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  • Reimagining the Teaching of Secondary English
  • Howard Sklar (bio)
The English Teacher’s Companion: A Complete Guide to Classroom, Curriculum, and the Profession. 2nd edition. By Jim Burke . Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003.

Twenty years ago, when I was studying and training to become a secondary school English teacher, students in my program had a keen sense of the teachers who really knew their stuff. These instructors typically had firsthand, recent, and relevant exposure to the inside of a secondary classroom, as well as a sense of what it might mean to teach in one. This combination of practical subject knowledge and teaching skill, so often the focus of public discussion by individuals who lack both, is the larger concern of Jim Burke's The English Teacher's Companion: A Complete Guide to Classroom, Curriculum, and the Profession. Burke repeatedly foregrounds the delicate balance between curricular rigor and sensitivity to student concerns and needs, and this sensibility informs nearly every classroom activity that he describes. By providing a forum for discussion of this balance, of the ethos that ideally guides instruction in secondary English classes, Burke sees himself as a "companion" to other teachers. Yet The English Teacher's Companionis more than a personalized encounter with a skilled teacher; indeed, with minor exceptions, the book provides a highly readable, comprehensive portrait of the work of a secondary school English teacher, and thus will be of use [End Page 309]both to those who teach or intend to teach at the secondary level and to those in higher education who train and prepare them.

Burke systematically covers a range of issues that naturally comprise the backbone of instruction in secondary English classes. He devotes lengthy chapters to the discussion of reading, writing, speaking, and thinking, each of which is addressed through the particular sensibility of his own approach to instruction. Perhaps this sensibility is best exemplified by Burke's repeated emphasis on the importance of teachers serving as models for student reflection on literature. He believes that teachers can accomplish this by demonstrating for students the ways in which they, as readers, work their way through particular texts, and by giving students identifiable ways of approaching texts generally.

It is this need for models, rather than any intrinsic inadequacy on the part of students, that, in Burke's view, frequently causes students' difficulties in reading relatively difficult texts. "I occasionally hear teachers complain that students can't read a certain text. Certainly this is sometimes the case; too often, however, we forget that this text is different, more challenging than others they have read" (44). While this assertion may seem self-evident to all educators, Burke contextualizes it by suggesting that this task is framed not only by the expectations of what students "ought" to learn (as represented by state and national standards), but also by teachers' own awareness of the students' placement on what Burke calls a "Continuum of Complexity"—"from simple understanding to confident interpretation of multiple texts" (43–44). Burke argues that even very ordinary students can be helped to understand difficult texts, but only if "we . . . scaffold and sequence their reading so that we develop their ability to successfully read a series of increasingly challenging stories" (43). Aside from the modeling of the teacher's own written responses to literary works, this approach involves the literal structuring of thought and response through the extensive use of graphic organizers and other techniques, many of which apparently have been developed by Burke in his earlier books. 1

Confident of the efficacy of these methods, Burke argues passionately for the feasibility and importance, for instance, of teaching Shakespeare: "After a few initial flops with teaching Shakespeare, I learned that nothing scares students more nor gives them a greater sense of achievement than having successfully read—and, ideally, performed—a Shakespeare play" (65). Aside from the fact that this observation conforms to my own experience teaching Shakespeare to secondary-level students in the United States and Finland (both the initial fear and the eventual sense of mastery), Burke's conviction [End Page 310]likewise suggests that, when properly "scaffolded," even very challenging materials can be introduced to students who initially lack...

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