Telling that player to catch the ball would have meant nothing. Reprimanding the player for the error would not have resolved the problem in the future. Good coaches know they have to tell kids more than WHAT to do.
Effective instruction and feedback involves telling players HOW. "As the ball hits the glove, squeeze your fingers inside the glove. As you see the ball approaching the glove, mirror the angle and heights of your glove arm with your throwing arm. Follow the smack of the ball in the pocket with your palm to cover the ball." And we also tell the other players to back up the person who called the ball in case she drops it or it gets by her.
"What are you teaching?" I ask. "To Kill a Mockingbird." No. No you aren't. I try to convince folks that our job is not to teach specific texts. Most people don't know what I'm talking about and think I just hate The Cannon. I posted this about a year ago on my facebook page.
As I ran by the girl's softball field yesterday, I think I finally figured out how to explain what I mean.
When we are teaching ELAR, it's easy to be the coach who asks the player to catch the ball (to comprehend) and tells them they are wrong when they don't (tell you Romeo's tragic flaw). Yet, when our questions and discussions are solely about the content or ideas in the text, that's exactly what we are doing.
Here's an example of what I'm talking about. There's this guy named Kohlberg who developed scenarios to determine the developmental level of a person's morality. In the language arts class I was observing, they were reading about it here: https://www.commonlit.org/en/texts/the-kohlberg-dilemmas
The teacher had written the objective on the board "evaluate how the author's use of language informs and shapes the perceptions of readers" (2017 English IV, 8D). Originally, the teacher was reading the text with kids and talking about their perceptions about the moral dilemmas represented in the text. They were so engaged! With a scenario like this, wouldn't you be?
"Joe is a fourteen-year-old boy who wanted to go to camp very much. His father promised him he could go if he saved up the money for himself. So Joe worked hard at his paper route and saved up the forty dollars it cost to go to camp, and a little more besides. But just before camp was going to start, his father changed his mind. Some of his friends decided to go on a special fishing trip, and Joe's father was short of the money it would cost. So he told Jo to give him the money he had saved from the paper route. Joe didn't want to give up going to camp, so he thinks of refusing to give his father the money" (Form A, Dilemma I, The Kohlberg Dilemmas, 1958).
The conversations were rich and vibrant. The kids were connecting to all kinds of ideas. The teacher was so proud that students had all kinds of differing perceptions. I was pleased with their rich discussions, use of text evidence, and engagement.
I asked, "How is the author using language to shape the perceptions of his readers?" The response: "Well, everyone has their own perceptions and interpretations of the text." Well. No. that's not the point. The knowledge and skills statement for this standard talks about using critical inquiry to analyze the author's choices and how they influence and communicate meaning.
To really teach this TEK, we have to unpack the TEK and the TEXT a little further. What we are asked to do is MORE than simply comprehend the text and react to it with our opinion.
A portion of the knowledge and skills statement for this strand of Author's Purpose and Craft asks students to use "critical inquiry to analyze the authors' choices and how they influence and communicate meaning". If we are going to analyze the author's choices, we have to go back and look at what Kohlberg's purpose for writing these dilemmas.
When we look at the introduction of the common lit article...
...we learn that Kohlberg wrote these scenarios to test his subjects. So I have to change my question from, "How does Kohlberg use language to shape the perception of his readers?" to "How did Kohlberg use language to shape and test the perception of his audience - his dissertation test subjects?" He wrote the scenarios to elicit the participants' stages of moral development1 As a matter of fact, he structured them purposefully, and embedded them with connotatively powerful words to elicit the values he wished to juxtapose so that he could test how a person would make decisions when their values clash.You see, we have to examine the author's purpose. We have to pinpoint the audience. We have to discern the structure of how he lays out the text. We have to weigh the words he chose. These scenarios are purposefully structured and worded to cause a person to struggle with their values. As readers, we need to be very aware of how writers structure and word their messages so that we understand how the writers are moving us and changing us with the way in which they have written.
In the document below, I have taken apart the fist scenario. First, I divide each section and name the parts (text structure). Second, I highlight and annotate for meaning and connotation of words. I label the highlighted text by the values Kohlberg triggers with his specific language. Third, I respond to each structure and language to infer what values each is supposed to trigger for the Kohlberg's test subjects.
Annotated Dilemma Be sure to look at the comments and replys in the margin for each highlighted section.
Of course, each dilemma is worthy of discussion. But those IDEAS, the dilemmas, are NOT what we are teaching in ELAR. Reading this common lit article was SO much more than having a discussion about what you would do in each situation. So much more. We are teaching kids how to read, critique, and analyze what authors say and how they get that done.
Of course it is fun to debate whether or not Joe should obey his father. Of course it is important to debate ethical issues such as obedience to a tyrant. But it is even more critically and morally important to teach students how to use the tools of text structure and genre characteristics, connotative and loaded terms, and author's purpose and audience to look deeper into how that author influences and deepens your thoughts about a topic or idea.
Don't be fooled, we do need kids to catch that ball and comprehend the ideas. We don't need kids to drop the ball and miss nuanced messages. But we aren't going to get there simply by questioning kids through the ideas in the text, praising them for their correct answers, and telling them why their answers are wrong.
We have to - we MUST - teach them HOW to:
- squeeze the glove closed with considerations of author's purpose and targeted audience,
- mirror the catching hand with text structures and genre characteristics,
- and cover that ball with considerations of how writers purposefully select words to achieve their purposes.
