Learning Intentions

By the end of you lesson I hope that you can…

• Get answers to some of your assessment questions
• Understand the WHERETO elements in a unit’s lesson sequence
• Experience one way to teach the Say Something strategy
• Participate in a Lit Circle discussion group
• Start your final 320 task – the Lit Circles Journal
• Experience Six Thinking Hats approach to content analysis
• Critically consider the pedagogy of Whole Class Novel studies

As it turns out, we didn’t get to the last two.  We should be able to wedge those in during our next session.  Here’s what we did fit in:

Reassessing Assessment

I took some time to answer some assessment-related questions you had about in a previous lesson and questions related to your writing assessment tasks.  In my responses, I referenced Ministry of Education documents that can be found on the Ministry’s Classroom Assessment and Student Reporting page.  In particular, I mentioned ideas in these two documents:

• Principles for Fair Assessment Practices
• Adaptations and Modifications Guide

There’s a lot more good stuff here.  Don’t be shy and wait until your summer assessment course to dip into this material 🙂

Unit Planning Call Back

The UBD unit planning template I’m suggesting you use for your LLED 320 Integrated Unit Plan mentions the acronym WHERETO in Stage 3 – Learning Plan.  Today we took some time to unpack the elements of WHERETO – in essence, “the key elements that should be found in your learning plan” (Understanding By Design Professional Development Workbook, p. 214).  Here’s a summary:

and here’s the package we worked with in class:

• UBD – WHERETO Handout

We used a moving tableau strategy to process the material.  Here’s how it worked:

1. Form a group of 4
2. Randomly choose a WHERETO letter
3. Read the information relating to your chosen letter
4. Come up with 2 or 3 key ideas related to your section.   Ask yourself, what do my classmates really need to know about this WHERETO letter?
5. Design and rehearse a scene involving tableau and movement – but NO speaking – to visually represent the key ideas from the section
6. Present and explain your movement piece.

Here are a few shots to summarize your take on the WHERETO elements (Thanks to John and Eric M.):

Reading Fiction – Literature Circles

The Lit Circles model is based on research on what helps students improve as readers:

Here’s how we engaged in the Lit Circles process.  The approach we’re using is the one advocated by Faye Brownlie in the Student Diversity text.  You can get more details in her book Grand Conversations, Thoughtful Responses: A Unique Approach to Literature Circles and in a webcast hosted by the BC Ministry of Education – the same webcast I showed clips from in class today.

Reading Time

I gave you some time to read, exchange books, and find a passage to “sticky note” for sharing in your discussion group.

Getting Started: Learning the Say Something Strategy

Left to their own devices, the students will not spontaneously have great conversations about the texts they are reading.  They must be equipped (Hello, WHERETO!) with the skills for conducting thoughtful conversations.

A great way to develop these skills – a way that has the added benefit of getting students excited about a new box of thematic books –  is to read and consider a poem on the theme.  I modeled that by using the Story Behind the Poem strategy to analyze the poem Invictus by William Ernest Henley.

Here’s the recipe for the Story Behind the Poem strategy I used:

• Story Behind the Poem Recipe

Here’s the handout for the poem.  It’s set up to accommodate the SBTP sketching:

• The Story Behind Invictus PDF
• The Story Behind Invictus DOC.

Below is the scene from the movie Invictus that features the poem prominently.  According to the movie’s production notes:

“In the film, Mandela calls upon Pienaar (the captain of the South African national rugby team, the Sprinboks, in 1995) to lead his team to greatness, citing a poem that was a source of inspiration and strength to him during his years in prison.  It is later revealed that the poem is “Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley.  The title is translated to mean “unconquered,” which, Eastwood (film director, Clint Eastwood) says, “doesn’t represent any one character element of the story.  It takes on a broader meaning over the course of the film.”

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FozhZHuAcCs[/youtube]

When you’d had time to gather your thoughts on the poem, I asked a few of you  to Say Something – your connections, questions, imrages that emerge – about the poem.

Say Something is an easy, fun, and interesting strategy that should support effective discussions in the book-based discussion groups. [OK, we didn’t actually do this part because we were short on time but this is what it could look like in a middle school classroom – LH]

Brownlie suggests reminding students of the criteria for effective group discussions at the start of the Say Something and reviewing the criteria again at the end:

• all voices must be included
• all students must feel included
• all students must have their ideas respected
• the discussion should move us to new understandings

Lit Circle Discussion Group

I modeled a Lit Circle conversation with the members of The Holes reading group and utilizing a Fishbowl strategy.  After a quick debrief, I asked each reading group to meet and engage in a similar conversation.  The discussions were lively and could have run much longer than the time we had left in class.  They used a modified First Turn / Last Turn process that worked like this:

• Group members mentioned how far they’d read in the book (to make it less likely that one speaker would “spill the beans”)
• One participant read a sticky note and explained their choice
• Group members took turns speaking with NO cross talk
• When everyone had had a go speaking, it was time for free-for-all conversation
• The process was repeated with a new person reading one of their sticky notes.

Lit Circles: Double-Entry Journal Task

One During-Reading activity that really promotes thoughtful engagement with lit circle books is journaling.  In an effort to model this process with you, I’m asking you to keep a Double-Entry Journal as a means to consider the Lit Circle activities we’re engaging in during class time.  The task will be completed in class and it’s due on Thursday, 1 March 2012.  Here’s the handout:

• Literature Circles Double-Entry Journal Task – 2012

To this point you had experienced:

• Book Talks
• Wide Variety of Books
• Time to Read (in class and at home)
• Sticky Notes
• The Story Behind the Poem
• Say Something
• Discussion Groups

I asked you to choose two of those ideas and to give me your thoughts on them in the My Thinking side of the journal.  We took 10 or so minutes in class to do this.

We didn’t have time to get to our Six Hats Thinking on Chapter 6: The Whole Class Novel so that conversation will have to wait until next week.

Cheers,

– Lawrence