Rebecca J. Hickey
As a Library Media Specialist at Conte West Hills Magnet School, a K-8 facility, my place in the school and in the curriculum is not static. We are a social studies-based city magnet, and as such, have an economically and racially diverse student body from all over the city. Our teaching staff is comprised of 27 classroom teachers and approximately 15 additional teachers of special subjects and special education. It is a media specialist's responsibility to know and support the school's curriculum - all grades, all subjects. I welcome this responsibility as it affords me the opportunity to work with all the staff and students. I am also provided the opportunity to view the curriculum as a whole entity and identify areas that can be extended.
Being a library media specialist is different from being a classroom teacher in many respects. Many of us, in fact, call ourselves Teacher-Librarian in an attempt to further define our role within the school community. While we do teach to whole classes, small groups, and individual students, there is also an extensive program to be run. The library media program encompasses not only classroom work, but also reading incentive programs, non-print media manipulation, and administrative tasks. The primary role of the library media specialist is to teach the process of learning to the students. We are usually involved in research tasks, fact-finding missions and separating the useful information from the useless.
In New Haven the Library Media Services department has its own curriculum, just as any other department. However, our curriculum differs in that our concentration is not content specific, but rather is the process of attaining the content knowledge. Information seeking strategies based upon the Big6™ Information Problem-Solving method designed by Mike Eisenberg and Bob Berkowitz drives the city's library media programs.
The Big6™ is a series of six steps applied to an information problem, ranging from grand projects such as a research paper to a one-page biographical study. Our goal in applying the Big6™ is to encourage students to become effective seekers and users of information. When students master this technique they are information literate. The process of information problem-solving begins with task definition. This can be deceptively difficult. It requires that students are clear about what is expected of them, and that they know exactly what the assignment is. Once students know what they need to do, identifying sources, gathering information, and using the information are next in the process. As the media specialist in a collaborative setting, I work with teachers on the synthesis, or product, that includes the information. Often, I am also involved with the evaluation of the product and the process.
The library media curriculum cannot be completed without the subject area curriculum and the content materials cannot be taught effectively without the process. Classroom teachers and media specialists work in a symbiotic relationship, each needing what the other offers in order to meet the educational needs of the students.
I intend to create a Poetry Workshop for students in grades 6 and 7. The media center is flexibly scheduled, meaning that classes are not set for specific days and times. Because of this schedule, I do not have the opportunity to create and execute a workshop like this for use during the regular school day. Fortunately, the New Haven school district provides opportunities in the Extended Day Academy. The Academy is designed to enrich curricular areas outside of regular school hours. Extended Day is open to any student who chooses to participate, as well as students who are recommended by a teacher for further academic enrichment.
The students I will teach in this workshop will be a mix of the two categories. However, I can request that certain criteria be considered when a student signs up for the program. For example, this program would not suit a student who is not on or very near grade level in reading. We will be studying some poems by authors whose ideas and themes may take some work to understand, and students will need to concentrate on the message versus decoding the words.
While the focus of the workshop is, of course, the reading, writing, and understanding of poetry, there is another underlying goal to my project. Middle school students need guidance in enhancing their ability to think on a higher level. Making connections, drawing conclusions, and believing in their abilities of observation, seems inherently difficult for this age group. The very nature of adolescence is self-doubt. I believe that it is an additional responsibility of middle school teachers and staff to help students find their voices and encourage them to believe in what they know to be true - and trust it. Teaching this through poetry allows for an atmosphere of flexibility and experimentation that students may find comforting.
Last year, as I taught a lesson to a class of 7th graders, this lack of confidence became apparent. Students were working on a study of African countries. Their task was to answer a series of questions from various research sources. One of the questions was what the people of the country ate. After reading about the agricultural structure and economy of the country, one student could not answer. We went over the text together, and I lingered on the information the student needed to answer the question without directly pointing it out. "It doesn't say" was the student's constant reply. After a time, even with additional coaxing, the student was not making the connection between what was grown and harvested, and the staples of the country's diet. An exact answer was not written in the material the student read, and so drawing a conclusion was a necessity. After explaining how the question could have been answered with the information given, the student responded with: "Well, that's what I thought, but I didn't want to lie."
After this incident it was crystal clear that at this stage in middle school academic development, early 7th grade, students are very hesitant to know what they know, and trust it enough to present it to a teacher or share with another student. The refrain seems to go: If it's not written in the book, it can't be true. Therefore, the students themselves have demonstrated a true need for the teaching of information seeking strategies and higher order thinking skills.
In
Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry
Kenneth Koch speaks about how some poetry "lies." His point is that what a poet puts into his or her poem does not have to be truth as accepted by those outside of the poem (64). A poet puts into lines that which he or she feels to be true. I would suggest an addendum. What a reader draws from a poem, the emotions that are drawn out, the implications of a poem to its reader are not a lie either.
Dealing in such territory as personal truths through poetry, I believe, will help students to find it within themselves to trust what they do not see in a text, and rather what they know, intuitively. Making an honest judgment about a poem, someone else's or one's own, is a vital element to the cycle of learning. Very often, it is in the evaluation of work that one gains the most for one's efforts. Deciding the criteria for evaluation and critiquing based on those criteria is most valuable. Unfortunately, it is also the part of the cycle where most students are likely to feel a loss of control and unsure of their work. Oftentimes students are not involved in this process and we, as teachers do a great disservice to them because of it. They have nothing vested in the arrangement. Students offer up an assignment, many times not having a clear sense of what is expected, and we offer back a grade and comments based on that work. Neither party gets anthing of real value from the exchange.
Thinking critically, developing the ability to make rational conclusions, and evaluating the information we gather have become benchmarks for a successful, educated person. In an essay by Kathleen Cotton, titled "Teaching Thinking Skills" she observes that:
In the twentieth century, the ability to engage in careful, reflective thought has been viewed in various ways: as a fundamental characteristic of an educated person, as a requirement for responsible citizenship in a democratic society, and, more recently, as an employability skill for an increasingly wide range of jobs (1).
Learning to view material and information on a level higher than simply words and facts on a page, beyond face value, is a task that does not come naturally to many. Thankfully, it is a skill that can be taught and nurtured through practice. This workshop is designed to aid the student's movement through the process of learning to think creatively and independently using the Big6™ which is based upon Bloom's Taxonomy of Higher Order Thinking Skills.
Benjamin Bloom designed a ladder of cognitive activity. There are six levels of cognition from ranging from simple to complex, concrete to abstract. Base Knowledge is the lowest level of thinking skill. This, essentially, is the memorization of facts. Listing, naming, recalling, and recognizing are tasks at this level of involvement. Comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation are then added step by step to the learning process. The Big6™ mirrors these concepts, but in language that is easy for students to learn and recall. The Big6 can also be reduced to the Super3: Beginning, Middle, and End, for younger students.
The seventh grade student I mentioned previously was caught at the third step of the information problem-solving process. He had located the source he needed, a reference volume about African countries, but had not completely engaged in the source. He was reading, yes, but not fully understanding and using the information he was given. This is not an uncommon phenomenon. It is at this stage in the 'research' process where plagiarism is very often committed. Students hover around the right words and phrases on the page and write it down, hoping that what they've written will have a kernel of what the teacher is looking for.
It is a rare opportunity that I get to work on my own with just the kids. I am seeking ownership of a project and the chance to work something through beginning to end. However, I am taking into consideration the grade levels at which poetry is not a concentration, and the curricular requirements for Language Arts.