Collaborative Learning Communities in Middle School Literacy Education

Increasing Student Engagement with Authentic Literacy

Jolene Malavasic, Jolene T. Malavasic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429756993
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Offering research on afterschool literacy programs designed around teacher-student collaborative inquiry groups, this book demonstrates how adolescent learning is uniquely successful when grounded in dialogic conversation. By providing a robust theoretical framework for this approach in the middle school, Malavasic showcases how developing a learning community which focuses on mutual respect and attention to students' personal academic literacy histories can become the catalyst for the overall success of teaching and learning in the classroom.

Centered on building quality teacher-student relationships and creating a classroom learning community, this book highlights essential topics such as:

• The impact of talk-based critical thinking
• The augmentation on students' motivation, engagement, and identity construction
• Research, theory, and pedagogy
• Celebrating literacy learning

Collaborative Learning Communities in Middle School Literacy Education is the perfect addition for researchers, academics, and postgraduate students in the fields of literacy and those on Teacher Education programs. This volume positions collaborative inquiry learning as an effective way forward for teaching and learning in the middle school and is essential for those wanting to explore this further.

1 Relationships and Classroom Communities

Why Relationships Matter

As human beings, it is our nature to seek and develop relationships with others. The meanings we attach to our relationships, the expectations we hold for them, and the value we give to them are largely dependent upon the context in which they take place. Sometimes these relationships serve as the groundwork for change. When thinking about the contexts of relationships in schools, we can draw upon these same notions. Santa (2006) articulated it best when she described schools and classrooms as communities and microcosms of the larger society. If students feel disconnected in school, they will often disengage which can lead them to not be successful. Yet, fostering relationships with our students is not just about getting them to like us. In some instances, creating relationships with students can be more significant than the content we teach. Consider the way students, in particular, adolescents, navigate the multiple relationships in their lives, and where the social organization and culture of the classroom not only influence learning practices, but those same learning practices also shape the social organization and cultural patterns that develop in the classroom (Wells, 1996).

More often than not, students achieve better in classrooms when there is a sense of community where classroom members feel comfortable interacting with each other and the teacher (Wolk, 2003). Lee, Smith, Perry, and Smylie’s (1999) research aligns with this notion. They observed teachers’ interactions and relationships with their sixth- and eighth-grade students in the Chicago Schools, using an approach called “social support” that focused on strengthening relationships among teachers and students in and outside of school. They examined the levels of social support among teachers and students in four areas and noted to what degree did teachers know their students, listen to what their students said, relate the subject they taught to students’ personal interests, and hold the belief their students could do well in school. Their findings should not be surprising. Clearly, those classrooms where social support levels were high achieved the highest gains on standardized math and reading tests, thus reaffirming the need for quality relationships.

We should not jump to conclude that the ultimate goal of the above factors along with supportive, caring relationships among teachers and students should only be outcomes on test scores. Rather, we should be looking at how we can cultivate students’ success not just as test takers, but also thinkers, learners, and as people who will make valuable contributions to our future society. Work by Daniels and Zemelman (2014) reminds us that although there are multiple ways for teachers to build supportive relationships with their students, we should also consider trust as a fundamental factor to their success. This is where we again look to the classroom itself as a place to build a trusting community where students’ voices are heard and validated, and there are opportunities for students to be responsible classroom participants in an environment that is safe and encourages them to take risks.

I have always believed that educators have a keen interest in developing supportive relationships with students and colleagues, but sometimes these are seen as rushed “add ons” or supplements to instruction rather than devoting time to see them as a potential to become an essential part within the instruction itself. In my experiences as a middle school reading specialist and teacher educator, I have found time to be one of the key factors contributing to the overall effectiveness of relationship-building. Taking time to build quality relationships are at the core of successful learning outcomes for teachers and students. Yet, we can’t assume this will happen immediately; rather, it has to be an ongoing process, especially when teachers do not yet have background teaching in their own classrooms. In my experiences as a teacher educator, I discovered that most of my graduate students do not have extensive knowledge or practice engaging in supportive relationships with students, either as students themselves or in their prior teacher preparation. It was important to devote time in this course supporting the knowledge acquisition of developing teachers to broaden their understandings of why teacher-student relationships and engaging curriculum are equally important and using the design of the course to show how they can be interwoven thorough collaborative inquiry groups. Combining the first two factors with practical experiences in collaborative contexts allows teachers new to the field time to acquire and refine the tools they need to create these environments independently.

As the instructor of the course, I knew it was essential to embed time for the graduate teachers to learn how to form quality relationships with the middle school students in their collaborative teaching groups, and collegial professional learning communities with each other through their teaching partnerships and daily seminar sessions. These will become central to their future positions as literacy specialists working with students, teachers, families, and communities, and as literacy coaches working with similar stakeholders in the school community and professional development beyond the school setting.

The design of this book centers on two essential keys to successful learning experiences for adolescents: building relationships and creating a collaborative learning community. It details how collective knowledge building through student-teacher collaborative learning communities provides opportunities for teachers to experience the unique and personal academic literacy histories adolescent students possess that influence who they choose to develop relationships with, how they value literacy, and shape how they view their work. The interactions within these learning communities play a significant role in mediating multiple modes of being a reader and writer for the middle school participants. In the dialogical discussions among the collaborative inquiry groups, middle school students engage with multiple texts to express their opinions, emotions, and design multimodal texts that connect to their personal literate lives.

My primary intent in writing this book is to inform researchers, teacher educators preparing secondary undergraduate and graduate students, and teachers who interact with adolescents of the ongoing opportunity to revise and expand what we know about adolescents’ lives, relationships, and literacy practices. In the coming pages, my goal is to provide those affiliated with secondary education ways to create spaces for success within which students have multiple opportunities to enhance their competencies, rather than limiting to confining spaces that label and restrict such displays and growth. As Hull and Schultz (2001) suggested, there continue to be vast gulfs that have widened between students who flourish in school and those that do not. Such division can be especially seen between the privileged and disenfranchised students who have limited opportunities based on the out-of-school resources available to them. It makes sense, then, for educators to look for ways to consider relationships among students’ personal and transformed literacy practices in their efforts to increase the learning and success of all students.

Students come to school with a myriad of experiences to make sense of the new knowledge they learn or continue to learn, and they utilize their school knowledge in their lives outside of school. Rather than knowing students by their competencies displayed only on standardized tests, teachers who acknowledge the potential of relationships and multiliteracies of their students might come to a better understanding of the lives their students describe. Although what I note above is applicable to all students, it is of particular relevance to adolescents.

Connections among Relationships, Communities, and Collaborative Teaching

The course described in this book is structured around three central components: building relationships through collaborative grouping, fostering student achievement using literacy events, and designing curriculum via knowledge units to teach argumentative reading and writing. It is a required course for graduate students seeking to become secondary literacy specialists and coaches as there is a practicum component for those seeking either B-12 or 5–12 certification. This is considered a capstone experience where graduate students are required to complete twenty-five practicum hours working with middle school students. The course meets twice a week for three hours in an afterschool setting.

The purpose for offering the course afterschool is twofold: first, to accommodate graduate students, many of whom are full-time teachers; second, to provide a unique opportunity for middle school students to experience collaborative learning with a range of literacy events and knowledge building that extends beyond the school context and is designed to further bridge the in-school and out-of-school literacies of the middle school students. As Alvermann (2009) noted, it is important that teachers create opportunities where students can actively engage in meaningful subject matter learning that encompasses and expands on the literacy practices they already possess and value.

Forming School Partnerships

In the newly released International Literacy Association Standards for the Preparation of Literacy Professionals (2018) Standard 7.3 under Practicum/Clinical Experiences recommends that “candidates have ongoing opportunities for authentic, school-based practicum experiences” (p. 3). In order to support this suggestion, an essential part of our work in teacher preparation involves building partnerships with schools. In my experiences as a reading specialist and teacher educator, I have been involved in multiple practicum partnerships. As a teacher educator seeking to build a school partnership, I have found the most difficult challenge, but one that I readily embrace, is getting “off the ground” by requesting and securing a location.

When forming the initial school partnership for the collaborative inquiry course, I communicated via email with a reading specialist at an area middle school with whom I had developed a prior professional relationship. She and I set up a time to meet at her school the semester prior to the scheduled class. At the meeting, I presented her the framework of the course, and we discussed how it would fit into the context of the school community and the middle school students. She was immediately enthusiastic about the idea and the opportunity it provided students. She made arrangements for us to meet and discuss the course further with the school principal and English-Language Arts teacher who were eager about forming the partnership. The principal made a recommendation to the school superintendent who negotiated all the remaining logistical details with our department and the university.

There were some final logistical steps to complete a few weeks prior the start of the semester. They included securing classroom space at the school, going over the days and dates that needed to be allocated for student participation, and further detailing the components of the program with the teachers involved so they could promote the class to enlist student participants. In addition to the teachers’ assistance, I created a letter that was sent electronically to all families via an email from the school. The letter contained preliminary information about the structure and content of the course along with an invitation for students to participate. I should note there were no limitations, requirements, or incentives regarding student participants (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Sample invitation letter to families.

The letter is an invitation welcoming any students who have an interest in participating. I generally have a warm response to the letter and always have a generous number of students who want to participate. When I receive the names of those interested participants, I always reach out with further correspondence either via email or a phone call. I feel it is important to foster a relationship with families early to let them know how much we appreciate the opportunity to work with their child since they too are making an investment in the class. As a matter of fact, I now have students returning to participate for another year and siblings of some of the former student participants involved in the collaborative group practicum because they [prior students] spoke so highly of their experience. As you will read in the concluding chapter, I regularly receive compliments either in person, via emails, and written notes from the middle school student participants, their families, the school community, and positive comments from the graduate teacher participants in the course.

As I will discuss further in the next chapter, before our first meeting day with the middle school students, the graduate teachers and I spend four-five class days reading and discussing literature about many topics, including adolescence and adolescents, identity, classroom learning communities, etc., to name a few. During this time, graduate teachers work with their colleagues to build relationships and establish their own professional learning communities. They do this by creating and sharing identity webs, engaging in dialogical discussion and developing the instructional components of the knowledge units, and designing the unit presentations they will share on day one with the middle school students.

Although the context for this book expands upon the above work in an afterschool partnership between a middle school and university, I believe it can easily be adapted to multiple contexts. I believe this book further broadens the impact of learning communities for adolescent students. It validates, with supportive evidence, why successful teaching outcomes are often the result of supportive student-teacher relationships that enable teachers to weave various experiences and provide opportunities for students to develop as sophisticated readers and writers (Serafini 2001).

As you will read about in the coming chapters, the middle school student participants developed a sense of efficacy, shifts in their knowledge of the multiple literacy events around argumentative reading and writing, and confidence in ways of learning as a result of their connections with teachers and the collaborative environment created within the inquiry groups. My hope is the range of readers of this text will envision how they can apply this innovative framework to their own pedagogical practices.

Within the subsequent chapters, I lay out a theoretical foundation behind the program design, detail the two elements of the course, practicum and seminar, explain the essential components of the practicum such as construction of the knowledge units, multimodal texts used, descriptions of the five literacy events guided reading, discussion, word work, and writing workshop that were a part of each unit cycle, and provide insights into how middle school students designed their multimodal culminating projects. There will be vignettes that portray how the relationships, collaborative literacy practices, instructional strategies and activities within the learning communities weaved together to become integral components to the overall successful outcomes for students and teachers.

2 Research, Theory, and Pedagogy

Course Development

The background surrounding the design of this course is deeply rooted in ongoing discussions in the literacy field around content area and disciplinary literacy and the impact it has had on our teacher preparation programs, particularly at the secondary level. First, I want to focus the discussion on the foundation behind this course and how it became part of a two-course sequence I designed with my colleague, Margi Sheehy.

We teach in a graduate program preparing masters students for secondary literacy specialization to be secondary literacy specialists and coaches. An ongoing teacher preparation challenge we continued to face at the secondary level has been the wide-ranging nature of secondary literacy specialists’ work in schools: they might serve as homework helpers, administer literacy programs for an entire school, or teach supplementary literacy classes (Sheehy & Malava...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Relationships and Classroom Communities
• 2 Research, Theory, and Pedagogy
• 3 Course Components
• 4 Changing Worlds of the Reading Specialist/Literacy Coach
• 5 Fostering Collaborative Learning Communities
• 6 Expanding Connections
• 7 Celebrating Our Literacy Learning
• References
• Index