Currently, if I present my students with a particular text, selected from the many genres -- novel, short story, play, or poem -- and ask them for discourse on it, their immediate discussion would be of its plot. This discussion would not even occur without my first reading the text to them. Many of my students are English Language Learners (ELL). As a teacher, I try to help them form a general understanding of the text through Socratic questioning because orally they are very apt. They are encouraged to discuss the events of the story, perhaps in sequential order using graphic organizers as an aid. I often ask them to consider the structure and organizational patterns in the story, trying to bring them to an understanding of why an author chooses one genre over another. I might ask them to consider literary elements such as plot, setting, characterization, personification, irony, and metaphor that have been integrated within the text. After recognizing and discussing their own personal, cultural, and social mores and experiences, they are asked to consider how these might be represented and embedded within the specific texts and why, unless they apply these understandings to these selected texts, it may have no meaning. These reader-response connections and analysis are emphasized on the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT), within the New Haven School District Goals for elementary and middle schools, and later on the Connecticut Academic Performance Test (CAPT) for Connecticut high schools. Yet my student’s discussions are often rudimentary. Seldom do they analyze, synthesize, or evaluate in any depth. This has been their experience with analysis of the written word. They would not examine it past the story line without extensive guidance. Understanding why it is important that young people in the inner city experience the traditional literary genre, the “classic canon,” as well as other kinds of narrative forms, in more diversified ways, is a vitally important question that needs a solid answer. Convincing my students that reading is necessary as a source of information and enjoyment is, very often, a hard sell. This does not mean that they are not capable of coming to recognize what reading can offer.
It is a challenge in today’s educational environment to convince teachers that the pedagogical issues of standards-based teaching, where state standards drive the creation and development of curriculum, and differentiation, where the needs of each student must be the main concern of curriculum development, are not mutually exclusive. Teachers are inundated with the notion that assessment and standards must drive instruction. Some feel that standards throw up huge impediments when it comes to differentiated instruction. Differences in learning styles, readiness, experiences, and interests seemingly impose mountains to overcome in our high-stakes testing environment. Prescription is often used to describe today’s race to compete in education. But I believe there is no contradiction between effective standards-based instruction and differentiation. With a learning environment that is student-centered, complex in terms of resources and methods used, open and accepting, and highly mobile, in terms of student movement and desk placement; with content modification including complex and abstract relationships, and a variety of methods of inquiry; and finally where process modification includes higher levels of creative thinking, variable pacing, open-endedness and group interaction, most students can learn a great deal. Curriculum tells us
what
to teach, differentiation tells us
how.
This
how
is the key to instilling the love of learning, the desire to dig deeper and demand more of everything they read.
The purpose of this unit is to bridge the gap between my student’s cursory examination of a text and a more highly developed assessment, in which they dig deeper and demand more of what they experience. It is my goal to get them to a place where they can consider a piece of literature on several levels, being able to “unpeel” the structure and expose the complexities and sophisticated nuances of the text. In other words, they will see and appreciate literature as a multilayered construct of meaning. I will use an interdisciplinary, differentiated modality of instruction to accomplish my goals.