“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 adds 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.
Jonathan and Max are today’s seventh-grade poetry teachers, modeling the unpacking of a poem and facilitating a literary discussion. It’s a testament to the capacity of seventh graders to teach and lead the class. I am their co-teacher and student, supporting my colleagues as I follow-up with the other 28 students. There is nothing better than increasing the teacher-student ratio!
*All names are pseudonyms, and the dialogue is a composite.
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 his 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) critique the perspective of education as “delivering” knowledge to empty vessels without enough understanding of students’ experience. He believed the experience must have continuity and interaction; in other words, the experience comes from and leads to other experiences, propelling the person to learn more and is interactive because the experience meets the needs of a person. However, experience does not equal education. The classroom experiences can be mis-educative or non-educative (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)?
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. And they seem to enjoy it. The experience creates a positive association with literacy as they engage in the discourses of learning. The experience has the potential to seek a similar situation of learning and being in the classroom and beyond; in other words, students are more likely to want to associate with literacy-based experiences. The value of any experience, according to Dewey, “can be judged only on the ground of what it moves toward and into” (p. 38). The teacher’s role, then, is to anticipate and support the direction of an experience so that it does render the student more sensitive and responsive thus promoting further positive engagement with the content and learning environment (e.g., classroom, school).
As the scene described at the opening of this post unfolded, I met with the 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. I prompted their awareness of how their preparation to conduct the lesson was now benefitting their students, and their job now was to support others. The teacher-for-a-day experience influences a student’s attitude toward the content as accessible and shifts an understanding of “student” as one with agency and a capacity to direct learning experiences.
Ultimately what a student learns “in the way of 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, 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 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 through the process. This is the essence of constructivism–the participatory nature, the inquiry, the extension, the teaching experience. After all, William Glasser’s work shows we learn 90 percent of what we teach. But all that inquiry, action, and experience is done by me, the teacher. I am, in essence, mis-educating students by doing the inquiry work that students can, in fact, do themselves and that would nurture in them the habits of mind and discourses of English.
In this post, I will share how teachers can set up time for students to prepare the mini-lessons for writing or reading workshops and then offer sample protocols for the lessons in the hopes that more teachers will include “the powers and purposes of those taught.”
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 you doing the mini-lessons in the writers’ workshop, set aside a week for students to research a technique or convention.
Students select a topic (see Table 1) and begin their research into what it means and examples of application. Then, students practice the technique in their own writing and consult with a partner and the teacher to confirm and clarify understanding. To deepen understanding, students create Kahoot game, which includes examples and non-examples. Finally, they create an anchor poster and slideshow for their class presentation. The teacher assesses the research and accuracy of materials; then, the student adds a hyperlink to the slideshow presentation to a resource document, and hangs the anchor chart in the classroom to reference during writing 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-teachers 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 and Kahoot game to teach the class as the students take notes and later try the technique in their own writing. The “actual” teacher becomes a co-teacher during the lesson to support students in note-taking and clarifying application of the concept.
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. 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. (See Table 3 for the protocol). The poem selections can support the themes of other units, be part of the poetry unit, or be periodic poetry days.
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 and call attention to the evidence in the poem to support their interpretations. To develop speaking skills, students can memorize the poem and practice reciting it with expression.
Conclusion
When teachers invite students to participate in classroom activities, we want that experience to be enjoyable and educative. We plan so that students can engage with content and one another in a productive way. While Dewey’s work acknowledges enjoyment as important, an educative experience must also contribute to enduring sensitivity to the topic or condition of 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 but inviting students into the teacher’s role as co-teachers.
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.