Foreward by Dan Heath
- “The mere fact of doing something repeatedly does not help us improve.” (xii)
- “The enemies of practice are pride and fear and self-satisfaction. To practice requires humility. It forces us to admit that we don’t know everything. It forces us to submit to feedback from people who can teach us. But surely practice isn’t a sign of weakness—after all, some of the people most famously disciplined about practice are Michael Jordan, Jerry Rice, Roger Federer, Mia Hamm, and Tiger Woods. To practice isn’t to declare, I’m bad. To practice is to declare, I can be better. “(xiii)
Action does not mean getting
better. I know this from observing ugly, ugly soccer practices during which all
the wrong things were brought out in scrimmages.
So often practice is applied to
sports, or music, or dance, or some performance skill. But as an English
teacher, I think of practice for me and for my students.
For me, I want to practice
connecting our learning activity to the objective. I knew going in to the year
that I wanted to do this better. I guess I should have known that the only way
I would do this better would be to practice, but I never thought of practicing
it. I guess I’ll have to start doing this when I write my lesson plans.
For my students, my mind
immediately turns to the emphasis on reading and writing. I know I’m not a
wonderful reading teacher; I emphasize volume of reading, consistency of
reading, but also diversifying the types of books read and identifying
preferences. I know it’s my own theory, but if I believe part of my goal as a
reading teacher is to develop “life-long readers,” then some of the things I
want to help my students do is to identify and understand what they like reading
and why they like reading it, and to easily identify those types of books based
on genre, author, and reading level. I believe that helping my students
understand why they like reading a book will lead to deep and rich
conversations about narrative style, character development, plot analysis,
themes, role of setting, etc.—all the stuff a “good” reading teacher would
teach. Further, if I can help my students understand the genre, author, and
reading level of a book they like, I believe I have given them the ability to
self-select other books that they will similarly enjoy reading. Maybe I’m wrong;
I don’t know.
So where does practice enter in my
reading instruction? Well, that’s a little less specific. Discussions on
Tuesdays and Thursdays about our reading books, including addressing specific
questions, could be viewed as practice in identifying “why I like/don’t like this
book.” I do think keeping the reading record, and the reflection at the end of each
quarter on that reading record, as practice for identifying “what types of
books I enjoy/don’t enjoy.” Hopefully those actions—discussion, record keeping,
and reflection—lead to better readers. I don’t know if I’ve answered the
initial question.
As for writing, I think I’m a
decent writing teacher. My goal is to first help the students write a
lot—10,000 words this year, at least. If the students have a decent volume of
writing, then we can work on fine-tuning the skills the students use as
writers. Some of those skills are what might be considered basic:
capitalization, end punctuation, pronoun-antecedent agreement/cohesion, verb
tense, comma usage. But some of those skills are more complex: introductory
adverbial clauses, appositive phrases, parallel structure, combining sentences
through diverse ways. Freewriting is our method of practicing these skills.
First, we explicitly study these skills in isolation. I want the students to
develop a shared, academic vocabulary so that when we practice each skill in
context, the question is not, “what is a pronoun and its antecedent?” I want
the question to be, “where are my pronouns and their antecedents?” If the
student is answering the second question, rather than the first, then during
freewriting, we can, in the context of a larger passage of writing, practice
ensuring that all of our pronouns have clear and direct antecedents. That will
immediately improve student writing. And that’s really, really important.
I think I have a pretty clear idea
of how practice is used in freewriting, and then extended to every other
writing situation. I think maybe I need to verbalize that to my students, to be
more transparent with them. I think doing this will also help me as a teacher
to reference the objective more, because if the objective is clear and
specific, and the students know that our practice is directly going to lead us
to that, then they are more likely to know exactly when they have met the
objective and how they were able to meet the objective.
I haven’t done any process writing
like this in a long time, and it’s been really fun. I’m really enjoying this
book. I’m on page 55, so some of the things I wrote about occur in later
pages/chapters, but I only got through quoting my favorite parts of the
Foreward. Later, as I read more, I’ll include more favorite quotes and
hopefully get to process more as well.
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