Wilhelm Reading 1 and 2

While admittedly reading Wilhelm took several times (there were times I had to reread a sentence to process what he was arguing), I nevertheless found his insight extremely valuable. Wilhelm poses questions and theories that one might think are simply common sense, but many teachers never even consider them: What are you doing? How are you doing it? Are your students learning how to do things or simply learning for the sake of a grade? Teaching, Wilhelm proposes, is a science as well as an art, one that requires constant self-reflection and study. A teacher must be "wide-awake"--constantly self-assessing, constantly adapting to the student body they're facing. When it comes to teaching, one sizes does not fit all. 

Of course, it's all well and good to propose adaptive teaching, but what does that really mean? What is the relationship between teaching and learning? Is there one concrete way of "learning"? Wilhelm addressed this question with an exercise I found to be extremely intriguing. When presented with six different scenarios of "learning", which ones best fit the models of what it means to "learn"? Is it enough to know the concepts? Can you claimed to have learned something even if you don't understand why you're learning it? What qualifies as mastery over a subject? Wilhelm raises powerful questions over the issues of learning, engagement, and teacher-student relationships. As a future teachers, we have to ask ourselves not only what we will teach our students, but what they will learn from us. 

Wilhelm then dives to Vygotsky's sociocultural methods of development, something I had studied in the previous semester. However, Wilhelm brings up points of Vygotsky I had not considered: that in addition to cognitive zones of proximal development, but "social, emotional, and moral zones of development" (21) as well. As I read, I found myself wondering what I will pass on to my students, not only cognitively but morally and emotionally as well. What will they learn from me, either actively or subconsciously? When I think of myself as a teacher in a classroom, I model myself after the teachers I felt closest too in school, and there will come a day when I might be a model for a young student. Now I have to figure out what sort of model I want to be. 

Chapter 2 focuses largely on the issue of reading, theories of reading, and teaching reading to students. As a history teacher, I will have to engage myself with older texts that many of them will probably not be able to decode without help, a task that I have been wondering for some time now how I will accomplish. How do I engage reluctant readers, especially at a high school level where many of them have already given up on their own literacy? "The problem," Wilhelm writes, "is that there are very few resources to help teachers understand the demands of particular kinds of texts or genres" (46). He then examines the "Inquiry Square": the crosspoints between procedural and declarative knowledge. By asking ourselves and our students what the text is saying as well as what the point of the text is, we are all becoming more critically engaged. In my own experiences, having to clarify and defend a point over and over again leads to my examination and digger deeper into my own points of view. 

One argument that resonates strongly with me is Wilhelm's charge that much of American schoolwork is mindless tedium. YES! I thought, that's exactly it! I found myself remembering those classes I took in high school that consisted of nothing but busy work--students working silently on worksheets while the teacher sat at the desk--where I took away nothing from the class save how much I hated worksheets. The same occurred to me as I was doing observations: as it was the day before a three-day weekend, the teacher handed out worksheets to his students and then sat at his desk, never mind that there were students who put their head on their desk and refused to do the work. Frankly, I don't blame them. What's the use in doing work if even the teacher, who is supposed to guide and direct these students, shows no interest in their learning?

If even half of my teachers had employed some of the theories Wilhelm brings up, I might have had an easier time in high school. Teachers need to be able to teach students not only their content areas, but"real everyday activities that have purpose and meaning" (20). Teachers who respond to the student environment around, teachers who are passionate and self-assessing, teachers who encourage their students to be critical thinkers...those are the teachers who make the difference, and those are the teachers I want to model myself after.