Teaching Essentials by Regie Routman

One of the most influential texts that I referred to this year was Teaching Essentials.  This book is a guide for teachers in “expecting the most and getting the best from every learner.”  Over the course of the practicum, Routman’s writing provided me with a plethora of tips and strategies to use in order to engage kids and help them feel equipped to do their best work.

Some of the best nuggets of wisdom from Teaching Essentials include:

• In order for students to develop confidence in their critical thinking skills and feel comfortable sharing their thoughts, knowledge, and opinions with the class, we have to create an environment of respect for the children as individuals.  As Routman states, “showing respect is a worthy effort.  Our students can’t learn without it.”
• Teaching Essentials by Regie Routman states that “we all invest our energies more when we understand and value the purpose of what we are doing.”  By giving the [Regions] project [discussed in Teaching and Learning Portrait One] some context, students are not doing research for the sake of research, but are instead researching in order to perform a task and persuade their viewers to visit the region of the United States that they have studied.  I have used this strategy in several content areas, including writing word problems that are relevant for students to solve, and applying their knowledge of renewable and nonrenewable resources to the school building and their homes.
• In Teaching Essentials, author Regie Routman advocates for starting unit and lesson planning with the student, not the standard.  Routman instructs teachers to ask themselves “What matters most to this child?”  Whatever the answer is, “start there.”   When students find something that piques their curiosity, they can dive deep into that subject throughout their research project and presentations.  My goal is to motivate my students to investigate, because when they are motivated, they will achieve greater learning.
• “Celebration of specific strengths — not idle praise — helps ensure early success for our students,” Routman writes.  Noticing a particular phrase that the child has written well, or a singular well crafted image in their work goes a lot further than a simple “you did a good job.”  Students want to know how they did a good job, and learning more about what parts of their writing were successful will help them create more successful writing in the future.

Cultivating Genius by Gholdy Muhammad

In thinking about how to create a culturally responsive and sustaining classroom community, Gholdy Muhammad has many insights to share.  Her tips go well beyond creating a library that reflects the cultural and ethnic identities of students; she created “an equity framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy” that includes the four main components of identity, skills, intellect, and criticality.

Here are some highlights from Gholdy Muhammad’s book with my reflections:

• On Identity: Muhammad writes that “Identity is fluid, multilayered, and relational, and is also shaped by the social and cultural environment as well as by literacy practices.”  As teachers, we need to be aware that the things we say to our students and about our students can affect their self-worth and their feeling of belonging and acceptance within the classroom.  It is important that to support students’ cultural and personal identities, “we must start their stories and identities with their excellence.”
• On Skills: There are several skills, embodied by learning standards, that are imperative for students to learn.  However, Gholdy Muhammad notes that in many classrooms and schools, “we see there is a high focus on skills and not on other important qualities such as identity, anti-racism, and criticality.”  Skills should always be taught alongside the other components of the equity framework in order for students to get the most out of their learning.  Every subject area has opportunities for reflection; for example, Muhammad suggests incorporating students’ identities by instructing them to “write their own biographies in math, science, language, and social studies — as a way to learn what experiences they had and need to have with content-area learning.”
• On Intellect: When students enter school, they should not only be learners, but they should also be doers.  Teachers need to equip students with the skills they need to go out into the world, recognize injustice, broaden their minds in the search for innovative solutions.  Muhammad states that “intelligence is connected to action.  The HRL Framework starts with identity and skills because if these two pursuits are developed, the possibility is created for intellect, and when students develop intellectualism, they can express their ideas, work through justice-centered solutions to the world’s problems, and expand their mental capacities.”  In order to achieve this, we can connect learning “to the human condition or the social and political problems affecting communities.”
• On Criticality: “Criticality is the capacity to read, write, and think in ways of understanding power, privilege, social justice, and oppression, particularly for populations who have been historically marginalized in the world.  When youth have criticality, they are able to see, name, and interrogate the world not only to make sense of injustice but also to work toward social transformation.”  It is frequently said that the children are the future — equipped with criticality, students confront the inequities in society and take action to rectify the wrongs of the past that still affect marginalized groups today.