ELPC 4: And finally, a rubric

This morning I’ve been working on a rubric for the journals referred to in the earlier posts in this series. I don’t like marking with rubrics (but then I don’t like marks much!), but I do find rubrics useful as a way of exposing my values and criteria to my students. It’s good to talk [...]

ELPC Part 3: Redefining writing? What next!

I used to think that I worked best on my own, down at the coast with my own emerging thoughts and the world shut out. It was never true, I now realize. Even when I was writing my PhD thesis down here, I was reading books and articles and drawing on long conversations with my [...]

ELPC Part 1: A fertile research question

When it comes to learning something new, just listening to an expert is usually not enough. Nor is passively reading. Usually we need to do something, to actively construct the knowledge ourselves, from a number of different sources and for a particular purpose (often to teach or explain it to someone else).
This seems to be [...]

The mystery of learning to read

My colleague at the university and in our course on ‘Literacy across the curriculum, Associate Professor Kaye Lowe, has talked with our students about the essential mystery of how we learn to read. It’s often impossible to pinpoint what it was (if it was any single thing) that led to us ‘getting it’.
It seems to [...]

Thoughts on ‘literacy across the curriculum’ from my students

The university course is now almost a fortnight old, and the 90 postgraduate students have all begun their blogs. The course is called “Literacy across the curriculum”, and the students have been writing about their current understanding of the term ‘literacy’, their response to the question But I’m not an English teacher: is literacy really [...]

On the nature of literacy (with a nod to Spinoza)

In my last post, I suggested (following a lead inspired by Neil Postman) that we’re waging war on illiteracy. But this is wrong. We’re battling ignorance. Our enemy (at whatever level we teach and in whatever discipline we teach it) is lack of knowledge: knowledge of subject matter, knowledge of perspectives and knowledge of skills. [...]

Doubts and loves: Josh Part 2

The Place Where We Are Right
by Yehuda Amichai
From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.
The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.
But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

I. Josh
I’ve been writing [...]

Play the game!

Last Tuesday I walked into my Year 11 class in a rage. I was full of what my father once called ‘Steve’s white hot indignation’. I’d just read a number of comments on our class Ning that indicated that some of the boys were not taking the course (which I wrote about in ‘Searching for [...]

What I think I know about reading

I have a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s linked, I think, with a sense that in these blog posts on reading I’m exposing myself, running the risk of looking foolish. This isn’t going to stop me, especially given that I often tell my students that successful learning always takes us into [...]

Rubrics Part 3: a noun or a verb?

A noun or a verb?
Is a rubric a thing that we create (whether to give transparent feedback or to limit the creativity of our students, depending on your viewpoint)? Well, of course it is! ‘Rubric’ is a noun. Any dictionary will tell you so.
But what happens when we think about it as if it were [...]