McCann Ch. 7: “Discussion that Extends Our Experiences with Literature”
Guiding Questions:
- Why is authentic discussion so rare in a classroom?
- What can we do to generate more authentic discussions–rather than lapsing into recitation?
- How does participation in authentic discussions aide/increase students understanding?
- Authentic discussion promotes higher order thinking rather than simple recall or reactions. It is founded on open-ended, meaningful questions, allowing students’ comments to set the agenda, and prompting students to elaborate and build on their responses.
- Our students are trained for IRE as the privileged speech genre in a classroom; how do we “untrain” them? (Sidenote: I need to take a look at Bakhtin again…)
Belief: Students should grapple with texts and engage in the process of inquiry through discussions.
Potential Process:
- Prompt individual student responses (e.g., short answers, surveys, opinionnaires)
- Compile responses and share
- Invite discussion
- Refrain from evaluating–let students take it away!
This is more or less the process I followed this past Wednesday and Thursday, and it went tremendously well. Seeing it in “step” form helps me think about how to create future discussions of the same nature. I want to talk to my students about that discussion and ask them to think about why they enjoyed it, why I allowed it, and how they were thinking during the discussion…
- Make it transparent that there are different types of questions–and explain why it is important to use different types of questions.
This makes me think about a comment Rob Petrone made in the past–why don’t we make what we do transparent to our students? Why do we make them guess? I agree–I believe that we are teaching students how to learn and how can we do that without EXPLICITLY discussing it? I feel like my students are much more engaged in–or at least accepting of–what we do in class when I explain my reasoning. For example, today I gave my Period 2 a quiz that included five multiple choice and five short answer questions–and they GROANED since short answer questions were not typically used by my mentor teacher last semester. I asked a few of them that I had again in Yearbook how the quiz went, and they complained about the short answers. When I told them that they are more likely to get more points with short answer since they can give me everything they know in relation to the question rather than having to narrow it down to one out of four choices. When I explained this–getting at the fact that short answer allows me to assess them more effectively–they were a little more accepting…
Idea: OAR (p. 79)–I really like the procedure used with this: discuss OAR with students, push them to explain their thinking to justify labeling different questions with O, A, or R, and then ask them to describe processes they used to find answers to questions to help them define the types of questions. This really gets them thinking about their learning…
Belief: My job is to help students see how discussion can be a process of collaboratively “figuring out” or constructing meaning.
- Uptake involves turning a student response into a statement or a question in order to encourage further elaboration.
- Restate student comment
- Use student comment to frame question
Idea: Design student-run discussions (e.g., use fishbowl process on p. 84)Take Away: In order for a discussion to work, the teacher has to design key questions for the particular students and context–keeping in mind the students’ age, level, sophistication, interests, reading skills, social relationships, etc. Then, use these open-ended, meaningful questions to push students in discussion, asking for elaboration and promoting uptake between students–without evaluating comments, etc.
McCann Ch. 8: “Joining a Big Conversation: Discussion and Interpretations of Literature”
Do my students realize that they read texts differently? That they see life differently? That it’s possible to have these different views and to discuss them–without arguing or getting mad? That sharing these views is beneficial to them?
- ”Discussion about interpretations, which necessarily involves argumen, is crucial to understanding a text and to recognizing where one’s interpretation and opinions about a text fit into a broad conversation that has likely been sustained for years.”
Guiding Questions:
- How can teachers assure students that it is all right to argue, especially when discussion focuses on the interpretation and judgment about texts?
- How can teachers foster an environment in which students recognize that there are several reasonable and legitimate ways to read the same text, and where it matters how one has interpreted that text?
Idea: Use children’s books and guiding questions to prompt student to model academic discourse (p.89)
- ”The controversies surrounding the text, or the notion that some critic might attack the text or its author, provokes students to care about interpretation, to reexamine their own interpretation, and to engage in serious discussion with others.”
- “Faced with the challenges, students are introduced to the world of literary criticism and intellectual academic discourse.” I love this–this is one of the million reasons I teach English…
- The reader’s “thought bumps into the wall of its own inadequacy”–THIS is learning. Keep pushing your thoughts, beliefs, values–refine, reflect, build.
I think this chapter is full of a ideas that could build a complete unit on literary analysis…
Ok, shifting gears–
“Mastering the Art of Effective Vocabulary Instruction” (Janet Allen)
Guiding Question: How do we make vocabulary instruction meaningful, engaging, and contextualized?
- How does having a large reservoir of vocabulary terms lead to effective reading, writing, and communication?
- What does it mean to know a word?
- Four Stages:
- I’ve never seen a word.
- I’ve seen the word, but don’t know what it means.
- I have some knowledge of the word and can use it in limited contexts.
- I know the word–multiple meanings, uses, contexts, and word forms.
- Teaching words (labels) vs. teaching concepts (ideas)
- Surface-level knowledge vs. in-depth knowledge of words.
- How do we learn words?
- Experiences, reading, direct instruction, multiple encounters in meaningful contexts, independent research, strategies.
- Graphic organizers–familiar words, but incomplete understanding of uses (see p. 94)
- Choosing words for instruction is contingent on whether they are important for comprehension, can be defined in usable terms, are useful and interesting, and whether they are of general interest, but are not crucial to the text.
- What instruction makes words meaningful, memorable, and useful?
- Multiple encounters
- Organized word walls (see “Portable Word Wall” on p. 97)
- How can we use vocab instruction to increase content knowledge?
- Fill in the blank with less complex reading to build word familiarity
- Possible Sentences activity
- How can we provide strategies for students to learn words independently?
- How can we assess vocab knowledge as a part of all assessment?
- The value of effective vocabulary instruction
