The Classroom as a Stage

  David Theune's presentation reminded me that a world exists outside of the classroom. I know it sounds obvious, but I think that the purpose we often give for assignments, is that we are providing students with information that will be beneficial to them in completing classroom formative and summative assessments. Often the purpose for these assessments is that, "this is they type of thinking that your teachers will expect in high school or college." In both of these cases, the purpose for the assignment is related to the classroom, the reward comes far later, and students do not see immediate results for the hard work that they do. In the eyes of a student, what is the incentive to work hard? When students are not motivated by college, how do we get them to participate in a meaningful way? How do we make the results of their work immediate and purposeful to their lives?
David Theune looks at these questions in consideration to both creative and analytical writing assignments.
  Theune made an interesting point in his presentation, and one that I had not considered previously. Parents are involved in their students' lives in so many ways. They go to theater productions, sporting events or orchestra concerts, but they are hardly ever asked to come into the classroom and view how their children interact with the learning process. I think that this might be why, often, there is a disconnect between what teachers understand as the capabilities and dispositions of some students and how their parents understand their capabilities and dispositions. For the most part, unless invited by the student, parents do not often get a real insight into how their children perform as learners. Theune invites parents into the classroom for culminating events where students read essays to their parents, and more generally, parents may stop by whenever they would like or have time. In this way, the purpose for working hard on the essay is that the audience will not only be the teacher, but someone who is close to the student and who they care to impress.
   Audience is the focus of many of the writing activities that Theune performs with his students. He has them participate in community projects, and he has them interact with students in other schools on the internet. According to Theune, audience matters! Students are much more likely to produce a project that they are proud of and put their best work into, if they are deeply concerned with appealing to their audience, or in the case of community work, if they know that their work affects people other than themselves. I found this presentation to be so useful, especially considering that my content area is English, and I often see my students struggling with the question of why the writing they do is purposeful. My mentor teacher often does a project where students each come up with a short story on a topic, and those short stories are compiled into a classroom novel. The novel is published and they may get a copy and copies for others. We are starting this project next week, and I am interested to see whether the work that students produce is of higher quality simply because the audience has changed. I imagine that they will be excited about this work.