Have you read anything interesting lately?

My friend Helen always asks me when I see her what I've been reading. It is such a great question. Last week I had a delightful conversation about books with someone with whom I thought I had nothing in common. I now see her very differently. We began talking about the Special Olympics, which she is in charge of in my state, and we ended up sharing book titles.

Today, I celebrated not having to go to our school's staff development day by going to a bookstore. I had to buy thank you cards for two interviews a classmate and I had with professors about quality teaching. Randi Stanilus' research, for example, produced three main "indicators": classroom management that produces engaged learning; worthwhile content; and scaffolding/motivating--a teacher's ability to use her content knowledge in different ways. It was amazing to learn about the challenges of research and that so many urban students have a beginning teacher every year. One huge elementary school in Atlanta had 86 new teachers in one year! Imagine that mentoring challenge!

As I checked out from the bookstore, I asked the clerk (right word?) if he had read anything interesting lately. He was happy to talk about J.C. Ramo's book The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It. He said that it is about how we often reject ideas that are not from "our side." We'll see: http://www.ageoftheunthinkable.com

I talked with two high school boys over the weekend: one is a very good student, another is homebound with a tether. Neither of them read anything unless they "have to." I'm not sure whether that includes text messages on their phones or video game "literacies." I learned at last summer's NCTE New Literacies Institute that the best ways to improve reading is if kids read at their level and if they can find a series they like so they can get comfortable with the genre patterns. Anyone know any interesting series for boys?

So--have you read anything interesting lately?

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Holidays are a big part of elementary and secondary schools. In the article "Quantity Matters: Annual Instructional Time in an Urban School System" by BetsAnn Smith (Ed Admin Quarterly 36:5), she studies 8 elementary schools in Chicago and finds that of the 280 available time, and average of 23% is used for noninstructional activities--"more productive teachers" only use 14% (p. 662). By the way, noninstructional time included test days. I can send you the pdf of the article if you email me!

Critical literacy, or information literacy, can be learned through the researching of holidays in high school or college to complicate their understanding of the holiday, perhaps challenging their assumptions about national holidays. Every semester, I have pairs pick a holiday and research it online. I found that if you include the word "controversy" with the holiday in a Google search, for example, students can find more than the "simple" version of the holiday. They present a discussion from multiple perspectives on the online class discussion board--about Labor Day, Columbus Day, Yom Kippur etc.

Please share with me other information literacy activities!

Connecting the Dots to the Local

When I edited our newsletter, "Writing Transitions," I wasn't that nervous. After all, I sent it out to teachers, so I knew who was reading it! This business of writing--without knowing the whole audience--is more nerve-wracking. So I want to explore the difference.
This semester I've read new articles about similarities and differences in offline and online reading comprehension for students. Here are a couple of them: http://www.newliteracies.uconn.edu/event_files/IES_NRC2006_symposium.pdf
http://www.ucop.edu/elltech/leupaper010605.pdf

Also, I have been thinking about what got me into the high school liaison business: the concern in our local area that teacher education programs were not giving attention to the quality teaching of rural students. I had not thought much before about connections to the local community.
Professor Carl Leggo (in Journal of Educational Thought, 39:2) connects to Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Heart: "As teachers, including student-teachers, experienced teachers, retired teachers, may we always live poetically with a playful heart, in language, in love, intimate with our local locations, growing in stillness, full of trust, always hoping. May we know constantly the heart of pedagogy" (194).

There is so much scholarship now on "urban education." Gloria Ladson-Billings (in AERJ, 32:3)found that teachers who were exemplary believed that all students were educable, that their pedagogy was an art, and that they felt connected to their local community (478).
Urban teachers are not always connected to the communities in which they teach; Ladson-Billings has inspired me to think about how rural teachers also need to be connected to the community in which their students live.

Making Connections

March 9th Spring Break



It seems right to start this weblog--which is about the connections between high school and college, between traditional literacies and new literacies, and between theories and practices--during Spring Break for the colleges and universities and during the week of the Michigan Merit Exam for the high school teachers.



This schedule emblemizes the disconnect, for sure.

In graduate school, I am immersed in theories; in my practice of teaching, I am attuned to action. I hope to help bring these two worlds together in an online space of sharing. And because reflective teaching requires dialogue, I hope that high school, college, and university teachers will make connections.