Response to

Overarching question

To get young students to reflect on a text, it is important for them to ‘revisit’ that text multiple times in the context of different of different lessons.  This is what I hypothesized after the Literacy lesson that I co-planned and taught for this integrated assignment. I read a book to the students that I thought offered rich opportunity for personal reflection and connection-making but which fell flat because, I think, there was not enough preliminary discussion to acquaint the students with the text.  The story, Last Stop on Market Street, is about a young boy and his grandmother who live in the city and take the bus across town to volunteer at a soup kitchen.  It’s filled with examples of many daily, little things that make life in the city special.  The lesson goal was for the kids to pay attention to their thinking and to find in the book a connection to their own life.  Even though I modeled my own personal connections to the book, and talked about what a personal connection is, I came out of the lesson feeling like the kids had not only missed the point of the reflective activity but also missed the point of the story.  It struck me that before we could get to reflection, and personal connections, the kids would have benefited from some very straightforward discussion of the basics—the book’s characters, setting, and plot.

 

Even though it does not explicitly call for reflection, the ReadyGEN curriculum promotes revisiting, which in my experience creates conditions that encourage reflection.  I’ve seen that they build in five or six lessons on each picture book selection.  These lessons revolve around the same text and have very straightforward goals around story elements, such as: Lesson 1: Identify the Main Events in a Story, Lesson 2: Connect Words and Pictures in a Story, Lesson 3: Identify Details About the Setting, Lesson 4: Ask and Answer Questions about Key Details.  The curriculum moves to another picture book for a few lessons, but then swings back to the first book, revisiting the earlier text with additional straightforward goals in content: Lesson 10: Identifying Characters, Setting and Events and Lesson 11: Relating Words & Pictures in a Text.  I’ve also noted that the writing tasks included in these ‘Revisit’ lessons ask the students to revise the writing created in the earlier lesson. 

 

We’ve used this curriculum in my classroom and I believe it helps the students absorb ideas and information, which in turn helps them engage in reflection.  For example, in a second read of a book about a fictional penguin family, students were able to easily formulate many questions about penguins.  Two experienced educators in our classroom were so impressed by our kindergartners’ abilities and commented that ‘they never would have been able to come up with those questions if it had been a first read.’  It became clear that with a second and third read, our students were able to focus on ‘bigger ideas in the story and deeper questions,’ as Harvey and Goudvis claim in Strategies That Work.  Had the students not revisited the text, ‘a basic understanding of the text might have eluded many of them.’  (Harvey & Goudvis, P. 51) 

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Revisiting is a valuable tool even in math and science—where the subject of the lesson is not a conventional text like I describe above. Regardless of subject area, I think it would be difficult to build knowledge or memory in something if it’s not been referred back to and fleshed out.  An example of this is our classroom pet turtle, Todd.  Our students circled around a plastic bin and looked at him early in the year when he was moved into the room.  The students loved it.  But since then, there’s been no attempt to discuss him or to look at him or to learn anything about him.  For this reason, I felt that my small group science lesson should be based on the class turtle.  I wanted the kids to experience him and get the chance to think about him.  Similarly, I was asked to do a read aloud on tarantulas around Halloween time, but apart from the single book on spiders, there was not any other learning that took place around spiders.  It felt as if the lesson had vanished into space.  In my fieldwork, I’ve felt frustrated about the missed opportunities for building on themes and making connections between lessons.

 

In Making Sense: Teaching and Learning Mathematics with Understanding, Hiebert et al claim that ‘understanding is characterized in terms of how knowledge is connected.’ (Hiebert et al, P. 94)  ‘Knowing a subject means getting inside it and seeing how things work, how things are related to each other, and why they work like they do.’  In my small group math lesson, I wanted to help some students who we felt were shaky in counting and one-to-one correspondence.  There’s been a lot of counting in the new math curriculum--but mostly through watching math videos on the Smartboard and through counting drawings of things in the math textbook.  I wondered if some of these students had not yet had enough practice in physically counting out objects in their early childhood and if this was one reason why they were struggling.  Perhaps seeing another side of counting, and connecting it with the other tasks they’d done in counting, would help to round out their experience.  In my math lesson we poured plastic teddy bears out of cookie jars and discussed strategies for counting accurately.  We also practiced counting drawings of objects in cookie jars and discussed how we might organize our counting and stay on track when we’re working with pencil and paper.  I believe that putting the real-life, cookie-jar scenario alongside the drawing of the cookie jar offered a connection between the two and should have deepened their understanding of different instances of counting and what counting means.

  

Despite my belief in the importance of reflection, I’m aware that time investment required for revisiting and reflection requires trade-offs that present a challenge. In The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children, Lisa Delpit discusses a difference in teaching style and goal between progressive educators and the parents of Black students.  She refers, in the article, to different philosophies in reading instruction but I think her message is broader than that: 

 

Many liberal educators hold that the primary goal for education is for children to become autonomous, to develop fully who they are in the classroom setting without having arbitrary, outside standards forced upon them. This is a very reasonable goal for people whose children are already participants in the culture of power and who have already internalized its codes.  But parents who don't function within that culture often want something else. It's not that they disagree with the former aim, it's just that they want something more. They want to ensure that the school provides their children with discourse patterns, interactional styles, and spoken and written language codes that will allow them success in the larger society.’  (Delpit, p. 285)

 

To provide schooling for everyone's children that reflects liberal, middle-class values and aspirations is to ensure the maintenance of the status quo, to ensure that power, the culture of power, remains in the hands of those who already have it. (Delpit, p. 285)

 

Delpit does not say that she is opposed to teaching higher order thinking in classrooms.  But she does build a case for including certain kinds of direct instruction into the curriculum that will give students the language and communication tools to function within the dominant, White culture.  Delpit’s article reminds me that while there may be a place in my classroom for reflection and making personal connections, I will need to strike a responsible balance between these reflective goals for children and other more direct instructional goals in reading, writing, and math fluency. 

 

However, if there is any question about what is at stake when we talk about reflection, I would point to the absence of conversation in my classroom about the presidential election.  There’s been no mention of it from my classroom mentor or the students.  But, I work with Pre-K four-year olds on Wednesday mornings and they’ve talked with me numerous times about the election.  It often feels like my Kindergartners exist in a vacuum within the school, with very little conversation or mention of anything that goes on outside of the school.  This calls to mind Leland et al’s article and claim that a lack of analytical practices in schooling is an issue of equity.   I know that my students would have a lot to say if given the opportunity and if discourse and reflection were taught and encouraged more deliberately.  The result would students who are engaged with the world around them, including the social and political debates that determine the conditions in which they live.  But instead there’s a disconnect between the classroom and what’s going on outside of it. 

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In response to my original question, I’ve found that yes, reflection can be taught.  You can teach it by revisiting texts and experiences and previous knowledge.  You can teach it by creating many connections between lessons.  You can teach it by providing plenty of opportunity for meaningful conversation about real life situations. 

 

If we want our young students to become thoughtful, questioning, and active adults, who will be able to navigate and transform their world, and their social position in society, then I believe we should be prioritizing this kind of reflective and thoughtful mindset within our classrooms—even as early as kindergarten.  Furthermore, students want to feel as if they are part of something important and part of something that matters.  If there is a connection made between what happens in the classroom and what is going on in the world, then I think this contributes to building engagement and ownership and investment in school.  It’s a disservice not to teach students the formal and fundamental skills of reading, writing, and math, but I’d argue that it’s also a disservice not to teach them to be reflective.  In another article by Delpit, The Politics of Teaching Literate Discourse, she challenges the belief held by some that poor students and students of color cannot acquire the culture and formal language of the ‘mainstream’ because they were not born into it.  She explains that not only is it possible for individuals to learn to be a part of the mainstream discourse but that by entering into it, individuals can ‘turn the sorting system on its head and’ ‘make available one more voice for resisting and reshaping an oppressive system.  (Delpit, P. 166)  I believe that for students to take an interest in transforming their world, they must also be taught the skill of reflection.