This course has been a fun and
challenging experience in my teacher education program. More so than any other
course, I feel as though I have learned some tangible methods that I can bring
into the classroom to make me a better teacher. I truly feel sorry for non-English
education majors who don’t have a chance to take this before jumping into the
teacher education program. In this course we completed the large project unit
plan, a mini-lesson on one of the required reading list books, and a book talk
on a book from outside this class. The unit plan, although the most stressful
and time consuming, was by far the greatest introduction to me of how teachers
should write and prepare a lesson unit. As a teacher in practice I would
probably not write a TPA formatted lesson plan for each day, but there is some
value in having a unit already designed and ready to be used in the class. I
thought the mini-lesson was an interesting way to interact with the required
reading for the course, but the lessons and the teaching wasn’t exactly what I wanted
from the class and I will probably not use any of the lessons that were taught
in my future career. The book talk was a good idea in practice, however the way
I approached it was to pick a new book that I haven’t read before and read it
for the class. This wasn’t very smart because the new book added much more time
in reading that I could have spent on doing other homework. All-in-all I thought
that the class was well put together, only that many of the activities were
repetitive in nature.
The theories and concepts that we
discussed in class, including the two texts that we read for the class were
very well done and I learned a lot from reading the texts. I really enjoyed
Tovani’s book and Gallagher’s as well. Both books introduced me to new ways of
thinking about literature. Many times in classes we are dealing with fictional students
who are doing our assignments we make and the lessons that we plan and turn in
for credit. While reading these books I actually was able to picture myself as
an English teacher. The books really made me think about reading in the high
school and how far away from actual reading the schools have come. Being a
struggling reader myself throughout much of my school experience, I found that the
methods that the two authors introduced would have been fun and engaging as a
reader. Much of my reading in high school was about reading the book and then
taking a multiple choice test at the end of the book. I think that these two
books have really opened my eyes to the reading problem that we have in the
schools, and how we can get students reading meaningfully, not just for show.
The participation in the class was
important for understanding the materials, however I found that much of the time
during class, we were able to do other things while also participating in the
class. Having only ten students in the class (on a full day) makes it very
difficult to get a large group conversation going. Other than having very few
people in the class, I found that much of the content became repetitive for a
while. Tovani talked about how reading was important for students, and Gallagher
talked about how reading is important for students too. Although some of the
materials overlapped a bit, the class discussions that we had were important as
far as bouncing ideas off of each other and having lively talks about
censorship and group discussion.
