Going Backward

This week’s readings brought back memories of my first year as a Reading Specialist at a middle school in Woodbridge, VA while I was completing my master’s project at Virginia Tech.  I met my new students (small group of 12 students sitting around a large oval table) with great excitement. I was ready to teach! I had my extensive and detailed lesson plans, activities, and selected texts ready to begin the semester. There was a small problem; I was ready to teach, but my students were not ready to learn.  No matter how hard I tried, they resisted by turning their backs to me and engaging in a conversation with each other. I went home that day sad until a great idea hit me. They were not having fun. I spent all night coming up with new activities that incorporated fun games to engage them in my lessons. I returned the next day to face even a greater opposition. This time I was crushed, because I had no more tricks up my sleeves. I found one of my students – let us call him Travis – sitting in my chair that had wheels. I asked him repeatedly to move out of my seat. He looked at me each time and turned his back to me. With each time I repeated myself, I became angrier and angrier. One of the other students stopped talking to Travis and asked me, “Why can’t Travis sit in your seat?” That was when I realized that there was a war between us and they were winning. I said, “You are absolutely correct. Travis has every right to sit in that comfortable chair.” I walked around the table and I sat in Travis’ uncomfortable chair. The room became extremely quiet. I had everyone’s attention as they stared at me. I pushed my lessons, activities, readings, and fun games away from me on the table. I said, “Okay, let us get to know each other!” For the rest of the class, we just talked. I became a part of the learning community. They took me in as they opened up about their lives, about their “hate” for reading, and about their distrust in authority.  I began to individually interview them, which served as part of my informal assessment. I unlocked the truth behind their defiance. My initial goal of developing strategic readers was side tracked. I had to go backwards in order to achieve my original goal. I had to reach them, their intrinsic motivation, before I could teach them.

Did I achieve my “enduring understanding”? I believe I did. Once I gained their trust by joining them in the community of learners, they were open to learning what I had to teach. By the end of the semester, they were all strategic readers. My “enduring understanding” was to help my students become life-long readers. To achieve that goal, they had to read strategically and critically for comprehension and engagement.  Without their consent to learn, I would not have been able to achieve the goal.

I couldn’t help but to think of the last two weeks of our course on Nat Turner when I read about the idea of uncoverage – “It’s depth over breath.” (Sample, page 2 of Teaching for Enduring Understanding) We dug down deep as we uncovered Nat Turner’s confession. Initially, I looked through the pictures in the Nat Turner and thought to myself, “This is easy!” Then, for the next two weeks, we used the five steps of Wiggins and McTighe to unearth, analyze, question, prove, and generalize Nat Turner. As Sample state, “It’s tempting to characterize uncoverage as ‘depth’ and coverage as ‘breadth’.” “…breadth is a key component of uncoverage, the weft to the warp of understanding. Breadth means connecting disparate ideas, finding new ways to represent what is uncovered, and extending one’s conceptual reach to the implication of the material. Taken together, depth and breadth mean moving away from the prepackaged observations and readily digestible interpretation that go hand-in-hand with coverage.” (Sample, page 1 and 2 of Teaching for Uncoverage rather than Coverage) We uncovered Nat Turner with depth and breadth!