Small Strokes Big Oaks

With all the talk about differentiated instruction and student onus for learning in our district right now, it’s starting to seem like we’re trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.  Don’t get me wrong; I think differentiated instruction is a super great initiative and one that should be followed.  In fact, when I started learning about differentiated instruction, it just gave me a name (and some legitimacy) to what I had been doing all along.  I also think it is really important to try to reach each student at his/her level and use their diverse interests and backgrounds to create interesting and dynamic lessons.

However, I feel that some teachers just want to be given templates for lessons or projects that they can fill in for their needs and say that they’re following the latest initiative.  Even I, at first, was so used to being handed templates for lessons (CRISS training, anyone?) that I expected the same from this initiative.  Instead, as a district, we’re learning about differentiated instruction instead of plugging lessons into pre-planned templates.  And this is great, because there should be many factors to successful teaching, not simple project templates that get the job done.

This all got me to thinking: What dictates how you teach?  For me, personally, my focus seems to be on student interest and level of engagement.  The subject (literature or writing process, in my case as an English teacher) does not serve much purpose except that I must choose something that will be interesting to my students.  After that, it seems that I must focus on lessons that get my students up and out of their seats, talking, moving, and thinking critically.  For others, however, the focus may be on the subject, which may dictate a different method of teaching.

There is a definite disconnect between what I’m learning about English studies in grad school and what I actually see happening with English studies in my classroom.  For example, we spend a good deal of time doing and talking about how to do close readings of texts, but I rarely do close readings of texts in my classroom – partly because it is boring and partly because the texts I choose do not lend themselves to close readings.

Take Catcher in the Rye for example.  I just finished teaching this novel, and there was not a close reading in sight.  In fact, any discussions we had were broad-sweeping, general discussions about symbols and confusing plot lines, along with lots of predictions and theories as to why Holden did what he did or why he said what he said, etc.  Occasionally, we talked about a certain quote in-depth, but to me, it was much more important that the students had a critical understanding of the historical context and greater themes of the novel, so my lessons centered around those.

Speak is another example of this.  As a YA novel, the passage itself doesn’t merit much close reading.  But it is a great way to open up discussions with students about high school, feeling marginalized, and rape culture.

However, I know several teachers who teach a lot of poetry and other texts that lend themselves to close reading and analytical essays – two things I don’t do much of.  So I wonder, when they assign differentiated projects, does that almost seem out of context to their students?  Is that because the texts don’t lend themselves toward these types of projects?  Or is it because the teachers don’t normally do these types of projects?  Or maybe both?

How about you?  What do you find informs your teaching methods?