An article to make you rethink everything

Womack's piece really rocked my world. At the beginning, I was so invested, highlighting or underlining every other word and writing in "cool!" or "YES!" in the margins next to ideas I really enjoyed. I completely stand by her ideas: "there is no normal, primary way of learning, only normalized methods made primary through frequent use" (497). That made so much sense to me, and spoke a lot about my education in order to become an educator thus far. And that is true about more than just pedagogy, but also a lot of commonly-taught literature, commonly-assigned projects and reports: they are normal because they've happened a lot. It doesn't make them better, or good, or relevant.

Moving past that, Womack continued on with one of my favorite lines, "The way to teach difficult material well is always to make it more accessible" (497). Considering what she said earlier--that teaching literally is just about accommodating; it isn't a new idea--I was with her. Then, she made me realize I don't know nearly as much as I thought I did.

I spent this past year teaching a 7th grade class where 10-35% of every period was made up of English language learners. I thought I knew a lot about accommodation. I worked with technology. I differentiated, I provided multiple means of presenting material, because as she put it, students can only truly work for themselves when there is access for all.

But then she showed me how to structure a document that my students get.

I have been focusing so much on using multimodality as a means of assessing student learning and giving students voices through multiple mediums that I didn't even really consider how I use it when presenting information. When comparing her initial syllabus to her edited version, I realized most of my sheets look more like the first than the second. How sad is that? Sure, I use Google Slides and will draw on the white board and all the basic stuff, and I do add pictures to my handouts, but usually, if anything, its just for fun. This prompted me to go through so many of my handouts and see, am I really the technology queen? Do I really utilize the things I know to help my students, all of my students?

The answer is a big, fat NO. On a philosophical level, I am very much on-board with accessibility for all students and accommodations reaching everyone, but this article made me realize how little I truly know about addressing the needs of all of my students, and how easily I fell into the "taught as I was taught" model of creating worksheets and assignments.

Below is an example of an accommodation I made for my ELLs when we were reading The Outsiders. I was so proud of this new method of reading: taking the most important sections of each chapter and breaking it down in English and Spanish, including Frayer Model vocab breakdowns and questions written in both languages. Now all I see is are giant blocks of texts, no images, and an overwhelming amount of work. Does anyone have suggestions when it comes to ELL reading accommodations? I definitely have some more research to do on this subject.

An article to make you rethink everything

Womack's piece really rocked my world. At the beginning, I was so invested, highlighting or underlining every other word and writing in "cool!" or "YES!" in the margins next to ideas I really enjoyed. I completely stand by her ideas: "there is no normal, primary way of learning, only normalized methods made primary through frequent use" (497). That made so much sense to me, and spoke a lot about my education in order to become an educator thus far. And that is true about more than just pedagogy, but also a lot of commonly-taught literature, commonly-assigned projects and reports: they are normal because they've happened a lot. It doesn't make them better, or good, or relevant.

Moving past that, Womack continued on with one of my favorite lines, "The way to teach difficult material well is always to make it more accessible" (497). Considering what she said earlier--that teaching literally is just about accommodating; it isn't a new idea--I was with her. Then, she made me realize I don't know nearly as much as I thought I did.

I spent this past year teaching a 7th grade class where 10-35% of every period was made up of English language learners. I thought I knew a lot about accommodation. I worked with technology. I differentiated, I provided multiple means of presenting material, because as she put it, students can only truly work for themselves when there is access for all.

But then she showed me how to structure a document that my students get.

I have been focusing so much on using multimodality as a means of assessing student learning and giving students voices through multiple mediums that I didn't even really consider how I use it when presenting information. When comparing her initial syllabus to her edited version, I realized most of my sheets look more like the first than the second. How sad is that? Sure, I use Google Slides and will draw on the white board and all the basic stuff, and I do add pictures to my handouts, but usually, if anything, its just for fun. This prompted me to go through so many of my handouts and see, am I really the technology queen? Do I really utilize the things I know to help my students, all of my students?

The answer is a big, fat NO. On a philosophical level, I am very much on-board with accessibility for all students and accommodations reaching everyone, but this article made me realize how little I truly know about addressing the needs of all of my students, and how easily I fell into the "taught as I was taught" model of creating worksheets and assignments.

Below is an example of an accommodation I made for my ELLs when we were reading The Outsiders. I was so proud of this new method of reading: taking the most important sections of each chapter and breaking it down in English and Spanish, including Frayer Model vocab breakdowns and questions written in both languages. Now all I see is are giant blocks of texts, no images, and an overwhelming amount of work. Does anyone have suggestions when it comes to ELL reading accommodations? I definitely have some more research to do on this subject.