Thursday, June 23, 2016

Last day!

I can't believe today was the last day of the EPO's first year!! Once my co-teaching got into a flow, time just raced by. Managing the data collection/analysis for the ethnography while teaching made my calendaring a unique experience. For reasons I still can't explain, the closer it got to June, the more intense everything became. There were field trips, parties, awards ceremonies, prom, and all sorts of senior events. With the warmer weather, family groups started meeting outside and playing a huge variety of outdoor games. And the varsity baseball team made the sectionals as the first RCSD team to go in 36 years!  The pace of the everyday left me breathless.

Overall, the critical literacy project went well. There is a lot to rethink for trying again next year. All of us felt like just as the students finally "got it," it was the last day of class. I wish we would have hit stride much earlier. Their projects ended up being very good. We put together a website so they could share beyond the classroom or the teachers. The site, Youth Doing Justice, explains a bit about critical literacy, shows who we are with a scrolling set of photographs, and the "our projects" page is all students. Given the time constraint, I did the first two pages of the site, but the kids did everything on the projects page.

Because this work was called a "pilot" so we could do the work without also having to do the Common Core module, we had to write a report for a meeting where we showed all our unit and lesson plans. Even though I know the chief academic officer well, I forgot to include enough "evidence" of students meeting standards. I think I thought the projects would speak for themselves. Silly me. We did use a portfolio of student writing, their research documentation, daily reflections, and an essay where they talked about what they learned from the project to grade using standards-based grading, but this was not "seen" on the webpage. She also felt that thirteen weeks (how long we ended up doing the unit) was too much time for what they produced. We had an interesting discussion around the difference between what she thought was more something 4th graders could have done and what we found in terms of how much impact being under taught had on what we could do when. Getting to the work of critical literacy to deconstruct text in the analysis of power first took weeks of teaching about audience and purpose of text, how to communicate a message to an authentic audience, revision strategies including peer conferencing, and a basic sense of critical language awareness. This is why we ended up running out of time. However, the fast pace of the last two weeks did get the students digging in to finish.

One of the many things I learned this year being at East full time is that it is one thing to read Delpit's Other People's Children and learn how urban children are under taught and underserved and quite another thing to stand in front of kids and realize they have never done a revision in eight years of school!! We know from over forty years of research that students more often than not only do first draft writing and that teachers think teaching writing is correcting papers. That none of this extensive research on writing has had an impact in classrooms was a shock.

We are working over the summer to design a five-week critical literacy unit that we have gotten permission to do next year. Finding ways to meet external, state mandated requirements remains a challenge. But, we have good ideas and some experience under our belt.

Most of all, the students were amazing and I am grateful beyond what I can express for the privilege of getting to know them. 

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