Understand how students learn and develop.
Throughout my education classes, we have been taught many different theories regarding teaching. Bloom's taxonomy (shown to the left) is important to keep in mind because you always want to keep moving your students up the ladder. Higher order thinking skills is the goal that teachers should strive for with their students because that is where true learning takes place.
As Linda Christensen says, "Finding the heartbeat of the class isn't always easy", but it is necessary to do if you want to foster learning in your class. With my 7th graders, I really feel as if I have developed a nice classroom climate. When there is comfort within the classroom, students feel as if they can share more and this provides more class participation and learning. During my poetry genre study, we read widely within the genre and then produced poetry as the final project. I had students base their poems off of a family photograph and this was a wonderful way for students to open up and share about their personal lives. This unit followed Bloom's Taxonomy because we started by understanding selected poems, moved up the ladder by analyzing the poems together, and then finally I had them create their own poem.
Modeling is also very important to do in the classroom. For the poetry unit, I brought in my own family photo along with the students and wrote my own poem about it. I wanted to demonstrate to students that I write too and that this was not just a "bogus" assignment. It was also a good way for me to model to them the writing process and how to peer edit. I had students peer edit my poem on the Smart Board to show them that even I could use improvement, so there is no reason for them to have "perfect" poems for the first draft.
Below are examples of some student's work and examples of their peer editing process:
As Linda Christensen says, "Finding the heartbeat of the class isn't always easy", but it is necessary to do if you want to foster learning in your class. With my 7th graders, I really feel as if I have developed a nice classroom climate. When there is comfort within the classroom, students feel as if they can share more and this provides more class participation and learning. During my poetry genre study, we read widely within the genre and then produced poetry as the final project. I had students base their poems off of a family photograph and this was a wonderful way for students to open up and share about their personal lives. This unit followed Bloom's Taxonomy because we started by understanding selected poems, moved up the ladder by analyzing the poems together, and then finally I had them create their own poem.
Modeling is also very important to do in the classroom. For the poetry unit, I brought in my own family photo along with the students and wrote my own poem about it. I wanted to demonstrate to students that I write too and that this was not just a "bogus" assignment. It was also a good way for me to model to them the writing process and how to peer edit. I had students peer edit my poem on the Smart Board to show them that even I could use improvement, so there is no reason for them to have "perfect" poems for the first draft.
Below are examples of some student's work and examples of their peer editing process:
Poetry Sample 1 | |
File Size: | 1138 kb |
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Accompanying Peer Editing Sheet 1 | |
File Size: | 1110 kb |
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Poetry Sample 2 | |
File Size: | 297 kb |
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Peer Editing Sheet 2 | |
File Size: | 1305 kb |
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Poetry Sample 3 | |
File Size: | 264 kb |
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Peer Editing Sheet 3 | |
File Size: | 1141 kb |
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Poetry Sample 4 | |
File Size: | 720 kb |
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When doing Hamlet with the seniors, I knew that I needed to find ways to make it "fun" for them. One activity that I had them do was to create a scene by drawing it in a comic strip template. They seemed to love this activity! This helped them visualize Hamlet differently and when I hung their comics up in the classroom other students really enjoyed them.
In addition, Critical Literacy is a huge part of learning in the ELA classroom. To put it simply, critical literacy is basically conscious reading. Readers do not just passively read, but instead ask questions and are actively involved. As Friere says, you have to read the word to read the world. Once you learn critical literacy, you unlock access to the world because you are able to uncover dominant Discourses, power relationships, and form your own opinions. Shin-ying Huang's states in the article, Reading "Further and Beyond the Text": Student Perspectives of Critical Literacy in EFL Reading and Writing, that "Critical literacy enhanced students' reading comprehension and motivated them as writers" (150). As ELA teachers, this should be our goal. Critical literacy helps students climb their way up the ladder to higher order thinking skills and being life long literacy learners.