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My Strategy for “Questioning the Author” :
For my first lesson on Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, I would like my students to read Chapter One in class so that we can begin the book with a solid understanding of the content we will be reading. While reading, students will be using the “Questioning the Author” strategy to help create a dialogue about the meaning of the text. The book explores the existence of racism and discrimination that exists within our country, and it takes a deep dive into the importance of a sense of self, identity, and place in our world. These complicated topics can often be a lot for students without helping guide them through. For our first chapter reading guide, I would give the students focus mainly on the questions in “Initiate Discussion” to help prepare them for small group discussion, which would turn into full class discussion eventually. I would provide the questions in a worksheet and encourage students to jot down notes about what they have read while they are in class, hopefully forcing them to actively reflect on their reading in the moment. Students will then share their questions with their small discussion groups, going over the answers through conversation. At the end of small group discussions, every group will be told to elect a reporter who will share one question with the class that was discussed and the conversation it ignited. This holds groups accountable for participating without forcing the students to feel as if their answers are being graded for accuracy.
Explanation
I chose the “Questioning the Author” strategy from Improving Adolescent Literacy for my lesson because I believe it gives students the best ability to begin forming open-ended questions on a topic that they may see as hard to talk about. Being told to question an author can often seem like a daunting task for young students who often approach texts as unquestionable pieces that they should simply memorize and absorb instead of actively engaging with. Changing the narrative of “questioning” an author from a negative connotation but to something that is encouraged and required in the classroom could begin to open pathways to conversations that would not be had otherwise. Another point of contention with engaging with this text could be the heavy topic of racism being seen as something we should not be bringing into question. Giving students a space to ask the questions of the text they feel like asking in this format is an opportunity to see questions we might not see otherwise. In alternative reflections of a reading of a text such as an essay, students are often told to have the answers to the questions that they are asking and to be able to point out direct evidence to support their answers. While this is an important reading strategy in some circumstances, this piece of text should invite more questions than answers. The “Questioning the Author” strategy gives space to ask those questions while relieving them of the pressure of having an answer. I also chose this strategy because of the low stakes participation it invites since students will not be told to turn in their questions or forced to share with the class unless they want to. The questions generated will hopefully be formed from genuine curiosity which will insight better conversation. It also allows students who were not able to come up with a question of their own to participate in conversation, hopefully motivating them to choose a question for future readings.
Thieves: A Literacy Strategy
My second chosen reading strategy is THIEVES and I would like to use it in the classroom to discuss how we find and choose information for research essays. One of the articles I would like to present is on misinformation. The article is (Why) Is Misinformation a Problem? Posted by the National Library of Medicine. In this lesson, students will use THIEVES to go over this essay in small groups. The small groups will jot down notes about every section of THIEVES in relation to the article into a Google form that is submitted to the teacher for participation in your group. We will then engage in a full class discussion about the article as well as how the different parts of THIEVES helped students find useful information throughout the article that they can use in their future writing.
Explanation
I chose the THIEVES strategy for this lesson because it is a helpful way to make sure students are absorbing an entire article by going through those checkpoints instead of lightly skimming and cherry-picking the information they want to use. The purpose of using an article about misinformation for this activity is to help highlight the purpose and necessity of thoroughly examining articles that are used in research. The article highlights how misinformation spreads and how it affects those of us who are absorbing it. When students do not take the time to understand what they are reading or the true purpose of a certain article, it can cause them to use sources that are false, and also potentially spread harmful narratives. This often happens when data is taken out of the context of studies and used for articles that exist only to push a certain narrative. Going into an article having already thought about the author's purpose and point of view can help students determine if it is a source they should be using. The article I have chosen goes over the importance of understanding the difference between “misinformation” versus “false information”; a tool that will be helpful for students to learn as they skim the headings. This activity gives students a strategy to potentially combat this while also helping them learn more about how to begin researching for their future essays. Article: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10623619/
Strategy Application
This week I took two texts and applied strategies from both Fang and Buehl to the articles I chose. The first article I chose was from a linguistics textbook, outside of my content area. The second article I chose was from a children's literature textbook about the importance of fantasy. From the Fang article I chose to focus on the importance of paraphrasing when reading a text. I did this by creating a graphic organizer that had simple questions about the text that students could fill out by reading the text the first time. The main focus for students would be on the “Key Details” which allow them to pull the most important points from the article. At the end of the worksheet when they come to the “Summary Sentence” and “Conclusion” they are able to paraphrase the details they have written down as quotes. In order to enhance the importance of paraphrasing moving from written language to spoken language, this worksheet activity can be coupled with a group activity that has students share with others the summary sentences they came up with, working together to create their own singular sentence for their group. This will help accentuate Fang's emphasis on the importance of paraphrasing in multiple formats for students. Through the linguistics article, we read “The second biggest Factor of Papua New Guinea's linguistic diversity is topography.” By putting this down as a “key detail” on the worksheet it gives readers the opportunity to identify it as an important part of the article. When using Buehl's strategies I used the graphic organizer given to us. I found this strategy to be helpful when considering the different texts we come across where we don't have a lot of background knowledge and need to be able to identify different parts of the texts we can think about to help us understand the meaning. When thinking about my background in the history of children's literature I do not have much, but I have read lots of fantasy books. When reading this text I was able to make connections with previous fantasy stories I had read as a way to help guide my understanding on a topic I may not have previously known about. The graphic organizer specifically helped with this when asked about “making connections prior” when going through the text.
Digital Jumpstart: Romeo & Juliet
The text I chose for my digital jumpstart is Romeo and Juliet. It is a very common text for high schoolers and one I believe gets looked over due to how common it is. The story can often get lost in the complicated language. My goal with my DJ is to get students excited about the story and give them an overview of what they can expect to hopefully help ease the nerves about the confusion of the story. In order to ignite interest in the story I have highlighted the forbidden love aspect as well as the warring families part. Romeo and Juliet is often viewed as a love story which can be brought for many young readers of all genders, not just boys. Highlighting the drama of the warring families will hopefully introduce the topic in a way that is captivating but also gives a more realistic view of the importance of the story. If students begin reading Romeo and Juliet as a love story, many scenes, especially at the start, make no sense since Romeo and Juliet have very little interactions throughout the story. Changing the context of the story into one of war between families will grasp interest and help students understand the story. I chose a book trailer for this mode of DJ since I thought it was a simple idea I could replicate across multiple stories I want to introduce into my class and was also a form of media, such as a movie trailer, that students are used to paying attention to and finding interest in. Having the ability to make book trailers throughout my units could help motivate students to read who would like to see how the suspense I build up in a trailer comes to fruition. It could also potentially be a great assignment for them in the future since I have shown them examples across the course of multiple stories. Creating their own book trailers for Romeo and Juliet could be an alternative assignment to help them understand the story through multiple mediums.
Teaching Vocabulary
Goal: Students will be able to identify vocabulary words where the word choice in the book has negative/positive connotations.
Students will be working with The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian to identify vocabulary words where the word choice has a negative connotation. The start of accomplishing this task relies on students being able to recognize vocabulary throughout the book which brings understanding of the story. We will accomplish this by first going over words such as revenge, reservation, and exaggeration in the story in the context in which they are used. I will begin by using the PRS card for the words to help students understand the different types of words associated with revenge such as vengeful, avenge, and revengeful. By dissecting the words, students will be able to identify words that are alike. The end goal of the lesson is for students to identify how certain vocabulary words hold important meanings to the text. I will do that by placing the sentences on the screen and substituting the word we are learning about away and switching it back in. How does the definition of this word help us understand the story? Students will continue this exercise by themselves by writing down vocabulary words as they read a section and record the sentence and page number. One word I will use to demonstrate this is the word “vintage” used to describe a motorcycle in the story.
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"Oh, that was my dad's best friend."
"That was a cool bike," he said. "Vintage."
"Yeah, he just got it."
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We will, as a class, go over the sentences and see how the students using the word vintage is influential to how their views of Junior are changing over time.
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Through my learning about vocabulary instructio, I have learned how important vocabulary instruction is to the end goal of lessons. Without a purposeful explanation and exploration of the word “vintage,” students would not be able to understand how the student using that word to Junior shows a shift in the story. While the word “cool” could have also captured this, having a total understanding if the text is important for all readers. The specifics of understanding the words the author has chosen is essential to be able to follow thematic extended metaphors that continue throughout the end of their story. This is also why I have written that this word would be taught “during” since it is not something that changes the overall meaning of the text, but rather it allows students to expand their connections of themes throughout the story. The IRIS Center tells us, “Teachers should also provide examples of how the word will be used in the context of the lesson, particularly if that word will appear in different forms.” By showing this word specifically in the context in which it is being used it gives me the opportunity to help students connect the ideas I am trying to teach of the importance of word choice while also expanding their vocabulary.
Thinking Outloud Annotations
Asking Questions and Finding Evidence using a "Who What Where When Why How" Graphic Organizer
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The Graphic Organizer I thought was best aligned with my teaching goal was the “Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How” Organizer from the Teacher Vision board that was provided. I like this one for my lesson since I want students to start thinking about how the specific characters and their actions can help us to start creating inferences and predictions about the rest of the text. The explicit scaffolding of teaching them to identify these in a text will allow students to begin learning strategies for analyzing stories they can use in the future. The questions above may be hard for students to create predictions or inferences about without the ability to go back in the text and point to exactly how they reached the conclusion that they did. This worksheet lays out that evidence for them in a way that is organized as well as accessible for future use as we progress through the story.
The story I have chosen requires lots of character analysis of power dynamics in order to begin understanding the purpose of the story. By completing this graphic organizer about specific characters, it gives students the chance to see these dynamic characters as important across the story. I envision this being used in the classroom as an activity we will glue into a reader/writer notebook that students are able to access throughout the reading of the story. Wherever they may draw a blank on who a character is or their importance, they will have a frame of reference to refer to as we continue on through the test. These can also be done when it comes to important scenes and other parts of the story that may help students reach the goal of a final summative assessment of an essay, where they have created these organizers to gather evidence.
This strategy is closely aligned with our work in circular instruction, which aims to expose students to instruction multiple times to help them absorb the information being taught. When they have the same organizer multiple times throughout a story it can help them begin understanding how they are identifying what sort of information from the story will be helpful for them to put on it while understanding how other information they may have used did not benefit them. As the teacher, it will be my job to guide them through this by showing them explicitly how we pick out the important information. I will do this by modeling this worksheet to evidence we find to answer the questions above.
