Common Core CPR - Chapter 3 - Engaging All Students

This chapter not only suggested ways to engage students in reading and writing, it made me think "outside the box" about meeting the requirement to include more informational text in the classroom.  One teacher uses movie trailers as informational text to start talking about intended audience and voice.  Students not only identify the targeted audience, they have to back their claims up with details from the text/trailer.  I have used movie segments from Shrek and passages from The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss as discussion starters for audience and satire with great success in the past.  I need to find similar materials to start discussions at the start of other units.   (For The Butter Battle Book introduction to satire -- adapted from a lesson plan on ReadWriteThink.org -- I scanned every page of the book and added each picture to a PowerPoint presentation that I then show my students while I read.  Even my most lively senior classes are remarkably quiet when I read the book to them!)

The chapter starts with an example of how one teacher addresses the idea of clear writing.  His students write directions for making a peanut butter sandwich.  The next day, he brings in everything he needs and then follows their directions with varying degrees of success.  He does this at the start of the school year and refers back to lessons learned through this activity throughout the year.

Another idea to encourage reluctant writers is to only grade early drafts for completion.  This provides a student who has had bad experiences with writing to get ideas onto paper in a non-threatening environment.  I have successfully used journal writing in a similar way.  I require students to write at least half a page in response to a writing prompt.  I mark what I see as the top three errors in mechanics and grammar, but do not deduct any points so long as the student makes it to halfway down the page.  With some classes -- those that need the additional motivation -- I give bonus points for reaching the 3/4 and full page lengths.  An idea that I plan to implement from this chapter in conjunction with these journal entries is to require that students address each entry to a specific person.

There is so much more in this chapter.  After reading it, I feel better about incorporating more informational text into my classroom.  I am already rethinking some of the units I have planned for spring semester -- the units will stay the same, but the activities will change.

 

Common Core CPR chapter 2

The second chapter of this book deals with the do's and don't s of scaffolding.   Like one of the teachers mentioned in the book, there are times when discussing and analyzing a text turns into me providing the students with a synopsis of the text.  Quite frequently it is apparent that few students have completed the assigned reading and have therefore not thought about the text, never mind being prepared to talk about it.  This applies to all levels of students.  The author's also mention the ability of students to answer questions and throw together an essay purely relying on what they have gleaned from commercial study guides.  One of the answers to this problem is to provide effective scaffolding, providing prior knowledge and background support in order to give students the tools they need to independently interact with the text.   One of the challenges acknowledged by the authors is the amount of time that this takes, but they propose teaching fewer works in greater depth rather than rushing through a multitude of literature and never allowing students to gain confidence or the skills sets needed to become actively involved in their education.

The authors also provide an excellent example of collaboration across disciplines to employ scaffolding for one text across multiple classes.  This not only has the benefit of providing students with support from more than one teacher, it shows students the relevance of what learned in one class in direct correlation to another.   Those of us who visited North Mecklenburg High School last year saw this work incredibly well in a high school setting, but it is hard to implement in a school where students are not taking the same classes in a given semester.  The example in the book and what we saw in action at NMHS were both collaborations between social studies and English classes.   The ability to work on a cross-curricular unit with another teacher, whether social studies, the sciences, or the arts, would be especially helpful for our struggling students, but they are the least likely to be scheduled in a way that makes this possible.

There are plenty of good ideas in this chapter that I can employ in my classroom.  One thing that is striking is that the authors point out that our more academically successful students are the ones who most often meet the common core goals of working in collaborative groups or independently on assignments.  They acknowledge that is takes more time and patience (and a willingness to be somewhat flexible with expectations) to assign group work to struggling or unmotivated students, but these students are the ones who will benefit most from learning to work effectively in groups.   I am often guilty of taking the easier (maybe) path of whole class instruction, but is it really easier when I feel like I'm pushing 25 students up a steep hill for 50 minutes at a time?   I will take the author's suggestions and blend them with things that have worked for me and other teachers in the past and try more group work with my unmotivated students.

On to chapter 3 -- How Do We Engage All Students in Reading and Writing?