Response to "A Response-Based Approach to Reading Literature"

One of the main themese of this reading is centered around the oftrn difficult task of getting a student to "find owenership" over their own education.  I was in a recent high school tenth grade class where some of the students acheived less than 30% on a vocabulary test.  Their reaction was to giggle amongst themselves.  When I talked with their teacher, he acknowledged that they could have been giggling nervously when he drew attention to them, but this did not feel like the case with all of them.

 Concerning response-based instruction, some teachers attempt to teach with "a pedagogy of student thoughtfulness because they think it provides students with ownership for their own learning, motivates and engages them in making sense, and provides a context for them to try out, negotiate, and refine their ideas in interaction with others."  The idea is not to just prompt a student to have ownership of their education, but to free them up to mold and challenge what is taught to them.  Every one of us have been in classrooms in which the only person with ownership in the place is the instructor in front who is chiefly worried about lecturing and getting his/her dry informaiton out to the cowering masses.  No one wnats to be here.

In freeing up students to own what they are learning, it is not our jobs to show, but to fascilitate.  When students are enabled to mold and challenge what they are shown, "they orient themselves differently to the ideas they are creating because their expectations about the kinds of meaning they will gain or create are different."  They care, because the learning process is no longer one of being stuck in a crypt, but on a self-styalized adventure.  A good teacher is one who ads fuel to the adventure, because "Their sense of the whole changes only when a substantial amount of countervailing evidence leads them to rethink how what they are reading or writing "holds together."  It should not be our job to force an issue, but to direct a free-flowing river of idea and thought.  It is our job to "learn to listen

to...students' attempts at sense-making and to base instruction on their...responses."  This may seem difficult, but if we loook at students as co-learners and instructors, rather than targets of our own ideas, it could not be more simple.