Book Clubs
The class will use a book club protocol to engage in discussion about the text,
The Color of Water
. Book clubs will consist of three students and will meet once per week to discuss their reading, questions, and connections. Each group will set a goal for the week and will be responsible for bringing in questions, quotes, and thoughts on the different themes in the text. Students will each have a job during the book club meetings, either facilitator, time keeper or scribe. Book clubs will meet for a half an hour and have three tasks to complete. Students will present two of their own questions to the group and have a discussion about these questions. Next, students will choose one of two deep thinking questions to answer in a paragraph. Then students will fill in a graphic organizer that asks them to record the literary points discussed, focusing on narrative, characterization, setting and theme.
By allowing students to meet in book clubs it allows them to take more responsibility for their learning. Instead of a teacher-centered protocol where the discussion is based upon the teacher's questions, students can direct the conversation to the elements that they are most interested in within the story. By breaking students into groups, the teacher can better assess the understanding of individual students by visiting groups, participating in the discussion, and asking probing questions. The teacher can also use the groups for differentiation by grouping students by ability level in either homogenous or heterogeneous groups depending on the needs of the students.
Workshop Model
When having students analyze complex texts the workshop model works well to scaffold the learning. The basic structure of the lesson is to give the students the text to tackle independently and then support them where needed. Below are listed the steps to running a successful workshop lesson:
Engage - Each workshop model lesson begins with a brief engagement to capture the class's attention and set the purpose for the lesson. Some kind of question to answer or mystery to solve works best to get the students thinking about the topic.
Grapple – Students are then given the text, or an excerpt of the text, to tackle independently. They annotate the text as they read, noting unfamiliar words and marking passages that bear closer analysis. By allowing students to first struggle with the text it builds independence and self-reliance.
Discuss – Students are then provided with text based questions which require them to look into the text for different purposes. The class spends a few minutes answering these questions independently and then the whole class discusses. Questions can range from asking students about vocabulary words in context to questions that provoke thinking about the themes of the passage. One protocol that works well at this point is a think-pair-share where students first consider a question independently, then pair up with a partner to discuss their thoughts, before finally sharing their ideas with the whole class.
Focus – Once the class shares their responses to the questions, the teacher is able to monitor and assess students understanding of the text. At this point the teacher will craft a mini-lesson to address anything that the students are struggling with. These lessons are no longer than ten minutes and basically just focus upon mopping up anything that the students didn't quite understand during their first reading.
Apply – At this point students are given a task to complete using the new learning they received in the reading. For my purpose, I had students read articles on Human Development and then apply them to their reading of the book
The Color of Water
. I put the students into their book club groups and had them discuss the connections they could make between the book, the article, and themselves when possible.
Synthesize – As a final step the class shares their thoughts from their small group discussion. As a class we look back at the initial mystery or question that was introduced in the engage section and the lesson is debriefed.
A full workshop model lesson is usually taught in an 80 minute block period; however, I have used this model successfully in my 50 minute classes. One way to do this is to assign an application task for homework and basically split the workshop into two days. For an example of a lesson developed using the workshop model, see lesson plan 2 in the lesson plan section. The basic premise of the workshop model is to encourage students to decode challenging texts through multiple readings. As the students complete their first reading and move on to the next, the tasks get increasingly more difficult allowing them to move past comprehension to analysis, application, and finally synthesis.
Writing Lab
The accompanying essay assignment for this unit requires students to complete several smaller tasks which might become overwhelming and confusing for students to tackle independently so I suggest dedicating one day per week as a writing lab day where students would be responsible for writing and editing one section of their final project. In order for this to be most effective, it will be necessary to lay the foundation of providing students with a common language for writing assessment. I do this through teaching them the 6+1 Traits of Writing. The class spends a writing lab time focusing on skills instruction instead of content. We look at a sample essay and discuss what makes this essay well written. As a class we identify some things that we look for in good writing and then compare our traits of good writing to the 6+1 Traits. Students often find that most of the things they liked in the exemplar are mentioned in the 6+1 Traits. This proves to be affirming for both the students as they realize that they are already fairly comfortable with telling "good" writing from writing that needs improvement. Students will then go through their writing portfolios and meet in groups to discuss a piece of writing that they choose to share with their peers. Groups of students use the 6+1 Traits to assess each others' writing and discuss what the strengths and weaknesses of each piece were.
Once we establish a common language through which to assess our writing, I would introduce the essay topic we would use over the next few weeks. As the unit progresses students are given specific traits to focus upon in their different drafts and revisions. On the first draft, students will focus primarily upon ideas and organization. Their main concern at this point is generating a strong thesis statement and supporting this thesis statement through their body paragraphs. During the in-class workshop students meet in peer groups to measure each other's essays on a rubric designed to assess these two traits alone. As students work through assessing each other, I will pull individual students to conference about the strengths and weaknesses of their essays. Students then will have two days to revise their essays before they hand in the revision to be assessed by me formally. Once those revisions are handed back, students were told to focus on voice and diction to polish the language they used in their essay and make it more formal and specific. We will repeat the process using diction and language this time and in the final writing lab the students are told to focus upon presentation and conventions of English. The class then completes a final revision on their essay making sure that it meets all the formatting requirements and the mechanics are as close to perfect as possible. During the writing lab students peer edit to give each other's paper a final polish and assess each other on a rubric designed to measure presentation and correctness while I pull students to conference. Because of this process, I am able to give students more specific feedback on each piece of their essay and on each draft and revision. They also have multiple sets of eyes looking for errors and places they could improve because their peers got involved in the editing process. Allowing students to write in class will clear up many of the technological challenges that present themselves when working with a low income population. Finally conferencing is very helpful in keeping the class honest and on task when it came to deadlines and the quality of their writing.