1

Crafting Teaching Practices

TE 408 Section 2, Spring 2009
Erickson 107, 8:00-9:50 AM

Instructor:
Seminar Lab sections
Carlin Borsheim Special Education:
Phone: 517.862.1368 Emalie Karp, eekarp@hotmail.com
borsheim@msu.edu Marilyn Scheffel scheffel@msu.edu
Mother wiki: http://msu-enged-cohort08.wikispaces.com/
Course wiki: http://msuenged-cohort09-02.wikispaces.com/

Course Description
This course aims to continue guiding you into English teaching, to continue preparing you for the world of the early twenty-first
century English classroom with a repertoire of instructional practices. We will also address the multiple roles of 21st century
English teachers and their professional, intellectual, sociopolitical, and communal responsibilities.

TE 408 takes this year’s focus on planning for instruction to the next level. We continue our consideration of dialogic instruction
and diverse learners through units on 1) writing instruction, 2) novel study, and 3) unit planning. In all of this, we continue our
focus on designing instruction and assessments with end goals in mind and understanding our students as learners in specific
social contexts. Interrogating our beliefs and reflecting frequently on our practice will help us meet our students’ needs.

Course Structure
Like TE 407, this course has three major components: the field experience, a lab (focused on special education for half the
semester and your minor for the other half), and the seminar class. The labs and the seminar experiences are not coordinated
with one another this semester; therefore, you should proactively look for ways to build connections across the different parts
of the course.

Field Experience
You will continue to participate in a secondary English classroom for at least four hours (spread out over at least two days) per
week. For most of you, this participation is happening with a partner. Throughout this semester, you should continue to
proactively seek out opportunities to teach. We will be doing some planning with these goals in mind, as well as scheduling
regular time to discuss your field experiences. We have also designed a variety of tasks to encourage you to get involved with
the community, school, classroom, and students in a different capacity. You will meet online to write about and to respond to
each others’ writing about your experiences in your field placements and how they relate to course readings and concepts.
 2

Lab
As part of TE 408, you will participate in a weekly lab. For the first six weeks that lab will focus on helping learners with special
needs and will be taught by special education specialists. In the second six weeks, you will attend a lab or, if a lab is not
available, conduct an independent project focused on your minor.

Seminar Class
As noted above, teaching well entails making many decisions before you enter the classroom as well as making on-the-spot
decisions once you are there. The seminar continues to focus on the planning aspects of English teaching. We will discuss the
complexities involved in making planning choices, and you will rehearse a number of decisions as you design, enact, revise, and
reflect on unit design. You will also continue exploring the wealth of resources available for English teachers and discover ways
of approaching and organizing your teaching and your curriculum. This course will support you in building a library of
professional resources and being an active participant in a network of professional colleagues.

Core Concepts
Almost everything we do throughout the year in TE 407 and TE 408 addresses the work of planning for English instruction. We
have structured the course around four core concepts. These four concepts, and the questions that define them, will not only
give coherence to our work together in class, but we hope they will also become touchstone questions as you make teaching
decisions in your own classroom.

o Teacher beliefs and knowledge: How do my beliefs and knowledge shape my practices? How do I believe learning
occurs? What do I believe is important for students to learn? What do I know, believe, and value about ELA content?
While we spent more time on these issues in 407, we expect you to grow in your awareness of your beliefs and your
ability to enact them in your planning.
o Students and context: How does what I know, and what I believe, about my students shape my practice? How do I
assess my students’ initial level of knowledge and skill and keep track of their progress? By the end of this semester,
the focus of these questions will be your intern placement.
o Purpose: How do my understandings of the purpose of a lesson or unit shape my practices? How can I build coherence
in my planning? How is what I do with students today significant for them beyond today?
o Classroom talk: How do different forms, types, and practices of classroom talk create the learning environment in an
English language arts classroom? How can I move classroom talk in a more dialogic direction? This semester we will also
consider how classroom talk and writing work together and influence one another

Course Goals
o To develop and articulate your beliefs and knowledge as English teachers, including your evolving understanding of
yourselves as teachers and your purposes in the ELA classroom.
o To integrate your growing knowledge about the history and characteristics of English as a school subject into this
understanding.
 3

o To practice gathering information about your students, both about the cultural backgrounds, discourses, and learning
styles they bring to the classroom and how they are progressing in meeting course goals.
o To practice planning curricular units and lessons using clear purposes, which are grounded in course goals, guiding
beliefs, and content expertise.
o To build a repertoire of instructional practices, including dialogic discourse practices, for teaching ELA content to diverse
learners given a growing knowledge of students and classroom contexts”

Units of Study
To meet these goals, we have designed several units and projects, which will take place over the course of the semester.
1. Understand, question, challenge, transform – Reading the word and the world
This first, short unit is designed to 1) offer an example tenth-grade English Language Arts unit for you to analyze, 2)
incorporate popular culture texts with school texts in academically rigorous ways, and 3) help us develop a common
vocabulary for what it means to be “critical.” During this unit, you will begin to “critically read” your own teaching
contexts – a process that will culminate in the final semester portfolio.

2. Teachers and writers: Designing writing instruction

In ENG 313, you will explore different varieties of writing and writing instruction. However, writing and teaching writing
are two different things, and in this unit we will address methods of teaching and assessing student writing. In the
end, you will collaborate to plan a mini-unit related to teaching personal narrative writing.

3. Approaches to literature instruction: Structuring small group conversations about multicultural literature
In this unit, we will address planning for and structuring collaborative work and individual assessment at the same time,
designing student choice reading and assessment tasks, the method of novel study known as literature circles (or book
clubs), and a variety of issues surrounding the teaching of multicultural literature. Finally, you will design a mini-unit
incorporating a multicultural novel, popular cultural or multi-modal texts, and professional texts of your choice.

4. Putting it all together: Designing a conceptual unit

The culminating work of the semester will be to individually design a unit, ideally intended for your intern placement. In
this unit, you will include reflective writing that “shows your work” and displays your understanding of instructional
design for particular students, backward design, engaging students, incorporating dialogic classroom discourse, effective
assessment, and writing instruction.

Course Texts
We chose our course texts with two purposes in mind. First, these texts will facilitate our exploration of course goals. Perhaps
even more importantly, however, we chose texts that will be useful components of your growing professional library. It is our
hope and expectation that you will be able to use these class texts as touchstones and resources when you enter your own
classrooms in two years. Some of these texts are available for a reduced price at online bookstores, such as amazon.com. All
except the fiction for book clubs are available at the MSU student bookstore.
 4

Appleman, D. (2000). Critical Encounters in High School English. New York: Teachers College Press.
Lowry, L. (2006). The Giver. Delacorte Books for Young Readers.
Hillocks, G. (2006). Narrative Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
McCann et al. (2005). Reflective Teaching, Reflective Learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Smagorinsky, P. (2007). Teaching English By Design. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
1 fictional work (for book clubs) – $10-$15
1 professional book - $15-$25

Optional TE 408 Texts

Stahl, S. A. (1999). Vocabulary development. Brookline, MA: Brookline Books.
Weaver, Constance. (2006). The Grammar Plan Book: A Guide to Smart Teaching. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Course Assignments
Unit 1: Critical Inquiry Tasks, posts and final portfolio (20%)
Unit 2: Narrative writing unit (20%)
Unit 3: Multicultural literature unit (20%)
Unit 4: Conceptual unit (20%)
Seminar participation & other projects and assignments, including teaching notebooks (20%)

Course Policies (incorporated into your participation grade)

1. Learning by being here
Because this class will involve interactive and collaborative activities, being present and prepared for class are essential
conditions for its effectiveness. If you miss class or come late, you will negatively impact the class, your classmates’ ability to
accomplish their work, your own learning, and your grade. For the learning of all, we hope you can attend every class and be
“fully present” when you are here.

2. Learning through timely application and reflection

Learning builds over time and is supported by thinking, writing, and talking about what you are reading and doing. With this in
mind, we have designed all reading and writing assignments to be time and situation relevant. This means that they are of
most value for you, for the class, and for us when completed at the time they are assigned.

3. Learning from and with experienced professionals

Your cooperating teacher and others at the school site of your field experience will become significant professional colleagues.
They can offer you a wide variety of experiences, perspectives, and information. Also, experienced English teachers and current
interns will join us to talk about and illustrate important elements and issues in teaching English. Finally, we will be consulting a
range of videos that will allow you to learn from experienced teachers talking about and modeling their practices.
 5

4. Learning from electronic, print, and other resources

Another way to learn from colleagues is to build your professional library to include books and supplementary materials by and
for English teachers. You should use your own teacher notebook designs to continue to keep track of both on-line and unbound
resources for various aspects of teaching English. As usual, I encourage you to experiment with new technology applications to
keep yourself organized. We will revisit and share these notebooks this semester.

As professionals, teachers continue educating themselves to improve their craft and stay up with developments in subject
matter and teaching resources. One important source is our professional organization, the National Council of Teacher of
English. I am requesting (though not requiring) that you join the NCTE this year and to begin taking advantage of the range of
resources it provides English teachers. [Note: Student membership is $20 and includes one professional journal of your choice.
I recommend you choose The English Journal. Additional journals, should you be interested, are $5.] Additionally, MSU hosts
an English conference in the spring, called Bright Ideas at the MSU Student Union. This local conference is a great way to get
your feet wet with professional conferences.

Finally, the MSU Writing Center (300 Bessey Hall, and in the library) is an excellent resource for writing assistance for writers of
any ability level at any stage of the writing process. As you know, even good writers can benefit from peer review, and you
might be interested simply in seeing how they do it. We encourage you to make appointments at the Writing Center early. The
schedule often becomes very busy during the semester--making appointments early will assure that you get assistance and will
give you deadlines for drafts.

5. Learning through observing and integrating

Good teachers are good observers of their students and of what goes on in their classrooms. This semester, you will continue to
sharpen your classroom observational strategies through your field experience. We will make time available in class to discuss
your experiences with your peers. In addition, you will be required to integrate course readings, concepts, and resources and
related learning from other courses in a weekly discussion post on ANGEL. If you are also enrolled in English 313 this semester,
you should actively seek to make connections between the classes.

TE 408 and English 313?

TE 408 complements the work you’ll be doing in ENG 313 but does not duplicate it. Both courses focus on writing and writing
pedagogy through a set of shared assumptions about writing:
• that effective teachers of writing are writers themselves;
• that writing development and its use are socially constructed processes; and
• that multimodal forms of writing and composing are becoming increasingly important in a global, democratic culture.
Within this context, ENG 313 focuses on writing in a variety of genres and deals with curricular issues at the local level during
the process of writing such as responding to student writing, creating writing assignments, revision strategies, peer review as a
pedagogical technique, developing rubrics, encouraging student engagement in the writing process, the creative interplay of
technology and writing, and evaluation and assessment. You should seek out ways to incorporate these writing strategies as
you plan for writing instruction in TE 408.
 6

In TE 408, on the other hand, we focus on planning for writing, on the construction of larger conceptual unit plans that include
writing, the alignment of English curriculum (including writing) with standards, and teachers’ multiple roles and their
professional, intellectual, sociopolitical, and communal responsibilities.

Attendance Policy
More than two absences – excused or unexcused – will lower your grade by one half letter. If you are more than
ten minutes late, that counts as one absence; in addition, three tardies count as one absence. We do, however,
understand that “life happens” and that you may need to miss class. In that event, you should let us know in advance, either by
phone or email. You should assume the same practice in your field placement. This is a basic and critical practice of professional
communication. We will be holding you to a high standard of professionalism this semester, as we look toward the intern year.

University Policies
TE Program policy dictates that in order to pass TE 408, all parts of the course (seminar, field experience, all labs) must be
passed with a 2.0 or above. This means that a satisfactory report must be received from your lab instructor and from the
teachers in the field experience. If you receive less than a 2.0 in the course, the entire course needs to be repeated in order to
continue in the Teacher Preparation Program.
Academic Honesty

Article 2.3.3 of the Academic Freedom Report states, “the student shares with the faculty the responsibility for maintaining the
integrity of scholarship, grades, and professional standards.” In addition, the College of Education adheres to the policies on
academic honesty as specified in General Student Regulations, 1.0, Protection of Scholarship and Grades, and in the all-
University Policy on Integrity of Scholarship and Grades, which are included in Spartan Life: Student Handbook and Resource
Guide. Students who commit and act of academic dishonesty may receive a 0.0 on the assignment or in the course. For
additional information, see MSUs ombudsman’s website: http://www.msu.edu/unit/ombud/plagiarism.html

Accommodations for Disabilities

We would like to accommodate students with disabilities; please see us with any concerns. Students with disabilities should also
contact the Resource Center for Persons with Disabilities to establish reasonable accommodations. For an appointment with a
counselor, call 353-9642 or 355-1293 (TTY).

Drops and Adds

The last day to add this course is the end of the first week of classes.

Observing a Major Religious Holiday

You may make up course work missed to observe a major religious holiday only if you make arrangements in advance with the
instructor.
Course Overview
 7

Unit 1: Guiding Questions: Assessment/Tasks: Texts: Threads:

Understand, Question, How can we approach unit planning? Summative: The Giver Understand, question,
Challenge, and What is “critical”? Critical inquiry tasks, wiki posts, The Truman Show challenge, transform
Transform: Reading the How and why do we incorporate pop and portfolio/reflection The Simpsons and pop “Critical”
Word and the World culture? culture texts “Seeing beyond”
What kind of research do we do as Formative: Morrell Teacher research
(3 weeks) teachers? Regular on-line discussions on Newkirk Unit planning
common inquiry questions Burke
Smagorinski

Unit 2: Guiding Questions: Assessment/Tasks: Texts: Threads:

Teachers and Writers: How can we approach writing Summative: Hillocks Planning writing
Designing Writing instruction? Mini-unit with writing Danielle DeVoss instruction
Instruction What is narrative? Why teach it? instruction City Voices, City Visions Writing Process
What are multiliteracies? Burke Writing Workshop
(4 weeks) Formative: McCann et al
Writers workshops Wilson
Planning exercises Samples of student work

Unit 3: Guiding Questions: Assessment/ Tasks: Texts: Threads:

Approaches to literature How can we approach novel study? Summative: Multicultural novel Planning literature
instruction: Structuring What are the limits and possibilities of Mini-unit with mc literature Professional text of choice instruction
small group multicultural literature? Appleman Multicultural lit
conversations about How do we teach skills as well as Formative: McCann et al Young adult lit
multicultural literature content? Professional text book review Burke Film as text
Literature circles discussions
(4 weeks) Argument assignment

Unit 4: Guiding Questions: Assessment/ Tasks: Texts: Threads:

Putting it Together: How do we approach unit planning?
Designing a Conceptual What does unit planning look like?
Unit “What does it mean to teach
Understand, Question, Challenge,
(4 weeks) Transform?”
Summative:
Design a conceptual unit
Formative:
Writers workshop during
planning process: backward
planning, pre writing, drafting,
revising, and teaching
Smagorinsky Apply course concepts:
Burke inquiry, dialogic,
McCann et al multigenre, culturally
responsive, multicultural,
multiliteracies, writers
workshop, and critical.
Merge traditional and
critical objectives

Calendar
Unit 1
 8

Monday, January 12 Wednesday, January 14th

Read: Lowry (1st half)
Monday, January 19th Wednesday, January 21st
MLK Day – No Classes Read: Lowry (2nd half), Morrell
Monday, January 26th Wednesday, January 28th
Read: Newkirk, McCann et al. preface Read: Freire
Unit 2
Monday, February 2 Wednesday, February 4

Monday, February 9 Wednesday, February 11

Due: Task 1: Community wiki post
Monday, February 16 Wednesday, February 18

Monday, February 23 Wednesday, February 25

Mini-units due
Unit 3
Monday, March 2 Wednesday, March 4
Due: Task 2: School wiki post Due: Lit circle prep
Monday, March 9 Wednesday, March 11
Spring Break Spring Break
Monday, March 16 Wednesday, March 18
Due: Lit circle prep incorporating lenses
Monday, March 23 Wednesday, March 25
Due: Task 3: Classroom Wiki Post Due: Final lit circle prep
Unit 4
Monday, March 30 Wednesday, April 1
Due: Mini-Units
Monday, April 6 Wednesday, April 8

Monday, April 13 Wednesday, April 15

Due: Task 4: Student Wiki Post
Monday, April 20 Wednesday, April 22

Monday, April 27 Wednesday, April 29

Due: Drafts of units for workshop time Due: Conceptual units
Monday, May 4
Final Exam 7:45 – 9:45
Due: Portfolios & Reflections