any school day without relevant experiences.

Where is the metalanguage necessary to critique our assumptions, beliefs, "truths" at an unConference?  Is it even possible to re-conceptualize one's practice when situated singularly within one's primary discourse?  I wonder if in the rush to embrace unConference, we may be forgetting the value of juried conferences.  Is there no value in preparing presentations that are informed by relevant and juried research and theory?

Social Collaboration: New Literacies

These days there's a lot of talk about what students need to be able to do with regard to something named, literacy.  The Common Core State Standards sets out to represent this and promises in the mix that adoption and application of these standards will result in "high quality education".  The framers write:

The standards establish a “staircase” of increasing complexity in what students must be able to read so that all students are ready for the demands of college- and career-level reading no later than the end of high school. The standards also require the progressive development of reading comprehension so that students advancing through the grades are able to gain more from whatever they read.

Given these standards, one might think that a single, uniform understanding of literacy existed— an autonomous model of literacy (Street, 1995). Brian Street defined this type of understanding of 'literacy" as an autonomous model as it situates literacy as a neutral entity, stripped from social, cultural, gendered, and historical contexts.

In contrast, Shirley Brice Heath’s (1983) situates “literacy events” as people’s ways with spoken and written words.  I would urge that a sociocultural perspective be used to inform what we mean by new literacies, or we will continue to understand “literacy” as reading and writing whether it is on paper or the net. A sociocultural perspective understands that a person’s primary and secondary Discourse groups will influence his or her ways with words. As educators, understanding that our students may have different ways with words than is privileged in school allows us the opportunity to build associational bridges between the child’s primary Discourse and school-based practices.

The Internet does not alter this dynamic.  Rather, digital literacies represent new Discourses (Gee, 1996).  Whereas the Common Core Standards reify this older and flawed version of literacy as a singular matter,  NCTE's Framework for 21st Century Curriculum and Assessment captures the complexity of multiple literacies that is always embedded in cultural and communicative practices.  From NCTE:

Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies—from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms—are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities, and social trajectories of individuals and groups. Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally 
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

The Common Core State Standards situates Internet-based literacies as being merely electronic texts that are to be consumed and produced by students just as paper-based texts might be.  This is a colossal mistake. Absent from this viewpoint is understanding Internet-based literacies as communicative, collaborative, and cross-cultural.  As such, it is critical to help students develop and manage global learning-relationships.

Global learning is here. I know this to be true as an artist and as an educator. Below is an image I composed with Bradley Nichol, an artist from Canada.  We discovered that we each had an affinity for U2 music and decided to illustrate a few U2 songs from The Joshua Tree album.  Red Hill Mining Town was created without meeting Bradley in person or working on the image in the same place and time.  Bradley and I got to know one another via our participation in two social networks for artists and decided to collaborate.  We began when Brad sent me an image and I then remixed his image with some of mine and a public domain image to create the final work.  Since posting the work, 2200+ people from various places in the world have viewed the image and many have left comments.

Red Hill Mining Town. Image by Bradley Nichol and Mary Ann Reilly. 2009.

Empowering students in this century requires us to understand that the definition of classroom as a geographic space within a school building has been modified.  The classroom need no longer be limited to a pre-Internet world, just as our definition of being literate need not reside in that old world too.  We need to shake off these misunderstandings, not embed them within our curricula. The  standards offered by the Common Core initiative anchor us to a world no longer existing.

Works Cited

Gee, James. (1996). Social linguistics and literacies: ideology in Discourses. NY: Routledge/Falmer Press.
Heath, Shirley Brice. (1983). Ways with words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Street, Brian. (1995). Social literacies: critical approaches to literacy in development, ethnography, and education. New York: Longman.