Lexi Teaches Literature: A Blog

Prior to actually reading about the Common Core State Standards, I was under the impression that they were fairly universally hated by teachers - that they were a straight jacket which kept teachers from creating lessons that best served their student populations and took creativity out of the classroom. After reading through the standards myself, as well as Chapter 1 of Teaching to Exceed the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards , I feel that this is not the case. Perhaps I was confusing a dislike of standardized testing with Common Core - either way, I feel much more comfortable now with the idea of Common Core State Standards than I once did. The Standards don't tell you you have to teach a certain way, or a certain text - they simply ensure that every student is learning the same set of important skills, regardless of school or teacher or text. Teachers are free to create their own curriculum and use their own teaching approach (likely with collaboration from the...

I was introduced to my first graphic novel, Maus , in middle school. I remember being annoyed with this new format - as someone who had been an avid reader since I knew how to read, it felt incredibly foreign. Part of the fun of reading was being able to take the words on a page and turn them into images in your own mind - here, the images were being fed to me. I also recall feelings of confusion when trying to figure out the order of speech bubbles (may sound silly, but very true!). As a student that was rarely confused by anything school-related (I was that annoying classmate that always got A's and ruined the bell curve), this was very off-putting for me. Regrettably, my annoyance at the time led me to brushing off the book, and I now remember very little of the story. My second experience with a graphic novel came during my junior or senior year of high school. We were reading Beowulf , and my English teacher brought in photocopies of portions of the book done in graphic nove...

This blog post is a response to my reading of Stephen Brookfield's " Discussion As a Way of Teaching ." As I was reading the first few pages of the text, I was given the impression that this was very much a "how to design and manage a discussion" manual. While in many ways that's what this is, I was happily surprised to find that rather than containing step-by-step instructions telling you exactly how you need to host classroom discussions, Brookfield instead gives you a number of unique and creative examples to serve as guides. He doesn't tell you there is one "right way" to do it; instead, he gives you tips and suggestions that encourage you to have more fruitful and inclusive conversations in the classroom. There are a number of important things to keep in mind when you're facilitating a group discussion: setting ground rules to make sure your discussion doesn't fail before it even begins, making sure to participate in your own di...