Layering Language and Novel Study Deepens Adolescent Learning

Abstract

A teacher provides multiple pathways for students' literacy learning.There was noise and laughter coming from Sarah Matthews' middle school classroom, a common experience, as students huddled in small groups to write scripts for a role-playing activity about a value word they had drawn from a bag. Their task was to produce and perform skits that represented the value without giving away the actual word, because the values were from a list that Sarah and her class had studied for the past several days. Examples from this list were: tolerance, cooperation, responsibility, integrity, conservation, compassion, wisdom, and imagination. The group in the front of the room was pretending to have just found a dog, and student-actors were frantically knocking on doors and asking neighbors if they could direct them to the dog's owner. A later group surveyed the room, picking up trash and placing it in recycling bins. The former exemplified responsibility and integrity; the latter represented conservation.This activity was directly linked to the students' study of Richard Peck's (2001) book A Year Down Yonder and was a launch pad for several other writing events that would occur as the unit unfolded. Prior to the role-playing activity, Sarah had students consider what they valued, asking them to write short pieces that answered the following questions: Which five (value) words describe you best? Which five words would you like people to think about you? Which five words are most important to you? Students wrote briefly to address the questions and awaited informal feedback from their peers. Because many of her seventh grade students had known each other their entire schooling career, they openly disagreed with one another's choices and argued like siblings. How students built on these brief activities is elaborated later in this article; use these examples first as an entry point into Sarah's pedagogical practice, one that fostered a language-rich environment of collaboration in the middle school classroom.I spent several weeks collecting data in Sarah's classroom during the spring 2010 semester. This was significant because, in Texas, where most of my research took place, spring means one thing: test preparation. Her students were not exempt from this, and they sat for both reading and writing tests during the spring semester. Pineland Middle School, situated in a small town in East Texas, was culturally and linguistically diverse. At the time of my study, 62% of its population was either African American or Latino students and roughly 70% relied on free or reduced-price lunch. An experienced and passionate teacher, Sarah had taught for 27 years. Seventeen years were spent in nearby school districts, and in 2000 she transferred to Pineland, where her own children attended school.Perhaps because of her years of experience, Sarah had felt less pressure regarding testing. She told me, I incorporate the standards throughout the year and other than some last-minute reminders about how to approach the test, let it take care of itself (S. Matthews, personal communication, June 25, 2010). Sarah worried about scope and sequence documents provided by the district, which seemed to her to offer few opportunities for re-teaching or deeper study of literature as it connected to writing. While she strove to stay within the scope and sequence in terms of ordering the skills she taught, her planning was tied less to the prepared materials included in the curriculum guides and more from her vast collection of activities, enrichment books, and ideas drawn from trial and error experience and from conferences she had attended over the past three decades.Sarah worked with both grade level and pre-AP students, but visitors to her class found little difference in terms of how she related to each group of students or in the manner in which she taught. From my standpoint, as a professor in the field of literacy education, was intrigued by her capacity to generate multiple pathways toward understanding and to foster a space for selfefficacy to grow within students regarding their literacy learning (Alvermann, 2005). …