Former Marine, Current Student, Future Teacher, but always a Dad!

The Approach

I went to Bright Ideas with an open mind and to be reluctantly honest, a Christmas like excitement. I looked forward to being in this academic setting with my fellow students and future peers. I think what I looked forward to the most was the chance to learn from educators who are putting their theories into practice in the classroom. I have been to many of these types of conferences in my experience as a football coach and my belief is that you try to take at least one thing from each session that you can use today or will help you in the future. It makes no sense to try and memorize everything that is being presented because you lose parts of it in recollection. So I just try and come away with a concept or technique that I can research later or add to my current philosophy today.  

Keynote: Jacqueline Woodson

Many times when you hear a speaker you get the sense that they are speaking down to you not sharing with you. This was not the case with Ms. Woodson. She not only seemed to be sharing with us but seemed to be connecting with us. As she spoke I found myself nodding my head and thinking, thats how I feel or I know what you mean. I couldn’t know what it was like to be a writer or a African American woman but she just invoked a sense of community into the room where we all felt connected to what she was saying. I am not sure if everyone experienced this same thing but I noticed others around me nodding also and the lady who say next to me at one point said “exactly” as Ms. Wooden was telling a personal experience, which is odd when you think about it.I tried to connect what she was saying to teaching and when she talked about her writing process I was able to think of it in not only her view but personally and how it would help me instruct. She talked about how the basics of a book just start with putting letters together and those letters create words and those word equal sentences. So with that in mind she just focuses on just writing that first paragraph and that the paragraph will lead to others. that sounds so simple but most of us don’t write that way but at least I have heard it and can try and do that when I write and might be able to give that same advice to a student someday.

Here are a couple other comments from ms. Woodson that I felt were important:

- Student need to understand the importance of reading when it comes to their writing. That you can’t write well if you don’t read often.
- That when the story falls apart is an important part of the process because it reveals where your writing needs work.
- When giving feedback to students or peers instead of using negative criticism, emphasize the positive and ask questions about the work. It will have the same affect.

Breakout Sessions

* Engaging Literature Lovers and Reluctant Readers Through Literature Circles

The emphasis in this session was to use literature circles and supplemented texts in a reader response influenced methodology to engage readers to view texts with a critical eye. This session was broken down into two parts. The first part delt with using books that are chosen by the student to supplement books that are part of the traditional canon. These books are viewed, interpreted, and criticised through prompted review sheets and theme related literature circles. I felt as though this would be a great tool in a larger learning unit. My concern would be the time constraints involved in doing it. The one thing I took from this session was that students and learn to view works that they are reading for pleasure in the same way they might interpret a classic and thus be able to discern the quality of different books. the second part of the session involved literature circles outside the classroom for Literature lovers. The presenter brought three high school students up front and asked them question about their dislikes and likes when it comes to reading. They discussed what they like about their literature circle and the processes they use when reading and writing. It was evident that these were very high achieving students that had talents for both writing and interpreting text. They all seemed to have an overall distain for the texts they are forced to read at school and when asked about whether they felt as though they would be able to learn from literature circles in their actual classroom they expressed a negative feeling about it. It was hard for me to see practical application of using these students as examples of the literature circle. To me they might even create problems in that environment.

* macBeth: Using Technology to Enhance the Teaching of Shakespeare 

I was very interested in this part of the conference but was a little disappointed with this presentation. The general concept was using technology as an approach to get students to embody and contextualize literature. The presentation offered two examples on how to do this. The first was using video equipment to have the the students create modern TV shows as a textual intervention method. The second was using powerpoint to create a social network, much like myspace, using the characters from the literature. Both of these ideas, in my opinion, are great approaches to having the students understand and internalize the text. The problem came in the implementation of the video project and the presentation. The video projects premise is a good one but it must be carried out in an organized, structured way. When examples were shown it was obvious that this project was a throw in to take up class periods at the end of a learning unit. The teacher gave vague guidelines and what seemed like little supervision. The end result was poor in quality and did not display understanding of the text. I would definitely use this in my classroom but would do it in a way that was much more curriculum oriented and classroom managed while still being student focused. what I really liked about this session was the use of PowerPoint as  social networking of the characters. The students were assigned their character at the beginning of the book and are given assignments when to post “blogs” or “comments” to there page. It gives them an opportunity to use technology they understand to display their view of the text. I was very impressed with this and will probably use a variation of it in my classroom.

Retrospect

I found this conference to be an extremely positive experience. While I might not have always agreed or understood what was being presented I was still able to think of how I could use parts of these sessions in my classroom. It made me really hopeful for my future experience as a teacher. I find these presenters inspirational in their enthusiasm and desire to reach and impact their students. I plan on joining NCTE as soon as possible based off of this experience and hope to get involved in some way in the future.