Candidates collaborate with classroom teachers to reinforce a wide variety of reading instructional strategies to ensure P-12 students are able to create meaning from text.
Reflection
Classroom Teacher: And then Lady Macbeth said “Come you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here…” her voice fades as a classroom of 15 year olds burst into giggles because the teacher just said “unsex”
This is a moment that plays out in every classroom that reads Shakespeare’s Macbeth when Lady Macbeth is introduced. It is a tricky scene because Shakespeare is portraying a moment of skewed sexuality that can be difficult for a 21st century learner to pick up. When I asked my colleague to collaborate on a lesson together, she jumped at the chance to enhance her students' understanding of sexuality in Macbeth. When we first started talking she knew she wanted to discuss gender roles, and she knew she wanted them to write an essay, but she needed some help with the in between. We met a couple of times to hash out the plan, and we really struggled at first to find a focus...she was not sure what she wanted. In the end, I think we came up with a pretty great lesson.
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Artifacts
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Over the course of three lessons, we asked the students to identify their own gender stereotypes as a way of discussing the stereotypes that are expressed and broken within Macbeth. Making personal connections is a great strategy for contextualizing reading, so we brainstormed our own stereotypes using the Gender Roles Handout, and then we used the Gender Roles In Macbeth Handout to identify where we find examples within the text.
The teacher really wanted her students to make non-fiction connections to the text, so we used the online database SIRS to find some great articles on gender roles in the 21st century. Her classes contained students with really low reading levels, so we needed to be careful with the text we selected. I used Microsoft Word to test the readability level of the text (a technique I learned from one of my breakout sessions at the MASL 2012 convention) and the special educator asked for a copy of the text so that she could highlight text features to enhance her students readability.
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On the day of the lesson, I got the students started with their reading by doing a think-aloud about annotating the text as I read. I modeled the first paragraph using the document camera and then asked the students to do the same while reading the rest of the article. After a discussion about what they found in the article, students used a graphic organizer that I created to make connections between the gender roles they found in the modern articles, with those expressed in their Shakespearean text. They would later use this graphic organizer for an essay on Gender Roles as their cumulative assignment.
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When I first asked my colleague to collaborate, I thought it would be a piece of cake. After all, I am an English teacher, how hard could it be to create a lesson for Macbeth? It ended up being one of the hardest collaborative experiences I have had, because I had to take on a different role. When you take a look at my learning log, you can really sense my frustration.
This assignment was harder than I thought it would be. I worked with a 10th grade English class and one of the most challenging aspects to the collaboration was that the classroom teacher kept changing her mind. Each time we met she was going for something different. Finally, on the day of the assignment, she did not like one of the pieces that I selected but did not tell me until the end of the day. She had found an alternate reading for the second part. I was not upset that she tweaked the readings but it was kind of annoying that we were making all of these changes on the fly. I had sent her the readings a week prior hoping that she would read them and give some feedback…which did not happen. In the end I was gracious and we were able to accomplish the desired outcome. But it was frustrating. |
When I reflect back on the lesson, I think it went well. There are very few adjustments I would make to the final lesson plan because it accomplished the goal. Where I did learn, was in the collaboration. A media specialist walks a fine line. I am entering another teachers classroom. As a classroom teacher, I know how difficult it is to share my students, so I have to be cognizant of that. There is also the issue of teaching style and open communication. I thought, because she never said anything, that our lesson was good to go. Instead, we had last minute changes and frantic fixes because it was not. In the future, I would be more proactive in my communication. I should have checked in to make sure we were ready. I also need to make sure that I am thinking like a media specialist, not an English teacher. The content teachers are experts in their content. And while I am quite knowledgeable, it is my job to bring the wonder and resources of the media center into the lesson. Overall, it was a great learning experience and I think I have become a better collaborator because of it.