Between the two different projects that we read about, I would have to say that Sherry Linkon’s was the most interesting to me. I also probably had the most questions about that one and how I could apply it to 9th graders as opposed to her college students. There are some ideas that she gives that are obvious in how they could connect. For example, I really like the idea of having students annotate, so I’m trying to think of how I can have them do so even though the books don’t belong to them and I can’t provide Post-It notes for everyone. After our discussion last week in class, it got me thinking a lot about myself as a reader. I remembered Prof. Sample saying that if you just highlight things, you’ll forget why. So I practiced annotating this article this week, and wow! What a difference I had in ideas. I could feel myself thinking more about what I was reading and interacting more with the text than I normally might – even if I’m just highlighting. I might be hooked on annotations now. I want that for my students. I feel like it’s something that would be easy to incorporate with ninth graders.
Another idea I really liked was that of recursivity. I think that by having students look at the text more than once, we’re forcing them, in a way, to become experts with it. It’s true that we might read something once and understand it enough to be able to discuss and form opinions and ideas, but the more we read any text, the more we will understand it. The problem is getting students interested enough to want to motivate themselves to read beyond just that first reading. I admit that this is something I struggle with as well. I know it will be easier the second time, but there are usually time constraints, etc. that prohibit me from being able to have just a second reading, much less a third and so on.
This leads me to my first questioning of the reading. In a collegiate atmosphere, I can see how it would be really beneficial to a student to have the entire 14 weeks to read and re-read a select few texts and think about them in order to develop questions and learn how to successfully seek answers. However, in a high school atmosphere, I’m a bit skeptical, mostly because of the time constraints. As high school teachers, we don’t have much choice in the curriculum that we teach. I have a guide that tells me what I need to complete each marking period, and it doesn’t leave me with a lot of time to allot for re-reading of texts. I’m torn between wanting them to become experts and knowing that I have only so much time in which to do it. Not only that, but if the kids aren’t prepared for their benchmarks and SOLs and administration finds out that I’ve been having them re-read material instead of teaching them new, they will certainly be coming to have a talk with me.
The second aspect of Linkon’s project that I found myself questioning was the lack of paper. I think that the portfolio idea is wonderful and I like how she spent more time going through the steps and letting the students work on smaller pieces at a time so that it didn’t seem overwhelming. But I have to wonder if there was not still some way to incorporate a paper into that assignment. Sure the students did the research and they learned how to think effectively, but the lack of formal assessment makes it almost seem like busy work – just with more learning involved. She says, herself, though, at the end, that her next step is to figure out how to incorporate some kind of formal assessment in there. I think how I would incorporate it is similar to the way I saw it done when I was in high school (is that allowed?). We had a graduation project to complete and we spent chunks of time throughout the year getting ready for it and writing small pieces of it at a time. While I wouldn’t have the whole year, I think that, if spaced out properly over the course of the marking period, it would be beneficial to the students to not feel like everything is being piled on them at once.