Our Worthy Target: Planning and Practicing

A Wordle compilation of our planning document

“...we must consider why the conceptual material and tools we are teaching were created, what issues they were meant to address, and what work this knowledge can do.” (Smith & Wilhelm, 2006, p. 58)

Our planning and our re-planning were equally as important. In planning our unit, we strove to implement critical literacy and liberatory pedagogy into our work. In re-planning we made our lessons more relevant to the students based on what we had learned about them that day, knowing how quickly that might change the next day.

One of the greatest challenges we faced was gauging the difficulty or rigor that we should incorporate into our assessments. We didn't want students to fail, and at the same time, we didn't want to belittle them by providing only simplistic or juvenile activities. Our essential question—“How does the way we tell and read news stories influence how we view the world?”—sought to make them think about what we were doing in a bigger context, but at the same time, there were several moments where I felt we had overestimated their abilities. This is a unique kind of teacher-tension, where we are caught between wanting to push students to their best thinking and their best work, and knowing when we are asking too much of them.

I think part of our anxiety about their lack of formal articulation was falling into the trap that Wiggins (2005) warns about: “We caution readers, then, to avoid the common misconception that goals for understanding represent statements that learners must “give back” by the time the lessons are over or that the understandings must be simplistic for younger learners or novices in a subject. On the contrary: The understanding of powerful ideas in use remains our worthy target.” (p. 142).

The fact that they could not produce a verbalized or written answer for our essential question does not automatically mean that our unit “failed” somehow. Their VoiceThreads demonstrated that they could produce stories that had the 5 W's. Their willingness to listen to each other's stories and identify the 5 W's also demonstrated a maturity that we had not see earlier in the week. Many of them could recognize when a news story was “unfair” without necessarily calling it biased.

We knew going in that the way we measured learning was as important as the learning we created. Particularly, the way “assessment” has been structured often serves a purpose that is counter-productive to liberatory pedagogy, for "[to] separate knowledge from interests is to present the former as value-free or objective, and to mask the power implicit in the latter" (britzman, 2003, p. 40). It is important to recognize the ways in which our assessments construct what “knowledge” is for our students and ourselves. I think in many ways our assessment disrupted more dominant ideologies about valuable knowledge—students were encouraged to use their own stories as something “newsworthy,” and they were given the freedom to communicate this in many different mediums—pictures, spoken and written word, and some with movement as well.

“Fortunately, many teachers intuitively know that the best way to achieve their goals is to enlist students' interests on their side. They do this by being sensitive to student's goals and desires, and they are thus able to articulate the pedagogical goals as meaningful challenges” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1991).