I went to my first high school football game in Texas this past Friday. I had pretty big expectations, mostly due to the show Friday Night Lights, and I wasn't let down. One of the students in the class I'm observing informed me that he had just been moved up to the Varsity team, and he wanted me to watch him play. Even though I was planning on being there to watch him, I thought that he probably wouldn't get much on-field time, simply because he'd be one of the younger players. I was wrong--he was part of every offensive play. And he definitely played his heart out. Though they lost, they played hard; I was really proud of him and my adopted school. I even saw three of my students there! (I was greeted with "Hey, Miss!" a few times.) For more background information on Reagan's football history, check out this 10 minute clip from Sports Illustrated's series on Underdogs. Apparently, Reagan used to be the top high school in Texas football in the '60s and '70s; in recent years, the team has struggled to win any games, due in large part to the change in the area's shift in population and economic status. This new push to reinvigorate Reagan's football team brings me to one of the most important concepts that Beers talks about in When Kids Can't Read: confidence.
Beers notes that we can help students become more skilled readers, but more than anything else, we have to find a way to re-instill (or just instill) a sense of confidence in our students of their abilities. My CT has definitely emphasized the need for affirming students, but I like that Beers goes further and looks at the role of the classroom as a whole. We can't view our students apart from the classroom environment, or even the school environment. We have to improve the climate of the classroom environment so that it nurtures each individual on his or her journey towards reading improvement. In addition, I think that the entire school needs to be a safe place for students, or at least promote itself as such.
First, Beers states that teachers should not "dumb down" the level of materials that they teach. Instead, they should provide lots of scaffolding so that students can work their way through more complex texts. I think this is true, as long as we keep in mind that more complex texts can still be interesting. Also, if we are teaching these more complex texts, we should realize that it may take longer to get through some books than anticipated. (Perhaps this should be true of higher-level classes as well--as we know at this point, being a faster reader doesn't mean being a better reader.)
Next, Beers emphasizes the importance of a classroom that encourages risk. She provides one seemingly simple solution: that students should know each other's names. However, I've noticed in a couple of classrooms that I've observed that students don't, in fact, know their classmates. When putting students in pairs, my CT has called out names to be together, and a couple of students quickly said, "Who?" How can we expect students to want to participate with one another when they haven't even figured out everyone's names?
Also, she states that teachers shouldn't tolerate put-downs. This seems like the toughest part of creating a safe classroom environment. I would say that a large part of the communication that I've witnessed among students has been comprised of sarcasm and put-downs. It would be difficult to eradicate such a large aspect of students' communication style. Maybe if the students decided on rules of conversation at the beginning of the year, it would be easier to enforce; otherwise, if I rang a bell every time someone said something negative, I would be ringing all day long...and these students are pretty good at tuning out what they don't want to hear. I think providing this safe environment for students is a process that both the teacher and the students have to actively work on.
For right now, I'm glad to be at Reagan High School. I get to witness this time of rebuilding confidence, and maybe even be a part of it. They're rebuilding confidence in athletics and slowly rebuilding confidence in academics. Though I'm not sure that some of the students in the school, and even in my class, believe that they can move past the label of "struggling readers and writers" or even "failing school, " Kylene Beers so aptly notes: "You must believe for them" (280).
No comments:
Post a Comment