Text Sets

Building Bridges by S. Herz
What Else? Other Approaches by S. Herz
SAY:
     I've found through these Say/Dos that there are a lot of things about teaching that just seem daunting to me.  Text sets have turned out to be one of those things.  I feel like I am at a point in my educational career where I have read a ton of stuff, but most of it comes from the canon because I majored in English.  We do not really focus on stuff that is for readers of a lower reading level, and especially readers who are learning English as a second language.  In fact, I have no idea how to choose books for kids who are learning English as a second language.  I am glad that we are creating these text sets so that I can have this collection of resources for my future classroom.

In Building Bridges Herz talks about something that we are all familiar with, the thematic unit.  This article seems like something that we have been working up to all semester because it is largely things we already know from this class.  I too thought that getting kids to read more than one book at a time was ridiculous when we were talking about it at the beginning of this course, but now, I'm not so sure.  These text sets offer us a way to enter students into book clubs based around topics that we are discussing with our main texts.  These readings are connected to everything that we have read about because they form the basis of our units.  When we are teaching with Socratic discussions, we can pull an article from our text sets to foster discussion about a certain topic.   These information and explanatory texts can also act as mentor texts when we are teaching students how to write in multiple genres.  Teaching multigenre papers is the most obvious way to use text sets because we can teach them in the context of our core text by giving students different examples of genre because we now have a set amount of different genres to show them.

Students can begin transacting with text through the text sets as well.  Students do not want to read The Grapes of Wrath and I don’t blame them.  Herz brings up a good point when he talks about word spreading about texts in English class.  Students don’t want to give these canonical texts a chance because they have heard from other students about how awful they are.  We can experiment with this by doing what Milner and Milner call ‘Title Testing.’  We can see what they already think they know about a work, and then gauge our lessons based around that. We can get them to interact with these canonical texts by first giving them something that they will enjoy reading and getting them to respond to that.  Once they have established this connection we can begin discussion comparing these works to the piece of canon that they are reading.  

DO:
The DO for this week is of course my text set.  The canonical text that I chose to work with is one of my favorites that I have not really thought about teaching before, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.  The theme I chose to work with is "Surviving in a Prejudiced Society." My texts focus around the experiences of groups of people who have been othered in American society over the past hundred years.  This text set focuses on race and ethnicity and how are views have changed since the writing of Huck Finn and more importantly, how they have stayed the same.

Huck Finn Text Set

Multi-Genre Papers

Blending Genre, altering style: Writing multigenre papers by Tom Romano
Multigenre-Multigendered Research Papers by Mary Styslinger

Create flow: Pulling in all together. In The multigenre research 

paper: Voice, passion, and discovery in grades 4-6 by C.A. Allen

Say:
     So Vic has taught us a little about writing multigenre stuff, but I have not really heard anything about what a multigenre paper is until I did the reading for this week.  After reading Blending Genre though, I think that multigenre papers might be the thing that we have learned this semester that I like the most.  There are students in every class who hate writing the traditional essay, and when I say that, I mean that most students hate writing the traditional essay.  I don't remember the last time that I wrote an essay for an English class that I actually enjoyed writing and didn't just make up the whole thing the night before it was due.  My academic writing process has been painful to say the least.  Multigenre papers seem to be a good way to get students writing about something without them having to try and make stuff up to fill in gaps for page limits with meaningless fluff.  The big thing that we talk about is transacting with literature and the multigenre paper offers a great way to do just that.  The best example of this that I can think of from Romano's book is the Count Basie poem.  He gives students a biographical encyclopedia entry and asks them to write what they know about Basie afterward, then he gives them a poem about Count Basie and has students write what they learned from the poem about Basie.  The results are amazing.  Students feel a connection with this historical figure just by reading a poem about him rather than just reading expository text.  Romano is careful to make sure we know that there is still a place for expository text however.  Students still need to learn academic writing in the traditional sense so that they are prepared for college, and these papers should be taught alongside other writing, not replace it.  I do think that having students write at all will prepare them to write anything in the long run though.
      Another thing that I like about the multigenre paper is the wide variety of themes and topics that students can choose to write about.  The example from our reading gives an interesting critique on the author's dissatisfaction with selling cosmetics.  Students could also write a multigenre about a specific character from a work of literature, or about a topic from a text.  My middle schoolers from A2 are reading the YA novel Lyddie right now, and I could easily seeing them doing multigenre research about child labor and other working conditions in factories in the 19th century, with entries from the perspective of the main character put in with the rest.  The thing that I appreciated most about this book though was how Romano laid everything out for us.  We often get readings where people are telling us things that are nice to do in classes, but Romano said, "OK, this is how you actually organize this in your class day by day."
     The description of a research paper at the beginning of Styslinger's article is similar to what I went through in high school.  In English III when there were about two months left in school our teacher brought out a packet describing the research paper and what our expectations were.  We then scrambled to finish it at the end of the year.  It was a nightmare.  The solution to this is of course the multigenre research paper.  Where Romano talks about having papers about topics and themes, Styslinger presents us with the idea of creating papers as a way to answer a specific question.  By doing this we are given a broader definition of research.  This broad definition of research allows us to utilize transactional theory again, as students first think about the answers to these questions from their own point of view.  This is where the research begins, with their own thoughts and feelings about a question.  Multigenre-multigendered research papers offer students the chance to reflect on their views about gender in ways that a traditional essay form can't.  One of the students in this article writes about gender by way of satirizing the traditional view of familial roles in the 1950s.  This satire says more than if he had just described his dislike of gender roles in the mid 20th century.  These papers also offer ways for students to make arguments in their writing that they would not be able to in traditional essays.  They can use journal entries, newspaper articles, or pictures as backings rather than just talking about them or quoting them in a paper.
     Allen provides us with some more practical knowledge about how students can organize their research papers.  We cannot just get in front of our class and tell them to just get started.  We have to scaffold them into it.  Once we know that they have a grasp on what a multigenre research paper is, it is time to teach them how to organize it.  Allen gives us a few ways to open up research papers, and how students can use these throughout their papers to separate different sections.  The other thing that Allen offers is the opportunity for students to present their research papers.  There is a duty of the writer to make sure the readers understand his or her paper.  Allen provides his students with the chance to separate into groups so that students can teach their peers how to read their papers.

Do:
     Coming up with a DO for this week seems a little more difficult than previous weeks if only because the only thing that I can say I am going to DO is to assign multigenre-research papers.  This seems to be the obvious thing.  I do think however that we need to put thought into how we organize these multigenre research papers into our curriculum.  It is unfortunately likely that students have not had the experience of writing multigenre papers before they take our classes.  I know that this will be my first experience writing one and I'm a grad student.  We need to begin with teaching students what a multigenre research paper is.  Then we can move on to the different forms of genre that students can create.  From here we need to have students writing, and once they have works written we can begin teaching them how to 'create flow.'  The unit of course will end with presentations.  I found this introduction to multigenre writing that includes some links to helpful things like organizers and genre lists.

Multigenre DO

   

Informational Text

Get it Done! Writing and Analyzing Informational Texts to Make Things Happen by Wilhelm, Smith, and Fredricksen

Say:
     One of the biggest problems I have with telling people that I am in the process of becoming an English teacher is that inevitably they look at me and say something along the lines of, "WHY?" There is a mindset that has permeated our culture of people thinking that the only disciplines that matter are science and math.  Writing an essay will not make the newest IPhone come out, and what did we really learn from reading The Pearl in ninth grade anyway?  Writing informational texts is a perfect example of how and why we still need to spend time teaching English to all students.  On page four our authors say, "Every discipline uses these thought patterns extensively, so if we are going to help students think like real readers, writers, historians, scientists, and mathematicians, we need to teach these patterns and text structures in the context of our subject matter." In any career, classroom, or even general conversation, people need to be able to give other people facts.  This can either be to inform, or as we have learned from our class last week to argue.  Informational texts offer up the basis of our warrants and backing when we are getting into an argument.  As always, our three authors end our introduction by discussing how these lessons adhere to the Common Core State Standards.
     Chapter five of Get it Done! offers some insight on something that I am aware of, but that I haven't really had the chance to use often enough. Essential questions.  I was recently working with Julian on our class log for Vic's class and I was working on writing a purpose.  When I asked him what he thought, he said that he usually just puts in essential questions to guide the lesson.  Wilhelm, Smith, and Fredricksen also present Essential questions as a way to organize a unit.  I like this idea of beginning with a text and then thinking about what the important questions are relating to it.  What do we want students to get out of reading this text?  Essential questions interest me for two reasons. If you are in a school where you are being required to teach a text, it gives you something to look for when planning a unit.  If you get to choose your own text to teach, it gives you the chance to look for something happening outside of the classroom to think of something you would want your students to think about and then to find a text that would begin answering these questions. This of course also ties back into transactional theory because students will be not just reading texts to learn about English, but to think about them in a way that connects to their own lives and the world around them.
     Chapters six through twelve go through each of the different types of informational texts.  These different forms of informational text all seem to be self explanatory based off their names.  The first form is naming and listing.  This form asks students to look into real world settings and have them find different lists of things they see.  One of the easiest ways is to have students look at top ten lists and then move them into logging information into lists and having them categorize data.  Summarizing is another form, and I think that this would be a good way to get students interacting with texts because it allows students to look at an informational text and think through it in order to tell us what it says.    

Do:
Today, I really lucked out for this Say/Do.  I did my observation of another teacher at my internship today and that teacher just happened to be going over informational texts with her students.  The way she did this was really cool because they had already learned about argumentative writing the year before, so she started with that and then taught writing informational text in the context of argument.  This allowed students to think about information and facts as a way to strengthen their arguments as they move into their final unit assignment of writing and argumentative essay.  So, what happened today consisted of looking at one argumentative essay and one explanatory essay and having students think about the differences without discussing anything beforehand.  They then looked at writing prompts for each essay and filled in a venn diagram with the differences in structure of the essay prompts.

Argument vs. Explanatory Essay

Argument

Oh, Yeah?! Chapters 1-2. 4-7, 9 by Smith, Wilhelm, and Fredricksen

Say:
    The definition of argument used in this reading was much broader than the one that I had previously thought of. Before reading this book, I always viewed argument as something that took place between two people who disagreed about something.  Smith, Wilhelm, and Fredricksen, present argument as something that happens every time we make a decision.  For example, if I am choosing something to wear in the morning, by choosing which tie to wear with which shirt, I am making a claim about fashion, or what I need to wear for certain situations.  It was interesting to go back and think about all the arguments that I make on a day to day basis.
     This book is heavily dependent on the Common Core Standards.  It makes sense that they wrote this with those in mind, because at the time of writing this, these standards were the norm for almost the whole country including South Carolina.  This is not to say that now that we are on SC State Standards this book is useless.  In fact, I would argue the exact opposite.  In Vic's class, we did an activity where we matched up the SC standards with similar Common Core State Standards, and our new state standards are pretty much just copied and pasted from the Common Core.  That's all I have to say about the first chapter, because it was just the argument for writing this book to the CCSS and that is self explanatory.
     Chapter Two was one of the more interesting chapters for me to read.  Like I said before, I didn't really know how an argument was structured, or what the process was.  After reading this chapter, I was able to place this structure over any other reading, or discussion that I have had to do.  It was also cool to see how this book was structured as an argument for a good chunk of it.  This also made me think about the Socratic Circles that we talked about two weeks ago.  We could structure a lesson about argument by introducing the basic structure of argument and then have students use this structure when they are having Socratic Circles.
    Chapters four through Seven discuss how we can actually use argument in our classroom, from introducing it, to actually implementing it, and using it to teach specific things.  The use of journalistic articles in order to teach argument is interesting because not only does it give students the opportunity to evaluate another person's argument, but it also serves as a mentor text for students to form their own arguments in class. Chapter five gives us two ways to introduce arguments.  Both ways are accessible, by relating argument to two things that students are already aware of, talk and advertisements.  In our Teaching Composition class, we just began talking about argument and we started our unit by playing "Would You Rather?" This was a good entrance into argument because it gives students a choice to make and then they will definitely have a reason for making that choice.  Lastly, we are given a way to teach argument through reading.  This allows us to give students a text and describe what the author is trying to argue.  This moves into book clubs, socratic circles, and even critical lenses, as they can begin to make arguments about a text. They can do this with their peers through Socratic Circles and book clubs, but they can use the tools of critical theory to also form and support their arguments.

DO:
For this week, I wanted to create a Do that would be helpful in introducing argument to the class.  This will take the form of an interactive mini-lesson where I will present students with the parts of Toulmin's argument structure and then ask them to identify them in different advertisements.  I will use Vic's idea of starting with 'Would You Rather?' as a fun way to begin the lesson and to get the students involved and talking to each other.  I will end with another "Would You Rather?" and have students break down their own arguments using this process.

Argument PowerPoint

Reading Like a Writer and Close Reading

Where Does Rigor Fit?
What is Close Reading?
Defining the Signposts
Explaining the Signposts
Wondrous Word: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom by Katie Wood Ray
Mini-lessons for Literature Circles by Harvey Daniels and Nancy Steineke

Say:
     The close reading section of readings all appeared to be from the same book, so I'm going to address them all pretty much together.  The first chapter that we read, Where Does Rigor Fit? was interesting to me because it addressed something that I had not put a lot of thought into before.  We often hear people discussing the benefits of a rigorous course, but we do not often see it actually defined.  I remember when I was in ninth grade, I had to read The Pear for summer reading.  I did not read it until the day before, and when I did read it, I thought that it was so dense and boring, that I didn't care about anything Steinbeck had to say.  I hated Steinbeck until a year later when we read Of Mice and Men.  For me, it seemed like the only reason that we had to read some of those books was because they were hard, and it was somewhat shocking for this article to confirm that for me.  I think that we need to challenge readers by maybe having them read above their grade level, but I do not think that they should be reading Ulysses because it is hard to read.  We should use rigor in a way that makes them think about texts and that makes them want to read more texts rigorously.  Close reading is something that I did all the time in my senior year of high school.  We would have assigned reading and the next day we would come in and talk about it.  Inevitably, at some point during this talk our teacher would bring our attention to a specific passage and we would go into deep detail.  This detail would be much through the lens of new criticism, but these close readings were probably one of the main reasons that I really started to enjoy analyzing texts and why I became an English major.  Now, I think that close readings would be a good way to bring in other theoretical perspectives.  Having close readings would be a great way to get deep into the text and start asking questions about different schools of thought.  The signpost ideas from these readings was presented in a way that I enjoyed.  I know that when reading we often tell students to think about different things, but these signposts give them an indication of important things from the text that they can begin talking about.
     The Katie Wood Ray chapters from Wondrous Word seemed to be something that we had already been aware of.  We are constantly being told that in order to be a writer you need to read more and write more.  It is no surprise then that Ray tells us that when reading as writers, we should be looking at how the author crafts the actual sentences and how he or she chooses words.  When reading, we need to be looking at what the writer does that seems to work so that we can try to use those things in our own writing, but we also need to be able to look at things that don't work in writing so that we know what to avoid.  Chapter two tells us that we need to look at the craft.  This is something that we hear a lot in English classes as well.  There is nothing written in a work that is not put there on purpose, but we need to look at some things that the author includes as the author employing a craft.
     This week in Mini-Lessons for Literature Circles we are given some ways that we can examine the author's craft in our classroom.  I like how these two writers give us a variety of ways that we can have students doing this, from classroom discussion supplemented by book clubs, to students acting out the verbs.  I think that having students act out verbs is particularly interesting because it connects to Wondrous Word in the way we are looking at craft.  Students can think about how important the words that the author chooses are because they need to understand the meaning fully to act the word out.

Do:
My Do for this week connects most directly to the close reading reading that we did for this week.  Right now, I am interning at Meadow Glen Middle school which has been an interesting placement because of their Expeditionary Learning.  The units are centered around expeditions, and there are premade lesson plans that the teachers teach.  These lessons make it so that all the teachers are doing the same thing each day.  This allows for teachers to have planning together each week to discuss where they are each at.  The lesson packet for the text requires that we often read aloud to the students which is as we know a good practice, but occasionally it will call for us to go back to specific sections of the text in order for us to do close reading activities with students.  For my Do, I am presenting one of the close reading activities that we did in class.  This activity takes place after we have already read the chapter.  We read the chapter, and then go back to the passage and talk about the questions presented about the reading.  I am including a lesson plan as well as artifacts with what the students actually did with the information they gained from close reading.

Lesson Plan

Anchor Chart