Putting into Practice

Out of all of the weekly readings that I have had for this class this semester, this set of chapters has probably been my favorite, soley because it deals with not just what we should be doing in the classroom, but how. I must admit that I have been somewhat frustrated with these readings thus far, as well as the pedagogy that I've read for other classes this semester, because so much of it tells instead of showing what to do -- even if that is the main message of the text. Seems a wee bit contradictory to me. At any rate, I liked the that the authors, especially Anderson, detailed their strategies through their own lessons in practice. This step-by-step process helped me visualize some ways to model grammar in the classroom.

Delving into the lessons themselves, I was surprised by how in-depth the integration between grammar and text actually was. I suppose this is my degenerate, grammar-severed-from-meaning education muddying my conception of what a lesson ought to look like. But at the same time, I can see how you could wrap up a text that students are studying and pull instruction out of that much, much more effectively than examples. This approach really appeals to my love of literature; I can visualize getting students to find example passages in a sentence-underlining frenzy.

Another technique which appealed to me was the keeping of writer's notebooks. Since I can see students being initially resistant to freewriting on a regular basis, perhaps a way to get them interested would be to have them come up with topics and write them down on slips of paper, collect them, and keep them in a bowl or box. Then, each day, a student can draw out a slip to determine what they will be writing about that day. A former teacher of mine used a technique similar to this; she kept a "no-questions-asked question box" which students could fill prior to a test, and then part of our review consisted of doing activities around student questions. The question box was useful because often what other students put in it were common questions that we were either too afraid or didn't think to ask about, and it was empowering because what we were learning what we wanted to know.

I also like the passage where Anderson talks about how to explain the use of grammatical conventions when students are keeping their writers notebooks. The comparison to grammar "rules" to "rules" found  in the everyday places. Furthermore, I like that grammar is emphasized as something to help clarify meaning in writing, rather than something that is arbitrary and nitpicky. Teaching students that grammar rules act best as guidelines, or tools, depending upon the circumstances, might help clear up confusion in students about what they are supposed to do with all of their "brushstrokes."

Finally, one thing that I'm realizing about this approach is that it takes a lot more work in the planning stages. I'm learning about Learning Focused Schools (LFS) in another one of my classes right now, and I think that that method is well-suited to preparing grammar lessons or workshops. In short, you start out with an end goal for your students and then plan lessons, then create activities, all of which gradually lead up to successful completion of that goal. If the end goal here is to, for example, model and apply varied sentence structures, you could plan lessons that do that through examining specific passages in an assigned text.