This section contains the detailed strategies I choose and adopt in order to differentiate. Each strategy responds to a specific area and/or group of students. Primarily, I use formative assessments at the end of each class to decide how to group the students for the next task. In deciding what strategy to adopt, I consider the reading and writing levels, any other special needs, and the pedagogical theories that are explained at the end of this section.
Pre-Reading
Quick Write Activity:
Every day, I start my class with a ten minutes writing activity. I use the "Quick Write" with the AP students and also with all those who are not struggling readers/special educational needs/ESL, or those who need help with motivation.
1. Select one quotation with a specific detail/literary element like diction, setting, imagery, symbol, and/or literary technique like structure that you want to comment on either for its insightfulness or its power to make you see something.
2. Sharing Time: Teacher and students sit in a circle, read aloud, take brief notes, and discuss the various responses.
3. Ask the students to review their notes, decide the most relevant ones, and write them on a Post-It board.
4. Ask the students to write whether their initial position has changed after our discussion/sharing time, and why.
5. After reading the excerpt/passage, ask students to write an evaluation of whether their initial understanding/analysis has changed after the close read, and how.
Tea Party activity:
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This strategy is appropriate for those students who are not motivated and are struggling readers. I would not suggest modeling it because "not knowing how to do it" triggers more thinking.
1. Prepare fifteen or twenty index cards with one phrase from the document they will be reading. Repeat those phrases two or three times in order to have one card per student.
2. Distribute one card to each student and ask them to move from student to student. While moving, they have to share their card, listen to others as they read their cards, discuss what these cards might refer to, and suggest what these cards might mean.
3. After ten minutes, group them and ask them to write their reflections.
4. Sharing Time
5. Read the text aloud.
6. After reading the text, compare and contrast their predictions and the text.
Probable Passage Activity:
This strategy is appropriate for struggling readers or those who have difficulty with close reading and literary analysis. When I present my students this activity for the first time, I model it. Then, we do it together on our second time. I also form groups of three or four students.
1. Write on the board a list of words from the passage we are about to read.
2. Ask them to distribute those words in one of the following categories: character(s), setting, causes, outcome(s), and unknown words.
3. When they finish categorizing the words, ask them to write a Gist Statement (concise statement).
4. Sharing Time: ask the students to say/share how they categorized those words. Write them on the board together with their gist statements.
Annotations
I do not ask students to annotate every single scene in
Invisible Man
. However, every day we reread one passage of the assigned reading and I expect them to annotate it. Students work in pairs and each pair has a specific focus. After practicing this strategy in class, I expect each student to annotate all the various literary elements the passage contains.
· Group 1: Highlight the passage for diction (connotation vs. denotation) and write "meaning statements" in the margins.
· Group 2: highlight the passage for images (sound, sight, touch, taste, and scent descriptions) and write "meaning statements" in the margins.
· Group 3: do the same for figurative language
· Group 4: point of view
· Group 5: syntax patterns
· Group 6: structure of the chapter or passage
· Group 7: tone
· Group 8: focus on characterization (setting/structure/imagery/symbolism/tone), and other literary elements or techniques.
Modification:
The AP students can usually work independently and annotate all the literary techniques the passage contains. The college students usually need to work in groups to learn what to annotate before working independently. The group composition includes students with different abilities to facilitate learning and help the struggling ones.
Close Reading and Analytical Writing
The following strategies are adequate for students in the AP class and even in college classes. The difference is that the AP students can work independently while the students in a regular class need to be placed in mixed groups to achieve the objective:
1. Predict the content of each new chapter/passage based on prior-knowledge.
2. Read the first time and underline every other sentence (this is an important strategy to help students see the length of the sentences and identify the literary elements).
3. Annotate.
4. Read a second time.
5. Summarize the passage, or paraphrase it.
6. Determine the point of view and discuss how it affects the meaning.
7. Determine the verb tense and its effects on meaning.
8. Write a first response in the journal.
9. Bracket concrete details in the passage.
10. Discuss the importance of these details.
11. Circle the author's diction's choices and discuss them.
12. Identify the images/setting descriptions/symbols and discuss their effect in decoding the narrator/main character as well as the secondary characters.
13. Identify the figures of speech and discuss the effect of each figure, how each of them deepens the understanding of the character.
14. Label each sentence (simple/compound/complex) and analyze their effect.
15. Determine tone/atmosphere/mood and discuss the effect.
16. Write a second 500-word analytical response. The AP students always write a five paragraphs response (two to three-pages typed essay).
Modification (appropriate for all the struggling students):
1. Read the passage/document.
2. Underline interesting, important, and/or unusual/unexpected words, phrases, and language structures.
3. Reread the passage/document.
4. Determine connections and draw arrows from one part of the passage to another to mark those connections.
5. Write a "Wonder Why" question for each interesting, important, unusual, or unexpected word/phrase. Write your theory(ies) and support it with clear references to the text.
6. Sharing Time: students share, discuss their interpretations, and take notes of the peer's thoughts in their journals.
7. Write how your interpretation of the passage/document has changed after the class discussion.
8. Type the response in view of the final project.
Narrator/character's Analysis
This strategy allows students to decode the hidden thoughts and feelings of the character. The various body-parts represent the external clues which open his/her mind to the reader. It can be used with all students to draw the final conclusions about the character before writing the closing essay.
1. Head: intellectual side of the character. What are his/her dreams? Visions? Philosophies he/she keeps inside?
2. Eyes: seeing through the character's eyes. What memorable sights affect him/her? How?
3. Ears: hearing through the character's ears. What does he/she notice and remember others saying about him/her? How is he/she affected?
4. Nose: smelling through the character's nose. What smells affect him/her? How?
5. Mouth: the character's communication. What philosophy does the character share? What arguments/debates? What images would symbolize his/her philosophy?
6. Arms: working. What is the character's relationship to work in general? To specific work?
7. Hands: the practical side of the character. What conflicts does he or she deal with? How?
8. Heart: the emotional side. What does he/she love? Who? Whom? How?
9. Torso: the instinctive side of the character. What does he/she like about himself/herself? What does he hide? What brings the character pain? What does he/she fear?
10. Legs: the playful side of the character. What does he/she do for fun?
11. Feet: the character's mobility. Where has he or she been (literally/figuratively)? How has he been affected by setting and/or travel?
12. Wings: the character's future. Where is he/she going?
Modifications:
The AP students have to identify four to five meaningful quotations for each body part and also to write an evaluation/analysis of each quote. The college students have to identify two important quotations for each part followed by commentaries. The weakest students have to identify one quotation for each body part followed by commentary.