Category: Teaching

Student brilliance: “rose-colored schema”

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Rose coloured glassesInstead of a general reading response, I ask my students in Culturally Responsive Teaching to complete CSQs–claim, support, question–on their reading.  Because the work of culturally responsive teaching often means knowing yourself, your position on various topics/issues/challenges, and confidence in those positions, it isn’t enough to summarize a reading.  I spend the first 3 or 4 responses getting most students to actually stake a claim. Then we build depth in their support and thoughtfulness into their questions.

But there are usually at least a few students who, though their own life experiences, already have a well-developed sense of cultural responsiveness.  I’m gifted with a few this semester and one, in her second CSQ, coined a term I’m going to chew on for awhile: “rose-colored schema.”
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Culturally Responsive Teaching

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I teach a class with that title.  How cool that my program has a class with that title? Given that UIW is a Hispanic-serving institution, and most of our preservice teachers go to work in schools where the majority of the students are children of color, the class begins to give them the language, strategies, curriculum, and support for teaching in a culturally responsive way.

Also, the content of the course isn’t tested like the assessment and pedagogy classes are.  The content in those courses factors heavily in the Pedagogical and Professional Responsibilities certification exam.  I have more freedom because CRT isn’t PPR’d.  So, I can talk about testing influencing curricular and instructional choices because I navigate that particularly convoluted map as well.  Specifically, this lack of testing means I can choose a really cool book, have my students listen to podcasts (This American Life for life!), and do book clubs.

The course isn’t without its challenges, of course. Continue reading →

Teaching in an election season like no other

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As I head into planning for the fall, the question that I can’t get out of my head is this: How will I teach about the election this year? And the cascade of questions that follow: How will I prepare my students for being in schools in this election season? How do I give them the confidence to engage with students spouting rhetoric they heard on television?  What do I do if a student complains because I bring up the election?  What are my protections as a faculty member?  Do I have any?

Every other year when I’ve taught during an election, I use the historic moment as a teachable one: comparing education policies, examining rhetoric, critical reading of media coverage. The list of standards I could cover by digging into a political campaign was long. That hasn’t changed, necessarily, but this isn’t a normal election year.  Trump is a demagogue. The current president called him unfit for the office.  And both previous Republican presidents are remaining silent or offering criticism of the policies that Trump espouses, like isolationism and nativism.  His positions and rhetoric are not okay. But can I say that outloud in my classroom?

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If we had forever

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I said the words that serve as the title for this post earlier today as I was wrapping up a week-long writing workshop institute  with a group of about 30 teachers from Northeast ISD. That’s a fitting line for such an institute because, when you dive into writing, there’s so much that doesn’t get done.  Conversations that don’t happen, aren’t finished, or are cut short.  Conferences that don’t happen, aren’t finished, or are cut short.  And when you layer on the meta-conversations about teaching writing, there’s even more that just doesn’t get said.  So “if we had forever” is what I offered.  Because we’ll always need to cut things short with our students: the bell rings, the grades are due, the year ends.  Though we can always consider, “if we had forever…” and remember that, when we’re writing, we can get close.

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