Ms. Cooper's Classroom

One of the biggest reasons why I wanted to become a teacher was the opportunity to also be a coach. I played volleyball for most of my life, and throughout the years, my coaches taught me lessons that shaped me into the person I am today. Eventually, I worked hard enough to get recruited to play in college, where I learned a lesson that changed the way I looked at teaching.

 

One day during a drill at practice, I kept hitting the ball into the net, but couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. My coach started screaming at me to do better, without offering me any feedback on how to do better, and threatened to make the whole team run if I didn’t hit the ball correctly. Under extreme pressure to perform well, without any knowledge of what to do differently, I tried again, but to no surprise, made the same mistake. This moment, even though I knew I was a competent player, destroyed my confidence, embarrassed me in front of my teammates, made me resent my coach, and even made me consider quitting. Now, how often do students experience the same frustration, seeing that they aren't performing well, but are not being properly coached through their specific needs?

 

I strongly believe in Ehrenworth's research that shows that skills learned in nonacademic areas, such as sports, can be transferred to the classroom. What I needed during that drill, as do many students learning in the classroom, is Fisher and Frey's model of gradual release of responsibility. My teaching philosophy, therefore, is a scaffolded process of coaching students through modeling, guided practice, group work, and independent work.

For example, most teenagers want their opinions to be heard and valued, but oftentimes have trouble expressing their thoughts and feelings in constructive ways. Beginning with the personal growth approach to teaching writing, students can learn how to express their thoughts and emotions through writing in nonacademic ways. Through informal journaling, students will become comfortable with communicating to different audiences and for different purposes. Whether students write a love letter to their high school sweetheart with pathos, or write a proposal to their parents to be ungrounded using logos, students will have the choice to write about whatever they want. I'll admit, writing through my teenage angst made me the writer, and future English teacher, I am today.

 

Once students know how to communicate their thoughts and emotions, they can begin to communicate what they think and feel about real-world social and cultural issues. Through the sociocultural approach to teaching writing, students can write about topics that are relevant to their own life, in their own voice and dialect. Students will be able to take a stance and learn how to support their claims to write for change. This scaffold in teaching writing is more structured and prompted, while still allowing student choice.

 

After students are comfortable with proposing and supporting arguments, we can move forward to teaching writing through the rhetorical approach. Many students resent reading because they believe literature is not relevant to their own lives, but many novels express human condition through real-world issues such as discrimination, love, and hardship. I still remember reading Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and empathizing with characters and having my outlook on life changed, even though I originally questioned how a 1930's family fleeing the Dust Bowl was relevant to my life as a high schooler. According to Zemelman, if we promote student choice in writing topics, and likewise expose them to literature that is relevant, students will be more engaged and have higher skill proficiency.

 

Although knowing how to express thoughts and support ideas are important in writing, details matter. Through the correctness approach to teaching writing, students will learn the importance of mechanics and structure in the context of their writing. Students will be taught the revision process through modeling, guided practice, and collaboration, so that they may become successful and independent writers.

 

Not only do teachers and coaches have the potential to teach, train, and transform students to be successful academically and athletically, but they have the potential to set students up to win in life. If we can help students get comfortable with expressing their thoughts and emotions through informal writing, we can help them find their voice as they engage with real-life social and cultural issues. From there, students will be able to make relevant connections with literature to write in more formal and structured ways, and through the whole writing process, students will be learning the mechanics of writing within the context of their work.

 

With so much emphasis being placed on standardized testing and getting the grade, students are so much more apt to regurgitating memorized information for a test or even cheating, instead of learning and retaining the skills and knowledge needed to be successful. Therefore, I strongly believe in the importance of metacognition, or teaching students the skill of how to learn, so that they can be successful not only for the moment, but for life.