It's All About the Book: Motivating Teens to Read by Diane Lapp and Douglas Fisher
Wiki Literature Circles: Creating Digital Learning Communities by Elizabeth Edmondson
Digital Literacies: Online Book Clubs: Bridges Between Old and New Literacies Practices by Cassandra Scharber
Mini-Lessons For Literature Circles by Harvey Daniels and Nancy Steineke
Say:
In Digital Literacies Cassandra Scharber gives us a look at how she uses technology to encourage students to read. The idea here is that students are reading and writing all the time, they are just not doing it in the traditional way that English classes try to make them write. When students are reading now, they are reading Facebook status updates and tweets. They are writing one hundred forty characters at a time. Digital Literacies suggests that we use this technology to have students talk about literature. With the website that they suggest, Moodle, students get to post statuses about what the think of the books they are reading. They can respond to each other as well. This not only encourages people to read literature, but it also allows them to build a safe community to share their thoughts, similar to the reasons that O'Donnell-Allen suggests for having book clubs last week. I completely agree with this article and think it speaks for itself. I intend to try and use Moodle or similar formats in my classes in the future.
Wiki Literature Circles was an exciting thing to read because Elizabeth Edmondson gives us an example of how these digital book clubs have worked in her classroom. The results in this article sounded too good to be true if I'm being honest, but that is what makes it such an inspiring read. That being said, I have a personal beef with wikis. In my experience, wikis have been difficult to use and they don't do much more than other similar sites that are easier to use. I think that some other good options are Weebly, or even Blogger. As far as the actual philosophy of doing this goes I think it is a cool idea and I enjoyed reading about students getting excited about what they were reading through these communities. Hearing about students getting excited about doing homework was interesting as well.
I like that It's All About the Book gives us a scaffold for how we can organize our classes around book clubs. I think that this set up is a good idea. We begin with teacher led read aloud and think aloud and then move to having students do sustained silent reading. From this, they branch out into their book clubs where reading moves from an individual activity to a group conversation. The question that I had with this article is how do they make sure that students get their first choice. In the reading for last week we learned to have students list their top three choices and then to make sure that if students didn't get their first two choices then they would get their first choice the next time around. Lapp and Fischer suggest that we have students go to the book shelf and bring back books. This seems like it could inspire chaos.
Mini-Lessons for Literature Circles gives a lot of practical advice and lessons for us as teachers. This text is not as much theoretical as it is practical. It gives concrete examples of what we can teach with literature circles, steps to put these into practice, and ways that they can go wrong. I particularly like the section about reading journals because Daniels and Steineke tell us what to do when kids are writing in their journals. It also tells us that the problems with journals are minor and that they are not writing about what the class is reading as a whole so it is hard for us to keep up with them.
Do:
The lesson lan that I provide for this Do is in response to my discussion of Wiki Literature Circles. In this lesson, I have students make posts and comments to other classmates through the use of wordpress. Wordpress, like Blogger offers students the ability to post their own blogs. They can each essentially create their own website for English class and make general posts either about class, what they're reading, or their literature circles. I like this idea because it promotes that idea of a reading community in class. Students are more likely to feel safe if they are able to see things that their peers are posting, and if they see things that I am posting. Student websites offer a great chance for us to model for our students. As we read our own literature, we can post thoughts, predictions, and observations about our texts. Not only that, but it just makes our lives easier by having a substantial amount of student work online where we cannot possibly lose it.
Lesson Plan
Monday, October 26, 2015
Monday, October 19, 2015
Book Clubs 10/19/15
The Book Club Companion by Cindy O'Donnell-Allen
Say:
In The Book Club Companion, Cindy O'Donnell-Allen makes it clear that she has not revolutionized learning. People have always known that putting students in small groups and letting them talk about literature together is a good idea. Book Clubs however put the focus of the learning on the students. They get to decide what book they read, and for the most part what they talk about when they meet in their groups. There are however open ended prompts that can be used to help facilitate these book clubs.
Book Clubs are similar to Socratic Seminars in that they give the students a more open ended idea of what they can talk about. Both of these methods force us to look at how we lead discussions in our classroom and what the idea of discussion actually entails. When we have a classroom discussion with the teacher at the front of the class and the students in their desks there is an expectation of the students to answer a right or wrong question. These two methods however prompt the students to think about something from a text and then to just discuss their thoughts. The teacher is as far removed from the discussion as possible so that the students do not feel pressured to be 'right.' These two methods differ however in that Socratic Seminars are not a regular occurrence in class. They certainly can be, but there is not an expectation to have them once a week. Socratic seminars also have more students participating in discussion based around a book that they whole class is reading together and that the teacher has assigned, where book clubs are in groups of four to six and the students get to choose the book they want within a theme.
The idea of book choice through me off a little in this reading. I like the idea that students get to choose a book within a theme for the book clubs. What we have been doing in this class with one anchor text and another reading would work well for book clubs. You could have one classic text and then students could read a YA novel in their book clubs that would probably be more interesting to them and give them the option of seeing how entertaining literature is connected to these more literary works. What threw me off though was that in the list of clusters in the appendix for this book were a lot of classic texts that were paired together. I wish O'Donnell-Allen had given us a wider variety of types of text to read because while there are quite a few different themes, most of these books are books that I would rather use as anchor texts.
The list of things involved in the social dimension of reading described in this text is something that I have been seeing in my time at internship A at Meadow Glen. Lexington One uses Expeditionary learning, and we have been teaching a book called Lyddie. So far the students have not read any of this novel outside of the classroom. We have either read it to them in class, or they have read it with a partner in class. My CT actually records herself reading the text ahead of time so that if they are reading on their own they have the ability to listen along if they need to. The one thing on this list that concerns me and has always concerned me is the size of classroom libraries. Of course I think that we need to have large libraries, but I just wish that we had more funds to buy books. All I want is more books.
Do:
My do for this week is a lesson plan that involves getting students acquainted with the book club format. I will begin by introducing an anchor text for my students. This will be something such as how we used Brave New World in this class. I will associate that with a theme and use one of the thematic clusters from O'Donnell-Allen to allow students to choose texts. After introducing the anchor text I will have students vote on what books they want to read and then put them into groups accordingly. I want students to begin interacting with the text so I will then have them read silently for a few minutes before having them fill out the sheets that describe their expectations of the book clubs. It is important to have students set up the goals and structure of their book clubs so that if they get off task they don't have an argument for getting side tracked because they are losing sight of their own goals. The last thing that students will do is to do a short activity with their groups. This will get them to feel more comfortable in their groups and give them a short taste of what will be happening in the book clubs.
Lesson Plan
Say:
In The Book Club Companion, Cindy O'Donnell-Allen makes it clear that she has not revolutionized learning. People have always known that putting students in small groups and letting them talk about literature together is a good idea. Book Clubs however put the focus of the learning on the students. They get to decide what book they read, and for the most part what they talk about when they meet in their groups. There are however open ended prompts that can be used to help facilitate these book clubs.
Book Clubs are similar to Socratic Seminars in that they give the students a more open ended idea of what they can talk about. Both of these methods force us to look at how we lead discussions in our classroom and what the idea of discussion actually entails. When we have a classroom discussion with the teacher at the front of the class and the students in their desks there is an expectation of the students to answer a right or wrong question. These two methods however prompt the students to think about something from a text and then to just discuss their thoughts. The teacher is as far removed from the discussion as possible so that the students do not feel pressured to be 'right.' These two methods differ however in that Socratic Seminars are not a regular occurrence in class. They certainly can be, but there is not an expectation to have them once a week. Socratic seminars also have more students participating in discussion based around a book that they whole class is reading together and that the teacher has assigned, where book clubs are in groups of four to six and the students get to choose the book they want within a theme.
The idea of book choice through me off a little in this reading. I like the idea that students get to choose a book within a theme for the book clubs. What we have been doing in this class with one anchor text and another reading would work well for book clubs. You could have one classic text and then students could read a YA novel in their book clubs that would probably be more interesting to them and give them the option of seeing how entertaining literature is connected to these more literary works. What threw me off though was that in the list of clusters in the appendix for this book were a lot of classic texts that were paired together. I wish O'Donnell-Allen had given us a wider variety of types of text to read because while there are quite a few different themes, most of these books are books that I would rather use as anchor texts.
The list of things involved in the social dimension of reading described in this text is something that I have been seeing in my time at internship A at Meadow Glen. Lexington One uses Expeditionary learning, and we have been teaching a book called Lyddie. So far the students have not read any of this novel outside of the classroom. We have either read it to them in class, or they have read it with a partner in class. My CT actually records herself reading the text ahead of time so that if they are reading on their own they have the ability to listen along if they need to. The one thing on this list that concerns me and has always concerned me is the size of classroom libraries. Of course I think that we need to have large libraries, but I just wish that we had more funds to buy books. All I want is more books.
Do:
My do for this week is a lesson plan that involves getting students acquainted with the book club format. I will begin by introducing an anchor text for my students. This will be something such as how we used Brave New World in this class. I will associate that with a theme and use one of the thematic clusters from O'Donnell-Allen to allow students to choose texts. After introducing the anchor text I will have students vote on what books they want to read and then put them into groups accordingly. I want students to begin interacting with the text so I will then have them read silently for a few minutes before having them fill out the sheets that describe their expectations of the book clubs. It is important to have students set up the goals and structure of their book clubs so that if they get off task they don't have an argument for getting side tracked because they are losing sight of their own goals. The last thing that students will do is to do a short activity with their groups. This will get them to feel more comfortable in their groups and give them a short taste of what will be happening in the book clubs.
Lesson Plan
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Fostering Talk Around Literature
Adolescent Literacy by Beers Probst and Rief
Response and Analysis by Probst
Strengthening Argumentative Writing with Speaking and Listening (Socratic) Circles by Styslinger and Overstreet
The Chicken and the Egg: Inviting Response and Talk through Socratic Circles by Styslinger and Pollock
Socratic Circles: Fostering Critical and Creative Thinking in Middle and High School by Copeland
Say:
This section of readings was useful in clearing some things up for me. I have heard about Socratic circles on multiple occasions, but I have never seen them in action or had them properly explained to me. This section has piqued my interest in learning about Socratic circles, although I am sure we will participate in one in class. This section of readings also interests me because fostering talk around literature has been one of my weaknesses in my teaching.
In the article about using Socratic circles to strengthen argumentative writing the most interesting thing to me was that these class discussions did actually strengthen writing. We are learning all these different methods and sometimes we forget that they really build on each other. I would think that the main goal of the Socratic circles would be to just get students to think about arguments in a more structured way. Overstreet and Styslinger say that students love to argue, but think that the way to win an argument is to just be louder than the opponent. I think that teaching students how to have a respectful debate or discussion is enough reason alone to use Socratic circles and that there would be another activity used to bridge the discussion to the writing. It never occurred to me that the discussion would strengthen the writing all on its own. I am however having trouble connecting the overall discussion of a text through socratic circles to actually forming arguments. In The Chicken and the Egg Styslinger and Pollock talk about how students had trouble using evidence from the text to support their arguments. To me, it seems like the circles teach how to be respectful and to debate, but not necessarily how to argue. While the students in The Chicken and the Egg did not always use textual evidence however, they still worked up to it and still used the format of discussion as a way of thinking about Romeo and Juliet as a class which is something that I thought was great.
Response and Analysis by Probst is the text that I spent the most time thinking about this week. This could possibly be due to the fact that I used one of these lessons in my classroom without knowing it, or that I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with Probst frequently during my reading. The thing that I most disagreed with Probst on was the analogy that he set up within the article. This is that people need to talk with others about movies or books. I went to a movie with my friends last night and we talked about it for about ten minutes afterward. I'm not sure that there needs to be a dialogue with others to fully think about a text. This is not to say that we shouldn't think about what we read, or just move on after we are finished, but we can think about it on our own. We can also think about reading through our writing. One of my professors said that if you spend more than thirty minutes reading anything then you should write about it. I think this is true, and if you need to talk about it then it wouldn't hurt. I did however like his take on the most important word activity which is what I actually did for the Do portion of this post.
The reading from Adolescent Literacy this week talked about one of the biggest problems that I have when getting students to talk, and it is even something I struggled with when I was in school. This is getting students comfortable with discourse. We think that talking is easy. After all, we do it all the time, but talking in front of people and about assigned topics in an English class is a different story. We need to teach students that there is not necessarily a right or a wrong answer, but there is only what the tell us, and if it is supported by the text or not. The point of having arguments is to have students learn the method of talking with peers, not rehearsing factual answers.
DO:
My Do this week comes from a lesson that I planned for the first part of internship A. This lesson is after I had tried to have classroom discussion a few times, but it did not go as well as I had hoped. I should point out here that I was teaching Freshmen and they needed explicit instructions on what we were doing and why we were doing it. My coaching teacher suggested when I had discussion that I gave them handouts, or questions to answer to lead the discussion so that they wouldn't be scared to say something wrong. I chose instead to do the Most Important Word activity that I found in Bridging English and then found again in Reading and Analysis. This worked in much the same way that my CT expected questions to work, and in the same way that we have been taught in our education classes. The students first combed the text for the most important passage. They then narrowed this down to a sentence and finally to a word. I then had them draw the passage to help them visualize. After this independent work, they talked to a partner about what they drew, and finally we talked as a class about what we all thought were the most important aspects of this story. It was a great success
Lesson Plan
Response and Analysis by Probst
Strengthening Argumentative Writing with Speaking and Listening (Socratic) Circles by Styslinger and Overstreet
The Chicken and the Egg: Inviting Response and Talk through Socratic Circles by Styslinger and Pollock
Socratic Circles: Fostering Critical and Creative Thinking in Middle and High School by Copeland
Say:
This section of readings was useful in clearing some things up for me. I have heard about Socratic circles on multiple occasions, but I have never seen them in action or had them properly explained to me. This section has piqued my interest in learning about Socratic circles, although I am sure we will participate in one in class. This section of readings also interests me because fostering talk around literature has been one of my weaknesses in my teaching.
In the article about using Socratic circles to strengthen argumentative writing the most interesting thing to me was that these class discussions did actually strengthen writing. We are learning all these different methods and sometimes we forget that they really build on each other. I would think that the main goal of the Socratic circles would be to just get students to think about arguments in a more structured way. Overstreet and Styslinger say that students love to argue, but think that the way to win an argument is to just be louder than the opponent. I think that teaching students how to have a respectful debate or discussion is enough reason alone to use Socratic circles and that there would be another activity used to bridge the discussion to the writing. It never occurred to me that the discussion would strengthen the writing all on its own. I am however having trouble connecting the overall discussion of a text through socratic circles to actually forming arguments. In The Chicken and the Egg Styslinger and Pollock talk about how students had trouble using evidence from the text to support their arguments. To me, it seems like the circles teach how to be respectful and to debate, but not necessarily how to argue. While the students in The Chicken and the Egg did not always use textual evidence however, they still worked up to it and still used the format of discussion as a way of thinking about Romeo and Juliet as a class which is something that I thought was great.
Response and Analysis by Probst is the text that I spent the most time thinking about this week. This could possibly be due to the fact that I used one of these lessons in my classroom without knowing it, or that I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with Probst frequently during my reading. The thing that I most disagreed with Probst on was the analogy that he set up within the article. This is that people need to talk with others about movies or books. I went to a movie with my friends last night and we talked about it for about ten minutes afterward. I'm not sure that there needs to be a dialogue with others to fully think about a text. This is not to say that we shouldn't think about what we read, or just move on after we are finished, but we can think about it on our own. We can also think about reading through our writing. One of my professors said that if you spend more than thirty minutes reading anything then you should write about it. I think this is true, and if you need to talk about it then it wouldn't hurt. I did however like his take on the most important word activity which is what I actually did for the Do portion of this post.
The reading from Adolescent Literacy this week talked about one of the biggest problems that I have when getting students to talk, and it is even something I struggled with when I was in school. This is getting students comfortable with discourse. We think that talking is easy. After all, we do it all the time, but talking in front of people and about assigned topics in an English class is a different story. We need to teach students that there is not necessarily a right or a wrong answer, but there is only what the tell us, and if it is supported by the text or not. The point of having arguments is to have students learn the method of talking with peers, not rehearsing factual answers.
DO:
My Do this week comes from a lesson that I planned for the first part of internship A. This lesson is after I had tried to have classroom discussion a few times, but it did not go as well as I had hoped. I should point out here that I was teaching Freshmen and they needed explicit instructions on what we were doing and why we were doing it. My coaching teacher suggested when I had discussion that I gave them handouts, or questions to answer to lead the discussion so that they wouldn't be scared to say something wrong. I chose instead to do the Most Important Word activity that I found in Bridging English and then found again in Reading and Analysis. This worked in much the same way that my CT expected questions to work, and in the same way that we have been taught in our education classes. The students first combed the text for the most important passage. They then narrowed this down to a sentence and finally to a word. I then had them draw the passage to help them visualize. After this independent work, they talked to a partner about what they drew, and finally we talked as a class about what we all thought were the most important aspects of this story. It was a great success
Lesson Plan
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