“So the speaker is saying that she wishes her mother would have left her courage behind instead of her brooch.Can you relate this poem to another poem or story?” says Jonathan. “Yes, Andy*?”
“This reminds me of a movie, Guardians of the Galaxy.”
“What makes you say so?” Jonathan asks, encouraging evidence.
“The protagonist’s mother died and left him cassette tapes of her favorite songs; it’s all he has to remember his mom,” says Andy.
“Right, the brooch and the cassette tapes are symbolic of the mothers. Anyone else? Yes? Jennifer?” sais Jonathan, making a note next to Andy and Jennifer’s names to be sure he involves all his students in the discussion.
“When Johnny died in The Outsiders, he left behind a letter–“
“Epistle,” says Jonathan’s partner, Max.
“Yeah- the epistle–but also the book Gone With the Wind, which was symbolic of their friendship but also of the Greasers and Socs, civil war,” says Jennifer.
“Yeah, I forgot about that. Good connections. So let’s break into partners and see if we can find some of the poet’s techniques and how they add to the meaning,” says Max.
Students move about the room, sitting on the floor to stretch their legs. The begin identifying alliteration, consonance, and other sound devices in “My Mother’s Courage” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Jonathan and Max walk around and support students in noting how the technique add to the poem. The imagery could contribute to the mood, like “granite.” There’s irony in contrasting the brooch and courage. And the sound devices such as alliteration and rhyme add a musical quality, an elegiac tone. (*All names are pseudonyms, and the dialogue is a composite.)
Jonathan and Max are today’s seventh grade poetry teachers, modeling the unpacking of a poem and facilitating a literary discussion. Several times a week students teach a mini-lesson or lead a discussion as part of our teacher-for-a-day pedagogy — an inquiry-based, shared teaching model for organizing class time that engages students in one of the most effective modes of learning: teaching. Middle school is an ideal time to nurture in students their inner teacher.
Welcome to teacher-for-a-day pedagogy! Here are a few ideas for organizing class time to welcome students as co-teachers. I will include two specific protocols — writing mini-lessons and poetry readings or free inquiry– which can be adapted for a range of topics and different levels of support.
Teacher-for-a-Day Pedagogy
The concept of teacher-for-a-day pedagogy comes from the educational philosophy of John Dewey and constructivist learning theories developed from Dewey’s pragmatist principles. Broadly speaking, Dewey considers useful knowledge to be the blending of theory and application. His work offers a way for teachers to solve the binary of student-centered and subject-centered instruction by framing instruction as experiential; that is, experienced by and through students. Teacher-for-a-day pedagogy develops in students a capacity for agency in their own education while building a community of teachers and learners.
Dewey’s Experience and Education (1938) critiques the perspective of education as “delivering” knowledge to empty vessels without enough understanding of students’ experience. He believed experiences in education must have continuity and interaction; in other words, the experience comes from and leads to other experiences, propelling the person to learn more; the experience is interactive in the sense that the experience meets the needs specific to an individual.
Experience, however, does not equal education. The classroom experiences can be mis-educative (Dewey, p. 25). A mis-educative experience stops or distorts growth for future experience. For example, a learning experience can “engender callousness” or produce a “lack of sensitivity and of responsiveness” (p. 26). When teachers plan fun activities like escape rooms, making book trailers, or simulations, Dewey acknowledges that they may have an immediate aspect of “agreeableness” but what is its influence on later experiences? How do such experiences live “fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences” (p. 27)? How do classroom experiences nurture habits of mind and dispositions of readers, writers, and thinkers in English?
When students experience the inquiry, planning, and practice of teaching their peers, of being the resident expert responsible for supporting their peers, they become more sensitive and responsive to the conditions of the classroom and of the subject matter. The value of any experience, according to Dewey, “can be judged only on the ground of what it moves toward and into” (p. 38). Students teaching a new skills or sharing how they uncovered meaning in a poem alongside their peers moves the entire class “toward and into” habits of literacy that defy measurement.
In the scene described at the opening of this article, I met with the student co-teachers to remind them to welcome a variety of voices in the discussion and to offer positive feedback to meaningful contributions. I showed them how to move around the classroom to help their classmates uncover the meaning of the poem by directing readers to a particular line in the poem. They had been so used to being stationary during presentations that they never moved freely in their own classrooms toward and through their peers in the role of a coach or helper — a role restricted to teachers for far too long. How beautiful to see a student kneel alongside a peer and confer about how sensory language improves a scene in writing or how a metaphor impacts meaning in a poem.
The goal of teacher-for-a-day pedagogy is to uncover the mystery of the curriculum by inviting students into the process so that students can ultimately do the uncovering on their own. Dewey explains: “knowledge and skills in one situation becomes an instrument of understanding and dealing effectively with situations which follow” (p. 44). I can attest that the students who have led a poem analysis or taught a grammar lesson appreciate, respect, and learn from their peers who later do the same. And I can attest that, over time, students take greater initiative to do inquiry, to ask questions, to research possibilities, and to engage with me as a co-learner.
It is within my ability as “the” teacher to influence the experience of others, which includes determining the environment of learning, but Dewey reminds teachers that it is a mistake to take upon ourselves the responsibility “for providing an environment”; we must consider “the powers and purposes of those taught” (p. 45).
As I ponder the “knowledge” or “skills” that are important in analyzing and creating texts, I can list dozens of terms and concepts, many of which require mini-lessons and direct or explicit instruction in what the terms mean and how they can be applied. I learned these concepts through research and practice, and I know them well because I teach these concepts every year (e.g, parallelism, asyndeton, punctuating dialogue).
To learn a skill or understand a new concept requires inquiry. However, the teacher typically does the inquiry first in order to pass along or transfer that information to students. To teach what I learned and help others understand it is experiential learning. To apply these skills in my reading and writing helps me engage with the knowledge and reflect on its purpose. I learn more deeply by and through the process. This is the essence of constructivism–the participatory nature, the inquiry, the extension, the teaching experience. But it is for me–the teacher. I am, in essence, mis-educating students by doing the inquiry work that students can, in fact, do themselves. I can be more useful if I am, essentially, less necessary as Peter Elbow suggests in Writing Without Teachers (1998).
Writing Teachers-for-a-Day
Whether teachers organize writing workshop by genre or by student choice, there are some writing skills or techniques that enhance all genres. Instead of teachers doing the mini-lessons in the writers’ workshop, set aside a week for students to research a technique or convention and develop a mini-lesson to teach the class later during the semester.
Students can select an unfamiliar topic (see Table 1) or teachers can assign a topic based on a student’s needs. Students then consult resources (English sites or textbooks) and begin their research into what the topic means. Students work together to share the sources for syntax that were useful. Student working on diction-related topics find literary sources and share. They track their sources as they take notes (see template below). The next step is application. Because we already reviewed narrative techniques, students write a narrative applying their writing topic. As students craft their stories, they confer with peers and the teacher to confirm and clarify understanding. It is helpful to color the sentences that show the application. If students do this work on a Google doc, it is easy for the teacher to collaborate and offer feedback if the application or story needs revision, but peers tend to be even better conferrers. Finally, to prepare students to teach the topic to the class, we review Bloom’s Taxonomy and learn how to develop meaningful questions to check for learning. Students write 5 questions in different levels. After all the research is completed, we learn about how to construct an accurate works cited page. Here is a link to our research template and an example (below). This is a meaningful short research project, but, perhaps more importantly, as a collective, we are naming techniques students can identify in their reading and apply to their craft as writers.
Joseph – Teacher-for-a-day Grammar 2018-19 (1)Finally, the student-now-teacher creates an anchor poster and slideshow for the class. The teacher assesses the research and accuracy of materials then creates a class hyperdoc (a document with hyperlinks to all the resources). Students access this hyperdoc during the mini-lessons, and it is available for students who are absent. The anchor chart in the classroom is a visual reference during writers’ workshop.
Once all the posters and slideshows are ready, the teacher shares the hyperlinked resource document and creates a teaching calendar, plotting the techniques in a meaningful order for the writers’ workshop. For example, maybe a teacher will have mini-lessons for informational writing Tuesdays and Thursdays, so on those days, student-coteachers will conduct their lesson for about fifteen minutes, and then the class will continue with application of the lessons in their own writing (e.g., a conjunctive adverb lesson during comparison essay writing; use of dashes in a sequence essay).
On the day the student-teacher is teaching, the student-teacher uses the slideshow to teach the class as the students take notes and later try the technique in their own writing. My role is to be useful during this entire process, to support students in note-taking and clarifying application of the concept as I do the same.
Table 1. Writers’ Workshop Topics
| Sound and Figurative Language Techniques | Grammar Topics |
| alliteration
allusion apostrophe assonance consonance oxymoron onomatopoeia personification anthropomorphism simile metaphor hyperbole understatement symbol |
asyndeton
polysyndeton anaphora subordinating conjunctions coordinating conjunctions conjunctive adverbs gerund infinitive direct address parallelism dangling modifier dialogue ellipses dash semicolon appositive |
Poetry Teachers-for-a-Day
Whether teachers plan a poetry unit or prefer weekly poetry work, partner poetry inquiry can engage students in poetry interpretation and support their practice in facilitating discussions with text evidence.
To begin, partner students to select a poem. Together, they read and unpack the poem, research the author, and create a slideshow for facilitating a discussion of the poem. The teacher’s role during this time is to engage with pairs about their interpretation of the poems, posing questions about the speaker, intended audience, subject, tone, mood, theme, and form. Over several days, students will read and reread these poems, uncovering purpose in the line breaks and making meaning of the parts and whole of the poem.
Once the slideshows are completed, the teacher can create a hyperlinked calendar of the slideshows and schedule the poetry reading days, which may be once a week or several a week, depending on the unit plans. The poem selections can support the themes of other units, be part of the poetry unit, or be periodic poetry days without a particular thematic thread.
Students learn to negotiate meaning together bringing prior reading experiences into the collaborative reading experience. They look up unfamiliar words and allusions and annotate the poem for speaker, subject, tone, theme, and techniques (e.g., assonance, oxymoron, etc.) before submitting their analysis to the teacher to discuss the process and outcome of the collaboration. For example, two students read Rudyard Kipling’s “If.” The two readers were discussing the tone of the poem, sensing optimism but also urgency. It was not up to the “actual” teacher to determine the tone but to encourage dialogue between the students and poem, calling attention to the evidence in the text to support interpretations.
As an extension to develop speaking skills, students can memorize the poem and practice reciting it with expression. On the day the students lead the class in a discussion of their poem, they can recite or perform the poem for their peers.
Table 2. Poetry Reading Student Co-Teachers Lesson Protocol
| Procedure | Engagement | Poem Suggestions |
| 1.A poem reading | Students listen as the teachers recite the poem from memory, having practiced expressing the mood and interpreting phrases to convey the message. | “Thumbprint” (Eve Merriam)
“Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout would not take the garbage out” (Shel Silverstein) “Miracles” (Walt Whitman) “Famous” (Naomi Shihab Nye) “Maestro” (Pat Mora) “The Microscope” ( Maxine Kumin) “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home” (Craig Raine) “Mother to Son” ( Langston Hughes) “Do not go gentle into that good night” (Dylan Thomas) “She Dwelt Among Untrodden Ways” (William Wordsworth) “Hope is the thing with feathers” (Emily Dickinson) “Big Yellow Taxi” (Joni Mitchell) “Most Dangerous Air”( Margarita Engle) “The Courage That My Mother Had” (Edna St. Vincent Millay) “Where the sidewalk ends” (Shel Silverstein) “If” by Rudyard Kipling |
| 2. Author biography | Teachers share a little background on the author along with a picture. | |
| 3. Second reading | Students are now looking at the poem, too, and follow along as the teacher reads. | |
| 4. Third reading | Teachers set a 5-minute timer; students read on their own and annotate their initial impressions for subject, speaker, tone, theme. | |
| 5. Speaker discussion | Teachers lead a discussion what the students discovered about the speaker’s concerns, age, gender, feelings, past, relationship to the listener. Students add on or revise their initial impressions. | |
| 6. Subject discussion | Discussion shifts to an analysis of subjects explored with text evidence. Teachers ask the follow-up question What makes you say so? to elicit text evidence and reasoning. | |
| 7. Tone discussion | Discussion identifying words and phrases that convey the speaker’s tone toward the subject. | |
| 8. Theme & connections | Discussion of theme and connections across poems; reflections on universal themes or symbols across books, movies, etc. | |
| 9. Form and techniques | Students break into partners to annotate for form (rhyme, meter, stanzas) and techniques (alliteration, etc.) as teacher support the process. End with a discussion of the poet’s craft. |
Conclusion
When teachers invite students to participate in classroom activities, they want that experience to be enjoyable and educative. Teachers plan so that students can engage with content and one another in productive and meaningful ways that nurture habits of mind and ways of being of readers and writers. While Dewey’s work acknowledges enjoyment as important in classroom experiences, an educative experience must also contribute to enduring sensitivity to the topic or condition of learning while impacting future learning.
In the English Language Arts classroom, teachers can engage students in the very work readers and writers do to enrich an appreciation for and deeper understanding of the skills, dispositions, and habits by inviting students into the teacher’s role and becoming a student of the powers and purposes of those with whom we learn.
References
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience & Education. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
St. Vincent Millay, E. (1953). The courage that my mother had. Poets.org. Retrieved from https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/courage-my-mother-had.