Liz B. Davis: Erikson and the Professional Learning Community

In her blog The Power of Educational Technology, Liz B. Davis compared Erik Erikson's model of social and emotional development with our own journey to find our place within a digital learning community. She sees these parallels:

• Trust Versus Mistrust: Can I trust the world? How much disclosure is safe?
• Autonomy Versus Shame: Is it OK to be me? Will I embarrass myself, reveal my ignorance? Or – perhaps worse yet – might I receive no response at all?
• Initiative Versus Guilt: Is it OK for me to do, move, act? Can I bring up sensitive issues? Acknowledge frustrations? Be playful?
• Industry Versus Inferiority: Can I make it in the world? As I realize that my voice is heard, should I invest my time in developing higher-quality posts? Can I make genuinely valuable contributions? Establish a reputation? A readership?
• Identity Versus Diffusion: Who am I? What can I be? Where’s my position in this community? Whom do I want to know better, to be associated with?
• Intimacy Versus Isolation: Can I love? Is it possible for these relationships to deepen into friendship? For us to move beyond our avatars into more authentic human relationships?
• Generativity Versus Self-Absorption: Can I make my life count? Can I support and mentor others who haven’t come as far yet in their professional journeys?
• Integrity Versus Despair: Can I continue to contribute as I attain a plateau of success? Can I learn to feel at home with that success, and with my peers, both new and established?

As emerging educators, we'll find ourselves tentatively advancing along these stages, and it's good to see that we're not alone in the process. Go visit Liz's blog for this great post - and other thoughtful, practical contributions on technology in education.

VoiceThread: Publishing as Play

At the foot of my page is a multimedia presentation my Educational Technology classmates and I put together one afternoon. We went out into the sunshine and took some pictures, then created our "digital story" in VoiceThread, a "secure K-12 network for students and teachers to collaborate and share ideas with classrooms anywhere in the world." Its editorial ease and simplicity, as well as its security features for safe sharing, make this application especially appealing for use in Mac-equipped classrooms. Go see for yourself!

Literacy Instruction and the Fourth Dimension

It was mid-January. I sat there at my desk in the CDC classroom, head in my hands, feeling tired before I even began. As I reviewed the assessments I’d done for my proposed RTI students, I wondered how I could possibly address all the reading deficiencies documented in front of me. Second- and third-grade students reading at Level B (and sometimes not securely within that level) were in dire need of help before they moved up to new challenges in line with curriculum expectations but far beyond their zones of proximal development. In 25 minutes per day, how best could I help them?

The Challenge: Do It All, Right Now!
As we gathered around the horseshoe table, the students were eager to come to grips with the new “remedial” basal text I brought, the flashcards, the tiles and board games. They were motivated to explore the guided-reading books I had in my cart, with their bright photos of real-world things. The problem came in knowing how to begin. Even with no training, I could see that reinforcing concepts of print were first on our list. However, I could also see that developing phonetic knowledge was first on our list, since none of our group could identify the entire alphabet or all the letters’ primary sounds. And what about comprehension? Shouldn’t the use of context cues such as pictures, punctuation, and previous text be first on our list?

Working Memory and the Fourth Dimension
In his 2001 book Improving Comprehension with Think-Alouds: Modeling What Good Readers Do, Jeff Wilhelm brings out an important consideration: working memory only has room to actively consider about three things at once. This being the case, it’s essential not to attempt to remediate in all areas at once! My students didn’t become three years behind their grade level in reading overnight, and they wouldn’t attain grade level all at once, either. So – how best could I organize my instructional process to help my RTI groups?

In her 2003 article (“What Do I Say When They Get Stuck on a Word? Aligning Teachers’ Prompts with Students’ Development”), Kathleen Brown offers the necessary mental adjustment: I needed to actively remember that reading is a developmental process, with recognizable stages and appropriate teaching strategies for each stage. Her article reminds me that I wasn’t really faced with a herd of strategies and concepts to teach, each clamoring for recognition; instead, our work on each concept and strategy had a proper place in time. Back when I wrestled with the problem of bringing my students forward, I needed to refocus my view of the job ahead of us as a chronological process rather than a “to-do list” on which every item was top priority.

Our groups made progress, but the process would have been more efficient (and probably resulted in more progress) if I had been more reflective and alert to the function of the fourth dimension in our literacy instruction.

The Literacy Continuum, Learning Trajectories, and the Matthew Effect

In reflecting on recent class readings, two ideas stand out: potential organizing principles for our approach to teaching. The first is the similarity between learning processes for direct interpersonal communication and for reading. The second concerns “the Matthew Effect” on learners who suffer an inequitable lack of adequate developmental stimuli, and our responsibility to help overcome it.

Learning to speak and to write
The learning processes for literacy and for speech have more similarities than differences. Both are holistic - that is, whole-life learning processes, begin very early, show characteristics of a series of developmental stages, and are dependent on frequent and regular human interaction for both motivation and modeling.

Just as speaking and listening are processes that begin to emerge in infancy (where appropriate stimuli exist), the foundations for reading are laid early on in development stimulated by appropriate interactions in speaking, listening, and written language. As the IRA/NAEYC Position Statement (1998) puts it,

. . . [R]eading and writing acquisition is conceptualized better as a developmental continuum than as an all-or-nothing phenomenon. (p. 3)

Further,

Experiences in [the] early years begin to define the assumptions and expectations about becoming literate and give children the motivation to work toward learning to read and write. (p. 3)

The Matthew Effect: “Haths” and “hath nots”
Sociologist Robert Merton coined “the Matthew Effect” to describe the different human trajectories established by the presence or lack of timely and appropriate opportunities. The ubiquity of this pattern in our culture has tended to render it invisible, or paint it as inevitable [often confirmed by quoting another verse from the Gospel of Matthew: “The poor you will always have with you . . .” (26:11a, KJV)]

In emerging literacy, the pattern produces an ever-increasing skills gap between the “haths” who receive appropriate learning opportunities and the “hath nots” who lack them. Over time, the skills gap becomes an access gap - a disparity in access to the commonweal that perpetuates social and economic injustice.

Communication skills are vital to our participation in human activity; at this time in our culture and history, mastery of the written symbol is almost as necessary as that of speaking and listening. Without advancing along the literacy continuum to a position of skill mastery, many doors to communal and cultural participation are closed.

Helping learners advance along the literacy continuum
We know that, as teachers, we are responsible to each of our students for providing them with appropriate learning opportunities. However, because each group of students comes to us across such a broad range of the literacy continuum, we don’t yet know how to do that.

The Position Statement (2000) of the International Reading Association (IRA) acknowledges the challenge and defines the approaches and attitudes with which we can hope to succeed at this daunting but vital task. Built upon that document, I leave today’s readings with some resolutions that I hope will inform my teaching.

Where to begin:

· Understand the literacy continuum.

· Believe in the research-supported assumption that we can advance each student along that continuum.

· Have in my toolbox a wide variety of methods and materials that support our research-based principles for literacy instruction, and implement them strategically rather than along convenient but arbitrary program lines.

· Teach “hands-on literacy” in direct, interactive ways – showing as well as telling; guiding individual performers within their appropriate zones of development.

Hands-On Literacy: The Way of the Wood Shop Teacher

I expect that my teaching work will be done in rural areas, and that’s where I’ve done my preliminary work. This week as I read the from Vygotskian theorists in my course materials, I kept getting a picture of reading as a hands-on life skill, and of teacher as trainer or coach – of reading and writing demystified, de-academicized, and made accessible to rural, urban, or ESL students from primarily oral cultures. People who teach a hands-on skill use the techniques discussed in our class materials in some of the following ways.

• Shop teachers and coaches explain what a skill is, what it’s for, why it’s necessary, and how to use it. (Example: “Here are the jobs a circular saw is good for.”)
• They demonstrate its use while talking students through their own interior process monologue. (Example: Accompanied by slow-motion demonstration, “Now, when I go for a lay-up, I keep my eye on the basket and keep the ball cocked until I see my clear shot.”)
• They work one-on-one with each student while that student tries out the skill, guiding, correcting, and explaining. They organize groups or partnerships among students who work together using the skill to create specific products. Roles within the groups are set out as well, to ensure that necessary production-related tasks are accomplished. (Example: “Volunteers? I need five of you to build this set of bookshelves; you’ll need to choose an equipment manager, a safety manager, and a blueprint coordinator among yourselves.”)
• They observe each student’s ongoing work, offering guidance and correction for that student’s individual technique. (Example: “Good job, but as you use this torque wrench, you’ll want to make a habit of keeping the wrist straight – you get more force, and you’re less likely to strain a ligament.”)
• They assess each student’s product made using the skill for its effectiveness at meeting its goal. (Example: “OK, Team, you’ve worked hard on your shooting skills this week, and as a result we saw a 4-point improvement in free-throw accuracy during yesterday’s game. Good work.”)

To begin . . .

As a teacher-in-training, reflection is more than an eduspeak buzzword, more than a luxury or wishful thinking - it's an immediate necessity. With so much to learn, I can't afford to pass up an opportunity for reflection. I need to process every experience I can.

My experiences may be so common that my stories seem redundant. However, you never know when someone will need to hear what you think - no matter how prosaic or banal it might seem to you. So I'll embark on this blogging experience, describing the scenery and wondering out loud about what may occur along the road.

I'll learn from seeing, here in front of me, just what I'm thinking. I hope to learn more as you contribute your experiences here, about this ambitious journey we're sharing.