Annie Dunigan
TE 803
March 19, 2006
Unit Case: An attempt at “Breaking Down Barriers” in classroom management and students’ successes
The Context:
I am placed at Fowlerville Junior High School which is home to grades 7th-9th, and the student population is approximately 900. The student body is not racially diverse; it is almost exclusively white, with a handful of Latino and Pacific Islanders, and one African student making up about 2% of the student body. While the school lacks racial diversity, it has an abundance of socio-economic diversity. Traditionally, Fowlerville was an agriculturally-based community, however, it is now home to a couple of plants which attracts working class citizens, and it is becoming home to many middle-upper class families who are moving up from the Detroit, Brighton/Howell area in search of more space and cheaper land. Within the 7th and 8th grade ELA classes that I teach, I have students who live in trailer homes and students who get dropped off in the mornings in Jaguars. There are many new subdivisions going up in Fowlerville, threatening the small farming town atmosphere that has traditionally defined Fowlerville, and which is a concern of many of my students whose families make their livings from their land.
I have chosen to focus my unit case on two students within my sixth-hour, eighth grade Language Arts class, at Fowlerville Junior High School. This class is comprised of twenty-seven students, thirteen female and fourteen male students. While the gender breakdown is about 50/50 within the class, it is dominated by a small handful of student jocks (3 males and 1 female). Out of this class, fourteen of the students are athletes in either school or non-school sponsored sports. Ten of these students (5 males and 5 females) are on the school’s basketball teams, and are considered mainly “jocks, preps, and the popular kids” by other students. Most of these 10 students are also involved in other activities and all of them except one male has an 89% or higher in the class.
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The Unit:
The unit that I am going to be focusing on during this unit case is the first unit that I have created for my guided lead teaching of the eighth grade English classes at Fowlerville Junior High School. I have entitled the unit, “Breaking Down Barriers”, as that is the main theme during this conceptual unit. During this unit the students will be reading various texts, including the novel, The Breadwinner, short stories, viewing a documentary film entitled, Beyond Good and Evil, and participating in a webquest that I have created and built, centered around the country and people of Afghanistan (in preparation for the novel). This unit will take place over the next 8 weeks.
The curriculum at Fowlerville Junior High is being revised, and for the first time, my mentor teachers have been given materials that they have been told they must teach. One of these materials was a unit on courage, which was built solely around the young adult novel, The Breadwinner. My mentor teachers were given a packet with all of the lesson plans, articles, and activities to use for this unit, which were all very MEAP driven. These they passed on to me, and my mentors told me that I could use what I wanted to, and that they only thing I was required to teach, besides the novel, was that I had to include a cross-textual essay. This type of essay was to be the culminating project because it was the common assessment for all the eighth grade sections. Luckily, even though the final assessment had to be a cross-textual essay, which was the common assessment because this type of writing often appears on the MEAP, I was given the freedom to word the question to fit my theme of the unit.
After looking over the materials, I felt that the information provided was biased, and presented the situation in Afghanistan in overly simplified terms, and painted the United States in only a positive light, in contrast to the negative light that Afghanistan and its people were portrayed in. The unit failed to illustrate the complexities that surround situations of war and my mentors and I both felt that this unit, if presented as the packet was written, would only reinforce many of the stereotypes of Middle Eastern people that our students had already expressed in our previous unit.
During our previous unit, we had taught a critical media literacy unit, in which we introduced the idea of critical thinking. Students were asked to question the traditional representations of race and gender in the media (primarily in Disney films and advertisements). We had already discussed misrepresentations of Arabs in movies, such as Aladdin. Therefore, I wanted to build upon this critical media unit, and continue to ask our students to question the ideas and representations of people, ideas, and things during the next 8 weeks.
With this in mind, I set about creating my original unit, entitled “Challenging Authority: Finding Courage in the Face of Fear”. I built on and complicated the MEAP packet’s theme of courage, and supplemented texts which I chose. However, this unit was eventually reworked completely for a couple of reasons. The first was that I had a Chris Crutcher short story that I wanted to teach, and his book, Whale Talk had previously been banned in our district. My mentor teachers felt that the short story was objectable for a whole-class setting, as it had some sexual innuendos, mild language, and involved a son challenging his father’s authority. The second short story that I wanted to use by Julius Lester, about interracial dating was also discarded for similar reasons (one particular sexual innuendo). Finally, due to some censorship issues that had been going on in our classroom (involving a parent, the principle and the superintendent), my mentor teachers felt that naming the unit “Challenging Authority” would be a red flag to parents and that people would protest to us teaching the students to challenge authority.
I went back to the drawing board, and reworked to some extent, the name and materials of my unit. What came out of this was the new name, “Breaking Down Barriers” in which I would have students focus on the complexities of different types of barriers that were presented, both in the literature we would read, as well as within their own lives. The largest barrier that we would be continually exploring would be the idea of stereotyping, or labeling others. This barrier is one that all of my students could relate to on some level, and it piggy-backed off of our previous unit, by asking students to analyze and break down the dichotomy of “us vs. them” and “good vs. evil”. This unit also becomes important in breaking down barriers that could exist within 6th hour, because it pushes the students and myself to see past the labels that my students so tightly cling to as a sense of identity, and those which I may have imposed on students through my interactions with them and the other teachers in the building over the course of the year, and asks all of us to consider the consequences of such labels.
One of the considerations in planning this unit was how to set up a conceptual unit that would not only capture my students’ interests, but would build upon their previous knowledge, and would prepare them for the final assessment. I consulted Jim Burke’s book, The English Teacher’s Companion, when thinking about how to plan this unit and I took Burke’s advice to “begin with the end first” (255). This advice was also reinforced by my field instructor, Jim Fredricksen who has also advised me to start with the end first when planning. I asked myself Burke’s guiding questions: “What do you want students to have learned or done by the end of this unit? What is the guiding or essential question you want them to be able to answer by the end of the unit?” The responses to these questions were I wanted my students to be able to identify barriers in the texts that we would be reading and viewing, and to explore multiple perspectives and positions when thinking about how to overcome those barriers both within the texts, their own lives, and the wider world.
In addition to this, I also asked myself: how I could best reach my two focus students where they were at and help to support them in finding success? This also begged the question of what would success look like for each of these students? For me success for Jen meant connecting with her on a personal level and encouraging her to discuss more in class, and for her to know that I am behind her cheering her on. For Doug, my definition of success was to get him to be interested in the material, to capitalize on his need to move around and discuss and help him to channel that into class discussions that were on topic, as well as to raise his hand and wait to be called upon before speaking out. In addition to this, I also wanted to help him with his writing, especially in light of the final assessment that would be coming up at the end of the unit. And finally I also asked myself how I could extend the strategies and methods that I wished to employ with Doug and Jen in mind, to help all of my students to succeed by creating a unit that “is an evolving or emerging curriculum, but never a random one. [Instead one that] is structured to keep things moving forward while also circling back around at each step to check on students’ progress so that no one gets left behind” (Burke 266).
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Plan of Action:
As I indicated earlier, I turned to multiple resources when I began planning my unit, including Burke’s The English Teacher’s Companion in which he states: “Technology is fundamentally changing our notions about the role of the teacher and our relationship with the text” (319). Knowing that the main novel of the unit which I was required to teach, takes place in Afghanistan, and having a limited idea of our students’ knowledge of that area of the world, I set about researching and building a webquest for all of my 8th graders to do in preparation for reading The Breadwinner. The Michigan Curriculum Framework English Language Arts Standard 11 states that: “All students will define and investigate important issues and problems using a variety of resources, including technology, to explore and create texts” (http://www.michigan.gov... 18). Keeping this standard in mind, I created a webquest that asked students to:
§ use National Geographic Maps to find locations of cities in Afghanistan, as well as surrounding countries, and to fill those locations in on their own maps
§ compare life expectancy and literacy rates between different countries
§ read a poem written by a student, to answer questions based on articles
§ keep a vocabulary definitions page (with pictures of certain vocab words on the webquest)
§ create a comparison chart between my students’ lives in Fowlerville and Afghan children’s lives based on responses from the Afghan children through a Scholastic website
The webquest would be split into two days in the library, and it would be the first time all year that my 8th grade students would be able to leave the classroom and go to the computer lab (it is usually booked solid, the computers are slow so it can be difficult to use, and we have a limited number of computers).
Jen will benefit from doing the Webquest because it is a challenging assignment, yet it allows her to work at her own pace. This is something that she will enjoy because she is productive learner that enjoys not having to wait for the entire class to begin an activity. I also tried to incorporate activities such as the map activity and figuring out the differences between the life expectancy rates of various countries that would appeal to Jen’s love for math and concrete information. In addition to this I kept both Jen and Doug’s interests in mind when building this webquest, and tried to incorporate materials that would relate to their lives (age).
Doug will benefit from doing this webquest because he will enjoy getting out of the classroom and having a change of scenery. He will also benefit from working at his own pace; however, I plan to keep an eye on him to make sure that he is able to complete the work in a timely fashion. By checking in with him on a continuous basis, as well as with the other students, I hope to best meet his needs by providing encouragement to finish tasks, inquiring what is interesting to him, and taking steps to ensure that he stays on task. For example, if he is not staying on task or is getting other students off task, I will have him work at a computer on the other side of the room, away from his peers. Changing Doug’s seat and keeping him within my constant view are two strategies suggested by P. Susan Mamchak and Steven R. Mamchak in their book, Teacher’s Time Management Survival Kit.
Doug will benefit from the visuals and map activities because he likes to interpret visuals rather than read texts. While he will need to write down answers, all the answers are either, a word, phrase, or a couple sentences long at the maximum, so he will enjoy not having to write lengthy answers. Finally, this webquest will be of utmost importance especially for Doug because Smith and Whilhelm found that “boys would embrace literate activities, both inside and outside of school, that were fun, that possessed intrinsic and immediately functional value, and that connected to them and their lives” (142). By choosing materials that were of high interest and visually pleasing, I hope to create intrinsic motivation in Doug to learn about Afghanistan in order to front-load knowledge that will aid him while reading The Breadwinner.
One of the new routines that I would like to introduce during my lead teaching is daily journals. I feel that especially 6th hour (as well as my other hours) will benefit from having a routine to how class is started. Students will enter class and know that right away the first thing that they need to do is get out their journals or their Writer’s Handbooks (these are notebooks that they have been keeping all year in place of a grammar textbook. We provide them with lessons and examples that they complete and copy into their handbooks) depending on the day. We had been doing Writer’s Handbook lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays, therefore, I want to keep this schedule and add journal prompts that the students will answer on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. All of my students will benefit from this addition to our classroom routine because they will know exactly what they are expected to do, will have time to settle down in class quietly by writing and reflecting on the journal prompt (which will tie into our unit), and will be able to practice their writing skills in an informal way. This will also benefit Doug especially because it will give him a focus when he comes into class and it will allow him to practice his writing skills in short increments (3/4 page requirement).