Story map homework breakdown 2.0

I wrote a while back about my daughter's frustrations with the story map homework she had been given from her second grade teacher. I wondered why she was so paralyzed and unable to complete the story map that simply asked for her to list the characters, setting, problem, solution, and mail plot events of a book off of her shelves at home. I did what I could to help her work through it. I tried to convince her that it was okay to have a different idea about a story than her teacher might have. And I was relieved that she got the assignment done.

But I got home last evening and there she sat at the dining room table with a blank story map sitting in front of her. She sat slumped over in frustration; my husband sat next to her at the table looking completely exasperated and frustrated.

Here we go again.

Seeing she was clearly stuck, I invited her to take the dog on a walk with me. As we walked up the hill on the trail behind our house, watching the dog frolic happily along side us, I took her through the same conversation we had last time she got so frustrated by the story map homework. I asked her if she remembered my story as a reader and what happened to my love of reading at school. She told it all back to me--about how I used to love to read when I was younger but grew to not enjoy it anymore by high school. She told me about how a teacher of mine told me I was flat out wrong when I disagreed with her interpretation of a book in AP English. I told her about how this shut me down as a reader for several years. I reminded her that I didn't want this to happen to her.

As we hiked along, I explained how I had thought last time about discussing this all with her teacher but decided against it. This will not be the first time that a teacher suggests there are right answers about a story in her life in school, and I do not want to rush in every year and try to fix it for my kid. Instead, I want to help my kid develop survival skills so she can still do the work asked of her with stories in school AND remain the engaged reader that she has become.

I do not blame my daughter's teacher. The problem is so much bigger--it's more in the unchecked assumptions we all carry with us about what we are supposed to do with stories in school.

So here's what we did. As we hiked, we composed a mantra for my daughter to remember when she did her homework. When we got home, the first thing she wanted to do was write it down--so we did. I wrote one word, she wrote the next and so on until we had written out the following:

"It is okay for me to have a different idea about a story than my teacher does as long as I can explain what I think and why I think it."

We both signed and dated it. And then we came up with a process for her to complete a story map "with very little stress." This we also wrote down, on the reverse of the page that held the mantra:

1) Read the story aloud together and pause whenever it seems a problem comes up in the story. Write the problems down and choose the one that seems to be the most important one.

2) Daughter writes in the characters, setting, main problem, and solution on the story map.

3) Daughter takes a break on the couch. During the break, she explains aloud what happens in the story and Mom or Dad writes down her words. This becomes daughter's rough draft.

4) Daughter uses this rough draft to select the plot events she wants to include in the story map and writes them on the story map.

5) We celebrate: "yay yay yay yippee yippee yippee!"

I wonder what this process will look like when she's in high school and writing literary analysis papers. I wonder how much help she'll still need at that point.

Signing off,
M. Shelley

reading ruined already?

I'm sitting here helping my 2nd grade daughter with her homework.

She is to complete three story maps, each on a book from her shelves here at home that she has read and knows well. This task has paralyzed her.

And that's what I find fascinating.

With as natural as stories are to us as human beings, how is it that a task to map out a story paralyzes my child? How is it that identifying the characters, the setting, the problem/solution, and the important plot details is making my child believe that she is unable to succeed?

Normally my child whips through her homework. But tonight, she had to take a five minute break under a blanket on the couch. Now that she's been back at the table she has written down three plot details in about 15 minutes. Not the usual pace for a kid who can complete a week's worth of homework math story problems in about a half hour.

She's sitting next to me, whiny, doodling on her page. "What happens next in the story?" I ask her.

"I don't know. I forgot," she says very sadly. "You told me but I don't remember."

We had just read the story together. Surely she has not forgotten the details of the story yet?

"What if there's a right and wrong?" she asks me. "My teacher writes A LOT when we do these at school. We copy down what she writes on the board."

"Are you worried that you aren't writing enough?" I ask.

She finishes with another plot detail and asks me what's next. She has just flipped through the book again but asks ME what's next. She asks me to write it even. Or at least to tell her what to write. When I make a suggestion, she tells me that it's too long, too many words (this from a child who has handwritten several pages of her autobiography in one sitting, a child who read about eight Magic Treehouse house books in one weekend and has no problem with stories).

I worry that already school is teaching her that there is only one set of right answers about a story. I worry that already she is learning that what the teacher says about a book is right and her job is just to copy it down neatly on her story map. I worry that she is learning already that the purpose of reading a story in school is just to identify its parts and pieces, not to say what she thinks about a story.

I ask her if she would rather write about what she thinks about the story. She says the story map never asks her to do that.

I ask her why she picked the book she used for the first story map--and she said it was because it was short and she thought it would be easy to work with.

Oh my. Already? Choosing a book for a school task because it's short? How did this happen?

I'm certain her teacher means well and does not intend for any of this to happen. In fact, I have been quite impressed by what I know of my daughter's classroom. I know that the literacy approaches taken there are all informed by researched best practice.

But it's absolutely fascinating to see my child struggling already with a task in school that boils a book down to its mere components, separated from pondering what the story has to say about our life as human beings. She's so worried about not writing enough and not writing the right details that she's paralyzed.

Well, we just agreed she could have some chocolate if she finished another story map... now she's somewhat more motivated. Good in the short term for getting the homework done. Bad in the long term for her love of reading?

No wonder so many of my high school students aren't readers.

Signing off--
M. Shelley

Invisible yet powerful barriers

For the record, F. Scott and I have committed to posting SOMETHING at least once a week, even if it's just a tweet (you can follow us on Twitter too--look over there on the right).

F. Scott's been tweeting all week. I've been mulling things over in my mind.

I am completely convinced of the need to make some paradigm-shifting changes in the way we deliver education. But there are some significant challenges to doing this within the context where I teach.

For one thing, it's difficult to convince my colleagues that something is broken that we need to fix. By most standard measures, our students are very successful. They test well. They get into colleges. Most of them do just fine. Why on earth would we need to consider changing anything? What's broken?

The answer to this is pretty complex. Within my particular teaching world, students are too heavily focused on grades, the grades they need to get into the colleges that they want. This currency takes precedent over learning. Another problem is that we have many students with unrealized potential--students who come to school because they feel like they have to, but school doesn't offer them anything truly meaningful. They simply go through the motions to get the grades and move on to more interesting things in their lives. And beyond the scope of my school, our world is changing and our schools aren't keeping up.

Making this argument to my colleagues feels daunting; their unshakable belief that what we're already doing is working is one of these invisible yet powerful barriers. Even putting the right words to the argument to help others see it is difficult. But it's something I need to work toward.

The other barrier is somewhat harder to get my head around. It pretty much has me stymied.

I believe in a few powerful tenets to guide my teaching: student choice wherever possible (choice about what they read and how they show me what they know) and de-centering my own ideas and voice in order to make space for theirs. The reading/writing workshop model is a great way to achieve these goals. I teach one section of creative writing right now. On Mondays, students study mentor texts--imaginative writing (novels, poetry, graphic novels, screen plays, etc) that they admire and want to learn from. They choose these texts on their 0wn, and they have the freedom set a mentor text aside if they don't like it. I have one student who has struggled to do much work for me in the senior lit/comp class I teach who has already read four books of his own choosing for creative writing. On Tuesdays, we have some sort of writing activity mini lesson to help students work on some aspect of writing I'm seeing as a need via their polished drafts that come in every two weeks--and then in the remaining time students have unstructured writing time. On block days, we have another writing mini lesson, unstructured writing time, and peer response group meetings. On Fridays, we workshop two students' work on the big screen together. Students read their work to us as they scroll through it on screen and tell us what help they need, and then we talk. The class is moving toward a portfolio assessment at the end of the semester, something that has already been defined so they know what the end goal is. All their work is driving toward that goal.

My students are engaged and excited about their work. I'm totally convinced in the power of this model.

The challenge is how to take a similar model and place onto the other class that I teach. It seems like it would not be a problem to figure out. Students still choose mentor texts, only perhaps with a few more parameters depending on what genre we're working on. Students still have unstructured writing time each week, only perhaps with a few more parameters depending on our current set of writing goals/objectives. Students still work toward some kind of end-of-semester assessment, only structured around the specific outcomes in the curriculum for this course. Students still workshop each other's work. Seems simple, right?

No. It's not so simple. Not at all. My brain is having the hardest time figuring this out. The barriers?

I teach on a team. In my department and school, that means we are pretty much on the same page, at least oriented toward the same outcomes for our students. We're pretty much working on the same (or similar) projects at the same time. We're dealing with the same books. It's all about securing a similar educational experience for students who take that class regardless of who is teaching it.

My department is on a quest to acquire enough copies of the major texts taught in each class so that all sections can teach those texts at the same time. If all eight sections of a particular class are all teaching Gatsby at the same time, for example, where's the student choice? We're literally putting in infrastructures that contradict the tenets that focus on student choice and de-centering the teacher's ideas/voice to make room for the students'. Instead, shouldn't we be building libraries of texts that grab and hold students' attention and challenge them as readers and human beings?

I teach with a group of Language Arts teachers who seem to operate on the notion that our ultimate goal is teaching literary analysis. This means practices that coerce students to read, that dictate how students should read and interact with a text, and that control the ways students write in response to texts. Yes, we do teach many classes that are controlled by the scope of AP and IB exams which do essentially drive toward literary analysis, but even in those courses there is room for practices that remind students that we read because we are human beings and we want to learn more about the human experience and there is room for practices that center on student choice. Conversations that question the practices I listed above are difficult and highly charged; I learned in my first year in the department to pretty much avoid questioning anything.

But maybe I need to start questioning again. I'd love for everyone to read Edmundson's Why Read? and for us to talk about it. He essentially makes the argument that traditional literature teaching methods place theory between students and texts, that we are by default teaching students NOT to engage in literature as a human being. They read like analysis machines. Reading is busywork.

Any how, it's because of these barriers and others that I'm sure are yet invisible to me that I'm having such a hard time figuring out how to make the shift. In essence, it's a paradigm shift from the idea that every student needs to be doing the same thing at the same time (reading the same book, working on the same paper, etc) to the idea that students will actually be more engaged if they are able to make choices to drive the focus of their work. I'm certain that the approach to have every student doing the same thing at the same time is about efficiency and managing lots of students in a day, but this model holds back students who would soar if given space and it doesn't provide the extra support others need who feel like they are constantly struggling to keep up. There is certainly a better way.

I just need to figure it out, despite the invisible yet powerful barriers that seem to come up and get in the way of being able to see the solution clearly.

Procedural Display

I recently had the opportunity to attend a talk by researcher and theorist Kris Gutierrez, and she brought up an idea that I have been mulling over ever since. It's a concept that has heavily influenced my teaching, but until her talk, I hadn't yet put a name upon it.

She challenged us to teach in ways that eschew procedural display. This is when students look like they are learning but aren't actually. This is when students play the game of school and give us exactly what we are looking for, doing the absolute minimum necessary for the grades that they want to get. On the surface, their grades, their demeanor in class--everything about them suggests that they are learning what we are asking them to. But the truth is that they are not actually engaging in the material in any meaningful way. They are not actually LEARNING in ways that are long-lasting and life-altering. They are not learning to THINK, only to demonstrate the procedures in our classes that make it look like they are learning.

I was the master of this as a high school student and as a college student during my first few semesters as an English major. By all outside appearances, I looked like a successful AP English Literature student. I earned a B in the class. I did fine on the exams and essays. I participated in class discussions and group projects. I earned a 5 on the AP Lit exam. But the nasty truth is that I didn't read a single book that year. Not a single one. I was able to "succeed" and get the B (which didn't hurt my GPA at all because it was a weighted class) by listening very carefully to the teacher and giving back her interpretations on exams and essays. I learned how to look like I was reading, but I wasn't. I was engaged in completing the work with a minimal amount of effort. To this day I regret the great works of literature that I didn't experience in that class. I only read what other people said about the works but never built my arguments around my own genuine response to a text. And this continued several semesters in to my English major in college (until I read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which blew my mind, and everything changed for me).

Now, the question here for me is how to get my students out of the mode of procedural display? I have thought a lot about my AP English lit class and why I was so disengaged. I take it back to the moment that my teacher told me I was wrong because I disagreed with her interpretation of the Brobdignagians in Gulliver's Travels. I learned in that single moment that my ideas about literature didn't have space in her classroom, so I promptly ferreted them away, never to be seen again until they were pried out of me by an astounding piece of literature. As a teacher, I share this story with my students and ask them not to let that happen to them, to call me on it when I shoot down a student's interpretation, to understand why I run my class the way that I do in order to quiet my voice so that theirs have room to speak. But still I'm not totally convinced that I have worked my students out of the mode of procedural display.

I plan to engage them in a conversation about it soon as we start reading our first book together. Procedural display doesn't just show up in Language Arts in conjunction with the study of books, but that is where I think I'll engage them in the conversation to begin with as what I hope will be some kind of inspiration for them to read. Several of them have already told me candidly that they have NEVER read a book assigned to them in school. NEVER. That is daunting. How will these students ever develop the critical thinking that is a necessary literacy skill in our changing world if they aren't READING?????

This brings up a conversation that F. Scott and I had the other day in the office--he'll have to give you the source, but he read recently an argument that the United States is breeding a new generation of illiteracy. People can read/decode anything, but they can't THINK. Those who can't think are doomed to be controlled and swayed by all sorts of nefarious forces in our society, never questioning anything. I'm not sure if I totally agree with this premise, but if it's true, if our school systems are only breeding these critical thinking illiterates who are highly skilled in procedural display, we are in trouble, folks.

And with that I will sign off. I've decided that I do not want to grade on the weekends anymore. I want weekends that are real weekends. The path to that is working my butt off in the week nights to get the grading done. I have 15 more personal narrative essays to get through before I go to bed--working to provide feedback that is real and genuine and not teacher procedural display. That kind of grading takes longer. So I better get to it.

M. Shelley

Reconsidering Literature and the Classroom

I'm working on my dissertation today. I came across the following tidbit, which captures much of what F. Scott and I have been chatting about in terms of how we've been asking our students lately to discuss literature in class. So here it is:

In Why Read?, Mark Edmundson (2004) calls for a reconsideration of how literature is typically dealt with in the college English classroom. He insists that teachers work away from more traditional classroom (New Criticism-esque) approaches toward a more meaningful approach to literature--asking students, for instance, what it would be like to take on a piece of literature as one's guide to life. What would it mean to live life by the guidelines suggested in this text? He argues that "literature [...] is the major cultural source of vital options for those who find that their lives fall short of their highest hopes," that "in literature there abide major hopes for human renovation" (p. 3). Probst (2004) echoes this. He explains that reading is not about searching for "'the meaning' of the work, a meaning residing in the text, as in the New Critical approaches," but rather an opportunity for exploration and creation (p. 3). He says that teachers should not ask "What does the work mean?" but rather "What can we do with the work?"--a similar question to Edmundson's about what it would be like to live life via the guidelines suggested in a particular piece of literature. In doing this, Probst reminds us, that our middle and high school students are not the intellecutal elite that end up as graduate students of literature; they are a "representative group from the local community," and therefore it's important to honor and make room for the individual exchanges between reader and text (p. 34). They are not literary scholars, but they can still access the "resevoir of all human concerns" that Probst sees in literature if we create the right kind of classroom space for them to do so.

In Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters: Imagination, Interpretation, Insight, Sumara (2002) makes a similar argument, that teachers need to work toward making literature matter more to our students. He claims that overall, literature "creates the possibility for deep insight," that engaging with literature "can facilitate the creation of interesting sites for thinking," that these literary engagements can "expand [students'] imagined world of possibilities," and that because in life "understanding requires interpretation, and interpretation requires practice," literature study can provide important opportunities for students to learn these skills (pp. xiii-xiv). Ultimately, Sumara believes that literature captures the "unnoticed experiences that combine to make a life" (pp. 154-5).

But Sumara--through his perspective as a former public school teacher--sees problems with literature instruction in schools. He is worried that the public schools "are not very interested in helping young people develop" important interpretation practices for literature (p. 157). He sees this in how students are often forced to read a lot of literature quickly, looking only for literary devices in order to write critical essays (p. 157). This, he thinks, is why students often claim that literature doesn't matter much to them, rather than seeing it as an integral piece of understanding the human experience (p. 157). Instead, literature will matter in schools if teachers put aside "theories of learning that insist on excavating Truth" but instead create "conditions for people to learn to be surprised by what might happen if they dedicated themselves to literary practices that require a sustained engagement with someone else's structure of thinking" (p.160).

(end of dissertation tidbit)

Now, as to why it's so difficult to actually get schools to teach literature in this way --> if I have time today, I'll write about the dominate teaching paradigm that controls the way we ALL think about school.

M. Shelley
----------------------------
Edumundson, M. (2004) Why Read? New York: Bloomsbury.

Probst, R.E. (2004) Response and Analysis: Teaching Literature in Secondary School (Second Edition). Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann.

Sumara, D. J. (2002) Why Reading Literature in School Still Matters: Imagination, Interpretaiton, Insight. Mahweh, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.