Planting Seeds (part 1)

Kia ora koutou,

With it being non-contact time, I finally had the chance to finish a book without it being a case of two painfully slow pages a night before I fell asleep!

I really enjoyed Planting Seeds by Susan Sandretto and thought I'd make a blog post out of the notes I made on my bookmark a) in case I lose said bookmark and b) in case other people may find these insights useful (and maybe don't have time to read the whole book).

Disclaimer: These notes are often more ideas that reading the book prompted rather than direct quotes. Even those parts that are quotes have more than likely been mangled by my hasty note taking.

Chapter One:

I found this opening chapter very useful, just to reinforce my understanding of what critical literacy is all about...

- All texts have designs on their audience

- How a reader, listener or viewer takes to a text is an index of its effect

I also liked the phrases used for the unpacking of critical literacy that could easily be used with students...

- It enables consumers to be savvy in their engagement

- ...so you can appreciate the potential social effects of subscribing to a viewpoint

Chapter one explained that students can be:

code breakers -------- text participants -------- text users --------- text analysts

What really resonated with me is that these don't have to be taught in this order. This fits in nicely with what we are trying to achieve with critical thinking and T-shaped literacy skills in junior classes. Students can still be analysing texts even though a lot of their reading time is still focused on code breaking.

Chapter Two:

Another definition of critical literacy...

'Uncovering perspectives and positions that underpin texts and asking/judging what these perspectives mean in the social context of our world'

What else stood out to me in this chapter was that you can teach critical thinking without critical literacy but you can't teach critical literacy without critical thinking. Even critical thinking can easily become just 'thinking' if you take away cultural and political contexts. 

Chapter Three:

This was the most useful chapter in the book for me as it focused on discussion. Student led discussion is one of our High Leverage Practices and last term I was privileged to go into many classrooms as part of our observations. Discussion was one of the aspects of the lesson (as well as the associated planning) that we were looking at. So I found lots of the information in this chapter relevant and useful.

Here's a little visual I made to remind myself of some of the ideas I hope to experiment with in the future...

 

*to add onto not having a right answer in mind... I realised how often I do this. Even if I'm asking an open ended question, I still have an answer in mind and am therefore biased towards that answer. Do I give enough credit to answers outside of this? Some tips related this this that are shared in the book include:

- At the start of the discussion explain that you're only going to respond to ideas with a 'thank you' or 'ok.' This way all answers are validated and you're not suggesting, by your tone or body language, that some answers are more valid than others.

- It's still ok to share your opinion as a teacher but you can do this at the end so that you don't shut down other ideas because they are not in line with what the teacher thinks.

**to add onto the idea of a shift in power... I really liked the analogy of the ebb and flow of the tide to demonstrate how the power can shift between students and teachers throughout the day. For example, a student can hold the (majority of the) power by being the expert during a discussion without this meaning that when it comes to managing the class the teacher doesn't have any power or has lost control.

So that's the first three chapters of the book which is probably plenty for now. Hopefully I'll cover chapters 4-7 in another post.

Ngā mihi