Starting Backwards to Move Forward
In my practicum, I’ve noticed a common statement: “School is a lot different than when we were students.” Education, and teaching, has changed over the years and rightfully so. The world has changed since many of us, even our youngest cohort members, have sat in the classrooms of our middle schools.
Most of us remember the days when teachers started with the title page of a dense textbook and moved forward until June. On “engaging” days, we partook in a craft or fun activity with only tangential relevance to our lessons that week. These days were usually signified by a craft tubby full of glue sticks or the rolling in of the good old VCR cart.
As Wiggins and McTighe point out, this type of planning doesn’t answer the questions that most students have: “What’s the point? What’s the big idea here? What does this help us understand or be able to do? To what does this relate? Why should we learn this?” (2005). We can design our lessons and teaching to respond to the disciplinary literacy needs of adolescents by making our teaching (and therefore our students’ learning) meaningful, adaptable, and accessible.
Making Learning Meaningful
When we’re intentional, our students can know our intentions and create meaning.
To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. That learning process comes easiest to those of us who teach who also believe that there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred; who believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin (hooks, 1994).
Backwards design and focusing on results rather than content ensures that instruction can support skills that students need inside school and beyond. By focusing on results and designing instruction to reach those end goals, we can outline the skills that they need (both short- and long-term “what’s the point?”) and build inquiry (“what’s the big idea?”) into our daily lessons. Under this plan, instruction has been focused on answering the “so what” and “why” questions that are often on the tips of our students tongues. Besides teaching content and ensuring that students are literate within that content, we can plan for more higher order thinking to build adaptable skills and teach students how to learn, not what to learn.
We live in a content- and leisure-rich society. At any given moment in class, as an adult with what I like to consider average restraint and discipline, I can list 40 other things that I would rather be doing. Netflix series to binge, internet mindless browsing, glorious naps, hikes…I’m getting distracted. Our students, tiny developing humans with limited self-control and changing brains, can do the same. Our students are critical thinkers — critically cynical thinkers, as illustrated in this Calvin and Hobbes comic above. How can we guide them to meaningful, productive, and challenging thinking? By making lessons meaningful and showing the larger picture, we can, if we’re being honest with ourselves, trick critical and resistive learners into learning. As Frey and Fisher illustrate, motivation to learn is often linked with needing developmentally appropriate and meaningful lessons (2010).
Practically, designing interactive lessons surrounding an inquiry question and keeping key understandings and evidence of understandings in mind can ensure that our teaching is meaningful. As McTighe, Seif, and Wiggins point out, “such an approach to teaching and learning is more apt to engage the learner and yield meaningful, lasting learning than traditional fact-based and procedure-based lecture, recitation, or textbook instruction” (2004). Varying methods can support this. From Frey and Fisher’s group work (2010) to using poetry to connect with student voice (Gutzmer and Wilder 2012), teachers can choose what type of practical instruction will work for their own students. Not only does this increase engagement and critical thinking, it increases demonstrated learning and test scores.
Making Learning Adaptable
In teaching students how to learn and not what to learn, we plan for a changing world.
Our world is rapidly changing, and students need skills to keep up. That’s not to say that the “old school” skills aren’t valid. There is something valid and worthwhile in being able to sit still and read printed, tangible text for an extended period of time just as it is valid to be able to critically analyze new media. The traditional skills have a place within our schools and therefore within our instructional design. With backwards design, we can focus on the disciplinary result aligned with standards (for example, students should be able to cite evidence from a text) and go from there. As genius, future ph.D. candidates Danielle Atkins and Marilyn Pugh stated during our first lecture, “everything is ‘text’” (Foundations of Reading and Writing lecture, August 24, 2017). Teachers, with this results-oriented approach can ensure that students are evaluating multimodal text — from print to digital to video to audio to future unimagined media.
Teaching students metacognitive skills are a great way to link the “old” literacy skills to the “new.” When students are able to think about thinking, they can bridge what they know to what they need to know by thinking about how they know. The same metacognitive skills needed to read a paper text can be used to decipher the narrative of a podcast. They can break apart “text” elements to strategically learn how to “read” new mediums. These skills, as Swinehart explains in Plaut, “teach our brains to adjust to the different demands of various types of texts” (2009). As teachers, we can help students by modeling that metacognitive analysis and scaffolding as we introduce and work through new mediums and new “texts.” Because students are digital natives, we often assume that this will come naturally without assistance from teachers; however, while this may be the case sometimes and in those situations we will stand back and learn from our students, even tech-savvy students may need help applying different skills or using tech strategically and academically. As Nichole Pickard questions in the video above, if a student does not possess digital skills to analyze and access online sources, are they considered literate? When technology evolves, our definition of literacy can evolve. Therefore, we must adapt to support literacy needs because those “needs” will always change throughout time.
Making Learning Accessible (Culturally and Academically)
In order to meet the needs of our students, we have to make learning accessible for all students.
The best way to make sure that lessons are accessible — both culturally and academically — is to know our students as whole individuals. William Ayers’ illustrates (pun intended) this concept in his graphic novel, To Teach, shown above. When we focus on our students as whole individuals instead of their deficits or differences, we can learn from them and focus on where they are and what they bring to our classrooms (1993). As Freire explained, moving away from a deficit-model can build student confidence and agency, making them able to access learning, and in turn, support and respond to their literacy needs (1970). Structuring our curriculum to be inclusive and moving toward a critical pedagogy ensures that learning is accessible for all students and their academic and literacy needs are being met.
Academically, we can tailor our lessons and assessments to make them accessible and meet the individual literacy needs of our students. Assessments, formative and summative, can be differentiated to show student learning, accessible for each student. The main goal is getting our students to climb, regardless of whether they learn to climb a step ladder, a tree, or Mount Everest. We have to make lessons accessible with guided instruction and constant real-time adjustments (Fisher, Frey, & Lapp, 2010). These help us know our students better and what they’re ready for to scaffold and adapt our lessons accordingly. Providing student voice and choice can help them incorporate their culture and identities, especially if they fall outside of the dominative culture. This not only makes lessons meaningful for that student (and hopefully others), but it makes learning accessible through inclusive teaching practices.
CONCLUSION:
Let me repeat it. We can design our lessons and teach to respond to the disciplinary literacy needs of adolescents by making our lessons meaningful, adaptable, and accessible.
Throughout these inquiries, we’ve learned all about literacy: different views of literacy, the varying discourses our students will bring and recognizing their literacy needs (and strengths) because of that, and finally, designing units and lessons to incorporate and support literacy, broadly and within our respective disciplines.
Everything that we’ve learned, in my opinion, can be organized within the framework of making lessons meaningful, adaptable, and accessible.
- Building lessons using gradual release makes learning accessible (academically) by meeting students where they are and working towards building independence.
- The choice texts, Gee, and Revisionist History podcast showed us the importance of making learning accessible (culturally) and adapting to incorporate different and progressive discourses outside of our disciplinary canon and traditional forms of disciplinary literacy into the lesson.
- Organizing lessons around inquiry makes it meaningful.
- Backwards design makes sure lessons are meaningful (working toward a specific goal) and adaptable (the final skill is more important than the medium used, which accommodates changing mediums and technologies).
Finally, meeting the literacy needs of our student isn’t in isolation, but it’s part of a larger strategy for good teaching. Meeting the needs of our students, literacy or otherwise, is our responsibility within the field of education. As Angela Davis stated above, education is to “imagine better ways of living and evolving worlds.” Designing curriculum and lessons and delivering instruction that is adaptable, meaningful, and accessible in all domains is a catalyst for democratic and societal change toward better possibilities.
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Sources:
Ayers, W. (1993). To teach: The journey of a teacher [online digital excerpts]. New York: Teachers College Press.
Davis, A. (2016, May 22). Angela Davis on the role of education [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btlHsuRXkTY.
hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom New York : Routledge.
Frey, N., & Fisher, D. (2010). Motivation requires a meaningful task. English Journal, 100(1), 30–36.
Fisher, D., Frey, N., & Lapp, D. (2010). Responding when students don’t get it. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54, 56–60.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Penguin Books.
Gutzmer, C. and Wilder, P. (2012). “Writing so people can hear me”: Responsive teaching in a middle school poetry unit. Voices from the Middle, 19(3):37–44.
McTighe, J. Seif, E. & Wiggins, G. (2004). You can teach for meaning. Educational Leadership, 62(1), 26–31.
Pickard, N. (2017, October 15). Edutopia big thinkers: Nichole Pickard [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/edutopia/videos/10155919206679917/.
Plaut, S. (2009). The right to literacy in secondary schools: Creating a culture of thinking. New York: Teachers College Press.
