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