Reinvigorating a failing literacy program
Feb. 27th, 2009 03:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
velvetpageToday I discovered what happens when traditional "assign and assess" teaching methods are carried to their logical conclusion at the high school level.
It a nutshell - futility. A large chunk of the student population and an equally large chunk of the staff feel that nothing they do really matters. For the students, this means they do very little. They only do work if they know it's going to count towards their grade. They don't put any effort into it beyond the absolute bare minimum - that is, they were turning in work that wouldn't get a B in my grade five class. On any given day, a third of the class is absent, and it's never the same third two days in a row. They have no motivation, no interest, and very little in the way of skills.
Meanwhile, the teachers fall into one of three camps. Either they recognize the futility of what they're doing and want to improve things so they can reach their students; or they deny the futility and their contributing role in it, just putting in time until they can retire; or they recognize the futility but believe that they are doing their job of teaching - it's the students who are falling down on the job by not learning.
I recognize it, because I've seen what that looks like at the elementary and intermediate levels. I've been there. I was mostly in the third group of teachers, with occasional forays into the second group.
I also saw what can start to happen when a group of teachers from the first group decide that they're going to change. I think over the next few years, that school is going to go through a complete and total makeover, and when it does, it will be because that first group of teachers - the ones who weren't satisfied with putting in time while their students failed - took it upon themselves to learn what to do and embrace a progressive teaching philosophy.
The other two groups of teachers are going to resist. They already are. There are math teachers claiming that literacy is not their problem, and they're very angry at having to sit through in-services that they see no relevance for. (IMO, the OFIP program for high schools is going to have to address this problem at the outset, or none of the changes they make are going to stick for long. They have to have suggestions ready for every subject area of simple changes that can be made to improve every subject area.) There are a bunch of teachers who will go to the in-services, do the bare minimum required of them, but in between they'll continue to teach as they always have so it won't stick. And there will likely be some who can't figure out how to apply what they're learning to what they've always done - and who are scared to try because it's overwhelming.
In any case,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hannahmorgan and I hashed out a plan of action to start getting her kids engaged in their learning, using the five big questions I posted about the other day and a bunch of magazines from the school library's magazine rack. The high school curriculum does require kids to read literature (read: novels) but it also has sections about media literacy that, according to hannahmorgan, are mostly ignored by the English department at the moment. So she's going to start with magazine ads. They're not even remotely threatening, they have very little that must be read, they can be taken in almost at a glance, and the question of relevance is obvious - "Companies are putting these ads in these magazines because they want your money. Make them earn it!"
After she's got them used to asking those big questions about ads, then she can move on to other text forms, including novels. The questions are the same - it's the methods of communicating the message that change.
Meanwhile, she has to get their writing up to something that can pass the grade ten literacy test, in short order. I have fewer suggestions for this - other than getting them to write about things in the ads, and how the company writing the ads is trying to dupe them. They get to be jaded, angsty teenagers, and turn it into good writing! However, this is where she's going to come against that wall of well-developed indifference to anything academic. I know how hard that can be on resistant nine-year-olds; I can't imagine it's any easier on resistant fifteen-year-olds.
It a nutshell - futility. A large chunk of the student population and an equally large chunk of the staff feel that nothing they do really matters. For the students, this means they do very little. They only do work if they know it's going to count towards their grade. They don't put any effort into it beyond the absolute bare minimum - that is, they were turning in work that wouldn't get a B in my grade five class. On any given day, a third of the class is absent, and it's never the same third two days in a row. They have no motivation, no interest, and very little in the way of skills.
Meanwhile, the teachers fall into one of three camps. Either they recognize the futility of what they're doing and want to improve things so they can reach their students; or they deny the futility and their contributing role in it, just putting in time until they can retire; or they recognize the futility but believe that they are doing their job of teaching - it's the students who are falling down on the job by not learning.
I recognize it, because I've seen what that looks like at the elementary and intermediate levels. I've been there. I was mostly in the third group of teachers, with occasional forays into the second group.
I also saw what can start to happen when a group of teachers from the first group decide that they're going to change. I think over the next few years, that school is going to go through a complete and total makeover, and when it does, it will be because that first group of teachers - the ones who weren't satisfied with putting in time while their students failed - took it upon themselves to learn what to do and embrace a progressive teaching philosophy.
The other two groups of teachers are going to resist. They already are. There are math teachers claiming that literacy is not their problem, and they're very angry at having to sit through in-services that they see no relevance for. (IMO, the OFIP program for high schools is going to have to address this problem at the outset, or none of the changes they make are going to stick for long. They have to have suggestions ready for every subject area of simple changes that can be made to improve every subject area.) There are a bunch of teachers who will go to the in-services, do the bare minimum required of them, but in between they'll continue to teach as they always have so it won't stick. And there will likely be some who can't figure out how to apply what they're learning to what they've always done - and who are scared to try because it's overwhelming.
In any case,
hannahmorgan and I hashed out a plan of action to start getting her kids engaged in their learning, using the five big questions I posted about the other day and a bunch of magazines from the school library's magazine rack. The high school curriculum does require kids to read literature (read: novels) but it also has sections about media literacy that, according to hannahmorgan, are mostly ignored by the English department at the moment. So she's going to start with magazine ads. They're not even remotely threatening, they have very little that must be read, they can be taken in almost at a glance, and the question of relevance is obvious - "Companies are putting these ads in these magazines because they want your money. Make them earn it!"After she's got them used to asking those big questions about ads, then she can move on to other text forms, including novels. The questions are the same - it's the methods of communicating the message that change.
Meanwhile, she has to get their writing up to something that can pass the grade ten literacy test, in short order. I have fewer suggestions for this - other than getting them to write about things in the ads, and how the company writing the ads is trying to dupe them. They get to be jaded, angsty teenagers, and turn it into good writing! However, this is where she's going to come against that wall of well-developed indifference to anything academic. I know how hard that can be on resistant nine-year-olds; I can't imagine it's any easier on resistant fifteen-year-olds.