TAIR Conference- Connecting with Reading

TAIR Conference 2011- Guyer High School, Denton, TX. 

Each year, the University of North Texas Reading Department puts on conference in Denton, TX to connect teacher practitioners with pre-service teachers.  Hundreds of undergraduates show up to learn from seasoned professional teachers, and the practicing teachers hone their conference presentation skills.  This year, we were honored to have the author George Ella Lyon as our keynote speaker. 

To those of us who teach the “I Am From” poem, Lyon’s presence was a thrill.  She read aloud from a few of her books, sharing her prose with the passion of a performer.  It makes such a difference when the reader feels the intention behind the text, and it was good to see how her reading showcased that very important aspect of reading for entertainment.  At the end of her presentation, Lyon sang a song that she had written that could function just as easily as a poem as it did lyrics to a song.  I urged her to record the song and place it on her website, so I’m hopeful that this will happen.

After breaking from the keynote, we moved to session one.  My own presentation didn’t have any participants show up, so I abandoned my empty room in favor of taking advantage of learning from my peers.  Although it was disappointing to not present something I worked hard to compile, I was pleased to have the opportunity to learn something new.  So, I will hold on to my presentation in hopes of presenting it again another year.  Perhaps I need to work on the title to entice teacher educators to hear me.

I went to Dr. Carol Revelle’s presentation on using a gallery walk to tackle the tough issue of the Holocaust.  She and her partner, a National Writing Project TC from Arizona, began by doing a read-aloud of the book “Erika’s Story” by Ruth Vander Zee.  In this children’s book, a mother is on her way to a concentration camp, and she chooses to throw her infant child from the side of the train in hopes that the baby would be taken in by one of the townsfolk that were gathered, watching the death trap speed ahead.  We were asked to consider whether we’d be able to make that difficult choice.  After sharing our writing, we were directed to walk around and consider various poems and pictures that had been mounted on butcher paper on the walls. Each of us armed with a marker, we annotated our impressions, questions, and connections. Then, we came together to share our thoughts again.  Finally, we saw a wordle that had been constructed using the text of the poems that we’d just seen on the walls.  We wrote a response to the wordle as a way to close out our session.

Not only was this lesson powerful thematically, dealing with how children were impacted by the Holocaust, but it was also an excellent model for interactive learning.  An alternate suggestion for using this model to teach other topics would be to collect poems and pictures from a time period and invite students to consider what was going on in the Elizabethan period, as an introduction to Shakespeare; or perhaps to collect poems and paintings centered around a theme, like “The Blues”.  The activation of prior knowledge through using a picture book and writing prompt, followed by movement and consideration to allow students to create their own meaning, and closed by a final writing reflection of the whole allows students to get the most from a class period. 

Next, I went to a session about Slam Poetry by Kip Nettles.  Kip began by showcasing his passion for poetry through sharing his own composition.  His recitation clearly showed pre-service teacher how important it is to share a little bit about oneself in order to make connections with the students.  He’s right about that.  Believing what you are selling is a huge part of encouraging students to think about how important the content is.  If a teacher doesn’t see the value of what they are teaching, the students won’t either.  However, when the teacher allows entry into the soul, it connects with the children.  After sharing his own writing, Kip showed three You Tube videos about Slam poetry that he said he’d use with his students.  They were gritty and used language that a teacher should consider carefully before using.  However, that is part of what Slam poetry is about.  It’s not always pretty or appropriate.  But it is powerful.  He also showed a video from an elementary school that had incorporated slam poetry into a performance.  This type of poetry is flexible through the grade levels.

Leaving his session, I felt inspired to bring more poetry into my classroom.  I wished I had written personal poems that were as powerful as his were.  I also wished I could have recorded his reading of his final poem, about the loss of his guitar-playing after a stroke.  Emotions can bleed through poetry.

Pre-service and teacher practitioners should take advantage of opportunities to learn from each other.  It is amazing what peers can bring to the table, given the chance.  Going to local conferences like the TAIR conference give the lifelong learner a way to connect with others, both socially and ideologically. 

Shown below are two of the Slam Poetry videos shared by Kip: