Meaning+making

There is a major irony in the teaching of literacy and language use--on the one hand, we have specific things we need to teach, such as reading and writing techniques as well as various forms of conventionality, and at the same time, the process of meaning making is owned by each person who is making meaning. In other words, what is on our agenda to teach may not always line up with the needs of our students to make meaning.

Teaching literacy and language, then, requires mediating between the needs of students to make their own, authentic meaning, and the needs of students to gain more skills in the process of doing so.

To do this effectively requires that teachers know about the various techniques of meaning-making such as phonics, reading comprehension, conventions of writing, and so forth and that teachers find ways of helping students to learn these things when it makes sense to do so (and yet to make sure that all students have opportunities to learn benchmark knowledge and skills appropriately).

Sometimes this sort of thing happens spontaneously as a student is reading or writing something. Sometimes teachers can set this sort of thing up by posing a particular problem in the context of literacy skills.

When teachers set up literacy problems, such as how do we read this book or how do we do this kind of writing or how do we use this particular type of punctuation, teachers need to consider how the learning activities can be authentic literacy experiences--such as involving children choosing some aspects about the texts they read or them having real audiences for any kind of writing they do.

Teachers can take advantage of spontaneous teaching moments (and then record their content and the benchmarks met in those moments so that these benchmarks do not have to be repeated) and they can plan to meet benchmarks using student interests as a starting point. Teaching literacy in an authentic way and meeting state requirements are not antithetical--it takes creativity and commitment but these two things can be combined for effective teaching.