TE_994_2010-2011

More TE 994, Section 002

Samantha Caughlan
Co-Subject Area Leader, Secondary English Education Department of Teacher Education 333 Erickson Hall East Lansing, MI 48824 517-353-3736 caughlan@msu.edu

Note: this course meets 15 times over the course of the year, usually on Wednesdays, usually in 212 Erickson, and usually in alternation with Sharon Schwille's 994 for field instruction. Subject to change as opportunities or obstacles arise!

Course structure and goals:
The purpose of this course is to provide support for those teaching in the English Education program by:
 * introducing the theoretical and practical underpinnings of the senior and intern curriculum in English education
 * offering a forum where participants can bring in teaching issues
 * providing a brief introduction to significant issues in the larger field of English education.

By considering why we do what we do, and remaining aware of the intellectual, pedagogical, ethical and professional issues that our work raises, I hope this course gives you an inside look at what goes into creating a well-grounded and coherent program, and forms part of your preparation for further university teaching.

Participants enrolled in this course will be expected to contribute to discussions on the reading and on each others' teaching dilemmas, and complete up to three projects: These are all similar to projects we ask our seniors and interns to complete, thus providing opportunities to reflect on their effectiveness as prompts to consider one's own teaching at a deeper level. In addition, it is possible that a research project begun for this class could become a proposal for a summer research fellowship or comps artifact.
 * a personal reflection on your teaching: this can take the form of a teaching journal, a professional portfolio, a teaching website, or an annotated syllabus;
 * collaborate in leading a discussion on an important text in English education;
 * conduct an inquiry or action research project on your own teaching or field instruction.

Here is the complete syllabus:

Course schedule:
Again, subject to change:

Week of 9/13 (asynchronous, online) Dialogism and English Education
How is language dialogic? Why is this a unifying concept in our sequence? How does that translate into dialogically-oriented instruction? Note: I have sent you an invitation to a draft of an online module designed to introduce teacher candidates to the concept of dialogic instruction and how it manifests itself in classrooms.(still under construction) Readings:

Nystrand, M. (1997) Chapter 1: Dialogic Instruction: When recitation becomes conversation. //Opening Dialogue: Understanding the dynamics of language and learning in the English classroom.// New York: Teachers College Press, pp. 1-29.

Bakhtin on dialogism and dialogic heteroglossia:

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). from Discourse in the novel. In M. Holquist (Ed. & trans), C. Emerson (trans.). //The dialogic imagination: Four essays.// Austin: University of Texas Press.

Recommended reading: Martin Nystrand (1997) //Opening Dialogue//. New York: Teachers College Press. Presents the research underlying Nystrand & Gamoran's contention that dialogic instruction is linked to higher student achievement. This work was replicated on a national scale in the following study, also recommended: Applebee, A. N., Langer, J., Nystrand, M. & Gamoran, A. (2003)**.**** Discussion-based approaches to developing understanding: Classroom instruction and student performance in middle and high school English. What are effective schools doing? **** // American Educational Research Journal // **** 40:3, 685-730. **

More Bakhtin: Read the whole of "Discourse in the Novel." It's marvelous. Also, his essays in //Speech Genres and other Late Essays// (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds; V.W. McGee, trans. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). Mary likes his earlier works, which get more into moral philosophy and ethics. I love V.N. Volosinov's //Marxism and the Philosophy of Language// (L. Matejka & I.R. Titunik, trans., Cambridge: Harvard U.P, 1973). I read the entire thing in Jim Gee's reading group, plus sections of it in at least two other classes.

Friday, 9/24, 10:00-12:00, room 212. Video in MSU's English education program
Note: this is the monthly meeting required for all field instructors -- but the theme ties in with our exploration of what we do in MSU English education and why. How and why do we use video in our program? What does it do to promote intern learning? How can we use it in both seminar and field instruction? Reading: @http://www.citejournal.org/vol10/iss2/languagearts/article2.cfm

Recommended reading: Troy Hicks (2009). //The digital writing workshop.// Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Recommended for several reasons: While this book is aimed at practitioners, our approach to using video in our program is strongly influenced by writing pedagogy. Also, Troy received his PhD. from MSU in 2007, and teaches at Central Michigan -- his wife is currently in the CTEP program. The book is also the book club offering on the English Companion Ning this month. []

10/6/10, Room 212 Erickson, 1:00-3:00. Current issues in the field of English education.
Note: this will be the time and place of our meetings, most times from now on. What are current issues facing English education? What changes in the world necessitate changes in English curriculum? What are the implications for our program? Reading: Dickson, R. & Smagorinsky, P., et al. (2006). Are methods enough? Situating English education programs within the multiple settings of learning to teach. //English Education 38// (4), 312-328.

Also of interest for this day: our philosophy statement for the program.



Recommended reading: The special edition of //English Education// this article comes from is a good source for an overview of the challenges English education faces in the 21st century. It came out of the first of a series of biennial summits on English education the Conference on English Education started holding in 2005 (the next one should be in June of 2011: mark your calendars).

Notes from our meeting: Essential things we want our students to have when they step into their classrooms:

Methods – Teaching strategies Content: Content knowledge gives you the confidence to teach something. Why we study literature – why it’s important to study. Literature as cultural transmission. Why we teach. Consider the narrative and how we live through narrative. Ways of knowing; horizons of possibilities. To understand mankind – to understand history. Writing: both being able to write and teaching writing Field experiences in diverse settings Viewing other aspects of schooling Conflict resolution Culture in education Curriculum Literacy practices Grammar and speech Policy History Philosophy Psychology

Looking at the journey from standards to implementation Making selection and setting realistic goals Ability to assess students and class and make readjustments Facilitate discussions Balancing the language arts: reading, writing, speaking, listening, etc. Making content meaningful and knowing why we teach that

Talk about teaching dispositions: enacting different parts of one’s personality as a teacher Cognitive and emotional development Connecting that to making meaning and motivating learning How do you conceptualize learning a thing, and then plan to facilitate that learning. Community involvement in student learning Building the skill of discernment and helping students build ways to deal with situations.

How do we prepare for the reality of schools? This is a major issue. On the one hand, society places demands on teachers that are unreasonable, and we don’t want our teacher candidates to buy into that; on the other hand, there are reasonable things we could be doing in schools that we are not (such as teaching writing and other forms of language use and production in a more authentic manner, or teaching a greater variety of literature). The tensions between an imperfect present and some more equitable or effective future are felt in teacher preparation every day. They are even felt in our meetings.

10/20/10 Room 212 Erickson, 1:00-3:00 Assessing Teacher Candidates
**What do standards-based assessments of novice teachers look like? What performances are important to observe and mark as teacher educators?** Reading: Koziol, S., Stallworth, B.J. & Tompkins, R. H., et al. (2006). Candidate and program assessment in English education: A framework for discussion and debate. //English Education 38// (4), 370-383.

The article by Koziol, et al. discusses issues involved with assessing teacher candidates' progress as they move through and complete a program, and the use of such assessments for program evaluation. The movement towards what we call "performance-based" assessments has been driven by several factors: dissatisfaction with standardized tests of teacher readiness; attempts to grasp the essentials of teacher competence; and pressures from the accrediting agencies (NCATE and TEAC), both of which require performance assessments for candidate and program evaluation. A number of states do, as well. As professors in colleges of education, you **will** have to take part in discussions of these measures and their development and revision in whatever program you are associated with.

In her chapter on annual performance assessment of teachers, Mary Kennedy (2010) distinguishes between what she calls "high-inference" and "low-inference" assessment instruments. A high-inference instruments leaves much to be inferred by the field instructor/observer; a low-inference instrument describes a prototypical performance at each level for each category, in an attempt to increase the reliability of scoring among users. I have provided examples of each below, as well as both formative and summative instruments. I have been collecting these for a paper I am writing with a graduate student, Heng Jiang, where we look at what about teaching is attended to, and how representative instruments position teacher candidates, their students, and observers.

Those of you who are engaged in field instruction are now doing midterm evaluations, and having to negotiate among your own commitments regarding good teaching, your intuitions regarding what your interns are experiencing, and what seems to be expected by the program that developed the rubric you use at midterm and final conferences. What is involved in using such an instrument? Would we all score the same performance in the same way, are there significant differences, or do all differences wash out in some implicit consensus regarding competence and fitness?

Please come with some of your own midterm rubrics from this period (or from a previous semester if you are no longer in the field), and be ready with questions or observations about your experience with our TEAC-required rubric.

Example assessment instruments to consider: MSU Secondary English education long rubric: (low-inference, both formative and summative)

Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) (low-inference, summative)

Student teacher observation form from the New Teacher Center, UC Santa Cruz and University of Virginia (high-inference, formative)

Northwestern University Student Teacher Evaluation Form (high-inference, formative and summative)

11/03/10 Room 212 Erickson. Teaching Literature: Models and Traditions
What are our purposes for teaching literature? Is it still central to our curriculum? What do we see in area classrooms? Please read the Willinsky as an opening into his critique and appreciation of what schooled literature study has come from and why it has its particular characteristics.



You might consider: Does a focus on the literary text, even now, “forestall asking difficult questions of the literacy that constitutes life in the modern world?”(Willinsky, p. 5)

Is the way school presents literature implicated in young peoples' unwillingness to read literature after schooling?

I will be talking about some of the dominant cultural models of literature at play in English classrooms and in state standards (those of you who have read Gee's //Social Linguistics and Literacies// for Susan's class this week will have a head start on the concept of cultural models -- I will explain in class).

I have also, with your busy reading schedules in mind, collected a few short readings that provide some alternative orientations toward the reading and teaching of literature:



What other models, frameworks, theoretical lenses, etc. do you consider essential for our students to have? Their students?

11/24/10 Room 212 Erickson. Teaching Language in English Language Arts
What do we mean by teaching “language” in the “language arts?” How do we help teacher candidates with a sophisticated knowledge of language variation teach grammar and vocabulary?

Readings:





12/8/10 Room 212 Erickson: Are we meeting the needs of teacher candidates at MSU?
Disjunctions between our classes and the field: how can we improve the conversation?

No Readings this week: : come with artifacts from your teaching or observation and ready to talk.

Questions: what are you observing in classes and in the field that impinges on the preparation we are giving these new teachers? Where are students doing well? Where do you see needs that are not being met? Consider the existing structure of the senior and intern year curriculum: how is it working, and where do you see possibilities for improvement?

1/19/11
**How can we support teacher inquiry with beginning teachers?**

=== **Directions: Please read the Lankshear & Knobel carefully, as you would a class reading, and the Phillips & Carr, if it appears (I'm having trouble finding it -- may have lent it to an undergraduate thesis advisee). Also please spend some time reading the assignment material from the 804 inquiry projects. The examples of teacher research -- both those early on from external sources, and those done by our students, are more to be skimmed, to get a sense for the kind of work done.** ===

**Readings:** Colin Lankshear & Michele Knobel. (2004). //A handbook for teacher research: From design to implementation//. Berkshire, UK: Open University Press. Chapter 1, pp. 3-23. Note: you can find this chapter online at @http://www.mcgraw-hill.co.uk/html/0335210643.html. Click on the "Read a Chapter" button on the right to gain access to the .pdf. (Lankshear & Knobel present a vision of teacher research that is both open and rigorous. This is chapter 1 of a handbook that is worth owning.)

Donna Kalmbach Phillips &Kevin Carr (2006). //Becoming a teacher through action research: Process, context and self-study.// New York: Routledge, pp. 10-28. [coming -- ] (Phillips & Carr's book differs from most books on teacher action research in being aimed precisely at pre-service teachers. They provide good scaffolding for the process, assuming no experience.)

=== As classroom teachers, did you ever do action research/teacher research/teacher inquiry in your own classroom? Did you do it as part of a research group, as a building or district initiative, or in connection with a Masters program? Feel free to bring in work from your own classroom research for our discussion this Wednesday. ===

It is becoming more and more common for teacher preparation programs to include opportunities for teacher candidates to do action research as part of their field experience. These take a variety of forms, from three-week projects that satisfy some requirement that TCs be able to show how their teaching influences student learning, to three-credit courses that involve a semester-long inquiry into some aspect of their teaching. In our program, this generally occurs during 802 and 804, and interns investigate some issue in their own classrooms.

Here are a few examples of teacher projects. Some have been published in selective publications, such as //English Journal//; others in online publications that exist just to disseminate teacher research.

Example action research project from Queen's University course Here are some links to online publications.

Networks The Ontario Action Researcher ARExpeditions As you know, students in our program do inquire into the process of engaging in dialogic instruction during their intern year, but this doesn't really count as teacher research. First of all, the program constrains what they investigate by requiring them to attempt to move their teaching in certain directions (in other words, they are investigating questions we set for them, such as "How can I get more students to participate," and "What can I work into my planning so that students have something to talk about?"). Second, there really is not a process such as Lankshear & Knobel define for questioning, collecting data systematically, etc. We have reasons for setting these questions: we consider dialogic instruction to be a powerful practice, a great set of tools for them to start off with. However, we also use 804 to invite them to conduct an inquiry into some aspect of their teaching that //they// feel compelled to look into. In the last two years, each student chose a question to investigate, looked into the literature on that topic, devised a way to try something, collected data, analyzed that data, and then reported on their findings.

In my first year trying this with interns, spring 2009, the project was fairly demanding. We presented an overview in October so they could begin thinking about a question, then led them through the process during the spring semester. I'm attaching the assignment here:

As you can see, there are a number of steps, including an extensive literature review. I found in teaching this that students were highly anxious about the data analysis. They thought in terms of statistics and scary math. Anne Heintz and I spent time in class discussing various types of data and ways of approaching it, and the Phillips & Carr book was also very useful in breaking down the process, but it was too much for that second intern semester, as they were moving through their lead teaching period. As we moved closer to the end of the semester, we abandoned the idea of a final paper, and replaced it with a final PowerPoint, which they presented during the last couple of classes. . Most of these met or exceeded any expectations we had. Here is a blinded one to look at -- it definitely is in the higher range. This intern understood research. Here is another standout -- notable for the intern's use of quantitative data. Many students avoided anything with numbers.



For the second year, Carlin and I scaled it down quite a bit. I still was committed to the idea that they take on some form of professional inquiry, but the expectations weren't as high. We grouped them into inquiry groups, and required a series of journal entries so we could monitor their progress. I believe it still is recognizable as teacher research according to Lankshear & Knobel's definition: they came up with a question, looked into the literature (but not a full-scale literature review), came up with a plan, tried some new things, and reported on what they gathered. However, I must say the data analysis was less systematic. The final project, which was very popular, was a mini-con, a mock conference in our two classrooms, with an actual program, speakers assigned to tables, and students either speaking about their work or moving from table to table. The product was a one-page handout (see assignment, here:, and also the clever template Carlin devised for them to use for the handout: ) Here is the program for the mini-con:

I will bring my collection of handouts to class, as I don't have permission to post them to this public wiki -- but they're really great.

Betsy currently has the 804 students coming up with inquiry questions, and will be talking about this year's approach on Wednesday, as well.

February 16, 2011
How can the English language arts be integrated through a focus on genre? What genres are our students teaching? How are they approaching the reading, writing, and speaking through genre? How are we doing helping our students master the genres of our profession?

Readings:
Duke, N.K., Caughlan, S., Juzwik, M.M., Martin, N. (in revision). Chapter 1:How Thinking Differently About Genre Can Motivate Your Students to Read and Write in a World of Varied Texts. From //Reasons to Read, Reasons to Write: Doing Genre with Purpose in K - 8 classrooms.// Heinemann.

Bawarshi, A. & Reiff, M.J. (2010). Ch. 10: From research to pedagogy: Multiple pedagogical approaches to teaching genre. From //Genre: An introduction to history, theory, research, and pedagogy.// Parlor Press and the WAC Clearinghouse. The entire book is available online, from http://wac.colostate.edu/books/bawarshi_reiff/genre.pdf

However, that link does not seem to be working this evening -- I'm putting up a copy I got earlier this year.

Note: the first reading is a chapter from a book still in revision. Please do not pass around further than this group. It is also aimed at a 1-8 practitioner audience, so it's a quick read, and not very scholarly. The Bawarshi & Reiff chapter is from a book series put together by Charles Bazerman,(a big name in composition theory and research), Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition. The whole book is worth your study -- for this week, we're just looking at the chapter on pedagogy.

Please give the readings a go, with the guiding questions for this week in mind. What are you seeing in the field, in terms of attention to a variety of genres? What does this portend in terms of their students' focus on audience, purpose, and context?

Warmup for class:
In your travels as field instructors, and in seminar discussions of what students are observing, what genres do you observe being taught? What genres are K-12 students producing? How engaged do they seem to be in this writing? How successful do they seem to be (what comments do mentor teachers and teacher candidates make about student progress?)?

Considering the reading:

The Duke, Caughlan, Juzwik & Martin book seeks to move beyond genre instruction that focuses on the structures associated with school-based writing in the traditional "modes" of instruction -- narrative, informative, persuasive, etc. If one considers the MAPS acronym (a quick shot of rhetoric in the K-12 writing curriculum) We consider much school-based writing to focus overmuch on modes, in a way that does not acknowledge the array of possible genres within each mode. Are focus is very much on audience and purpose, and how these and situation inform the form of genres. I would very much like your feedback on our principles (see p. 3).
 * M**odes
 * A**udience
 * P**urpose
 * S**ituation

Also important: the research and theory discussion on pp. 4-10. What are the implications for teaching of the recent research on genre for those classrooms you have been visiting?

The Bawarshi & Reiff book obviously focuses on adult learning, from freshman composition to more advanced research writing, but the frameworks are all applicable to K-12 teaching.

Consider Devitt's particle, wave and field -- p. 176 Bazerman: genres as cognitive tools

And the three overarching types of approaches: Implicit, Explicit and Interactive. As an example, what did you think of Swales's sequence of moves to learn about research writing? Could we -- or could our students -- come up with similar sets of moves for less-advanced academic writing?