V. Disconnect Between Theory and Practice
With so much exposure to student-centered activities in my coursework and studies, I began finding disconnect between my research and my practice. Every time that I tried an inquiry-based discussion or activity, it felt as though it never took off and that many students were off task; yet, when I led full-class discussions, students were typically cooperative and compliant and we got through the material quickly. Nevertheless, the issues remained that student verbal engagement in full-class discussions was limited to about five students or less per class and that the conversations tethered to surface-level observations about the texts we were reading. Neither model appeared to be fully working. Through the reflection of my inquiry process, I realized that I often swung too sharply from strictly teacher-led, simplistic discussions to entirely student-based, wide-open inquiries without providing students with the necessary intermediary steps of modeling and instructing students how to work effectively on their own.
Researching authentic, dialogic discussions that promoted student engagement, I became infatuated with the idea that I would ask only authentic questions, all without a singular answer; I would stray as far away as possible from the IRE model. Nonetheless, I fell back into a teacher-centered model one day in mid-January to get my 9th grade class started. In a unit on short stories, much of what we read was done aloud in class. At this point, we were reading “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe. The previous day we had read about half of the story so before jumping into the text, I wanted to simply review the plot and other straightforward literary devices (i.e. main characters, setting, narrator, etc.) that we had already discussed to get students’ minds back into the text. To my surprise, more student hands popped up than usual to respond to the questions I was asking. To my further surprise, several of these hands belonged to students who rarely or had never spoken in a full-class discussion, one of whom is an ELL student (Artifact 5). The questions were simplistic and a review; they did not require higher order or inquisitive thinking skills, yet more students felt comfortable responding to these types of questions.
Prior to this class, I was trying to make a conscious effort to rid my classes of such questions in their entirety, but this lesson made me take a step back to reevaluate my thinking. Perhaps these questions were not a waste of time but a building block for students to be able to then delve into more complex discussions, a sort of warm-up for students’ brains that generated comfort in speaking aloud. Perhaps student engagement in full-class discussions or discussions in general stemmed from the proper mix of lower-level to higher-level thinking questions and ideas; maybe higher-level ideas were dependent upon establishing some sort of baseline understanding.
Lastly, I realized that most of the theories or models of education that I was attempting to implement in my classroom were perhaps not working because of the context. I was trying to transplant other educators' exact best practices and theories without giving much thought to how the particular dynamics of my own classes would affect the outcome of certain models. Much of the reason that I think I was seemingly unable to get some of the more progressive dialogues off the ground was that I tried to replicate exactly the theories I had read rather than considering how to more smoothly adapt or connect the activities to the specific context of each of my classes. Moreover, another reason that I thought I was seeing disconnect between theory and practice is that I was viewing the two in black and white terms and not paying attention to the contextual nuances of each and how the two intersect.
Researching authentic, dialogic discussions that promoted student engagement, I became infatuated with the idea that I would ask only authentic questions, all without a singular answer; I would stray as far away as possible from the IRE model. Nonetheless, I fell back into a teacher-centered model one day in mid-January to get my 9th grade class started. In a unit on short stories, much of what we read was done aloud in class. At this point, we were reading “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe. The previous day we had read about half of the story so before jumping into the text, I wanted to simply review the plot and other straightforward literary devices (i.e. main characters, setting, narrator, etc.) that we had already discussed to get students’ minds back into the text. To my surprise, more student hands popped up than usual to respond to the questions I was asking. To my further surprise, several of these hands belonged to students who rarely or had never spoken in a full-class discussion, one of whom is an ELL student (Artifact 5). The questions were simplistic and a review; they did not require higher order or inquisitive thinking skills, yet more students felt comfortable responding to these types of questions.
Prior to this class, I was trying to make a conscious effort to rid my classes of such questions in their entirety, but this lesson made me take a step back to reevaluate my thinking. Perhaps these questions were not a waste of time but a building block for students to be able to then delve into more complex discussions, a sort of warm-up for students’ brains that generated comfort in speaking aloud. Perhaps student engagement in full-class discussions or discussions in general stemmed from the proper mix of lower-level to higher-level thinking questions and ideas; maybe higher-level ideas were dependent upon establishing some sort of baseline understanding.
Lastly, I realized that most of the theories or models of education that I was attempting to implement in my classroom were perhaps not working because of the context. I was trying to transplant other educators' exact best practices and theories without giving much thought to how the particular dynamics of my own classes would affect the outcome of certain models. Much of the reason that I think I was seemingly unable to get some of the more progressive dialogues off the ground was that I tried to replicate exactly the theories I had read rather than considering how to more smoothly adapt or connect the activities to the specific context of each of my classes. Moreover, another reason that I thought I was seeing disconnect between theory and practice is that I was viewing the two in black and white terms and not paying attention to the contextual nuances of each and how the two intersect.