According to Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey, there is a "gradual release of responsibility" that comes with teaching students and allowing them to collaborate with others. If we assume Vygotsky's position--that we all learn socially, from others--then we can utilize collaborative learning in our classrooms. However, in order to avoid the chaos that was Panama Canal: Part II, educators must be prepared to have portions of their lesson fall within this "structure" of successful instruction.
Although they are not to be considered as steps, there are four parts to this gradual release of responsibility: teacher-centered focus lessons, guided instruction where students follow a teacher model, collaborative learning where students work in pairs or groups to gain knowledge of content or a skill, and independent work where students complete individual assignments, such as homework.
These lessons do not have to follow a certain order. Instruction could, for example, begin with a collaborative bell ringer, move to a focus lesson on the content where the instructor briefly lectures, and then an independent assignment that students have to take home.
This variety of work can be extremely beneficial to students, especially those who need extensive scaffolding. It takes a lot of pressure off of teachers; they can spend more time preparing more meaningful lessons for students rather than strict bookwork or strict lectures.
I hope to use this in my future classrooms as well. However it requires significant planning. I would imagine that at the beginning of the year/semester, even teaching students about expectations during collaboration would require its own focus lesson and guided instruction. I have learned that teachers cannot expect that their students know any particular content or skill set, including appropriate group behavior. That being said, I think that a classroom that is formatted based on the gradual release of responsibility can be of great benefit to a group of students by preparing their minds for new skills and content.
Monday, November 25, 2013
Sunday, November 17, 2013
English Language Learners
English Language Learners
As educators, we are to teach to a population of students
with extremely diverse needs. In a high school setting, reading skills will
vary from student to student and class to class; some will be able to summarize
a passage and understand some complex “SAT words” and other will need lots of
scaffolding to help them understand passages that teachers may consider simple
and possibly below grade level.
Some students that will require plenty of scaffolding are
students who are learning the English language or are bi- or multilingual.
English language learners, or ELL students, lack enough proficiency in the
English language to be completely immersed in a course that is taught
completely in English and quite frankly, it is ignorant and insensitive of
educators who expect these students to perform adequately in school without
intense scaffolding.
The school where I am completing my observations and student
teaching is one-third Hispanic with a small Asian population. Some of the
Spanish-speaking students in one of my CT’s Global Studies classes did not
speak any English upon their arrival to her classroom. Both of the students
that I observed speak Spanish as their primary language, even in the classroom.
One of the young men refuses to speak English, which is proving to be very
problematic for my CT.
Although they both attend an ESOL class, they are not
benefiting as they should. There are scaffolds set aside for ELL students, such
as providing them with texts in their native language and helping them with
interpretation. However when the teacher, or even the ESOL teacher, does not
speak their language, communication is extremely difficult to make demands of
the simplest task.
It is easy for me to say that because I speak Spanish I can
communicate with my Spanish-speaking students and tell them what I need from
them, but what if I have a student who speak Russian and no English? What if my
student speaks Russian, Arabic, Mandarin, but no English? I cannot say that he
or she is not intelligent enough to understand the material because they speak
THREE LANGUAGES!! So how can I help them?
First it is important to try to understand the background of
a student from a different culture. Doing so will help me create an environment
where he or she feels safe to learn content in a new way. Secondly, I need to
utilize my resources, mainly ESOL teachers who have more experience and tools
to teach students who are new to the English language on their level. If I have
to find or translate material for them, then I need to be willing to do that.
It is imperative that they understand the content that I am teaching to their
classmates.
However, they also must learn English.
Personally, I feel that that is outside my realm as a social
studies teacher; if I have a class full of English-speaking students with
extremely limited comprehension skills in their native language, how am I
supposed to teach a new language to a new English speaker? However, I have a
passion for languages and know just enough from a variety of language families,
so I hope that will help me with basic communication. I believe that building
bridges with students is imperative. It may seem extremely idealistic, but I
hope that if my hypothetical Russian-speaking student sees that I know a tiny
bit of Russian, that they will see that I care about them as a person AND a
student…hopefully that will motivate them to do well in American schools.
I believe that this is the most difficult of literacy
strategies for a teacher to grasp, especially if he or she has almost no
knowledge of another language. (There’s really no excuse for that in 2013, but
that is a different story…) We can easily say that teaching students how to
think historically is challenging, but possible with Tools A, B, and C. But if
we cannot master basic communication with our students, how are we to teach in
a manner that is most beneficial to them?
This is actually an area that I hope to become an “expert”
in on a graduate level. My passion truly lies with not only working with
students with limited English skills, but learning new languages as well. I
hope that this journal entry will one day maybe grow into a full-blown
dissertation. Time shall tell…
Saturday, November 16, 2013
Panama Canal: Part III
Because of the debacle that was my lesson on the Panama Canal, I decided that I could not just leave the students with an incomplete assignment and wanted to at least get to a stopping point where I could feel like I accomplished something.
The problem with the previous lesson was that I assumed that my students had a prior knowledge that they did not have. My faulty assumptions led to poor time management--we did not even complete half of the lesson that I had planned. Fortunately, however, my CT is extremely flexible and I was able to complete Wednesday's lesson on Friday.
I decided that I would just have to be content with getting through the autobiography and not worry about not finishing the document analysis. Completion of the entire lesson would have taken close to a week, and I only had half of one class period left.
Now, I knew where their reading skills truly were and how I needed to adapt my lesson. Because they completed reading guides on every chapter, I knew that they would know how to do a reading guide with minimal modeling. Besides, they could not seem to grasp the overall purpose and meaning of the text without it. However, their typical reading guide offers mostly lower-order questions that are straight from the text. While I included many of those same questions, I included a few curveballs that I hoped would challenge them. Fortunately, I was right this time.
This was an assignment that they were much more comfortable with and the majority of them actually completed the assignment, much to my surprise. The majority of the questions that I asked were lower order questions, although the answers were not verbatim from the text. However, the last question that I posed to them was to decide whether or not the President used lies, half-lies, exaggerations, rationalizations, or obfuscations in his autobiography. With some assistance from me, most of the students were able to answer that question--even my students in the back who pride themselves on doing next to nothing.
This lesson taught me that I had been too harsh on the reading guides. Sofia, the student that I have been observing this semester, told me at one point that she got a lot out of the reading guides and the workbook questions. She said that completing them helped her understand the overall purpose of the chapter and prepare her for CT's lecture. Honestly, there is only one, maybe two students, who openly seek to be challenged with more difficult assignments. I do not doubt that many of them would be able to rise to that challenge, but they seem to be content with doing the bare minimum. (I know I was in high school).
I will definitely use reading guides in my lessons, although maybe not as often as my CT does. I think they provide students, like Sofia, with the necessary background knowledge to understand a chapter or unit's objectives. However it is easy to fall back on them constantly and I do not want to do that. I want them to be a scaffold so that students can start to see main points in a passage and grow from answering basic, lower-order questions to more challenging, complex higher-order questions.
The problem with the previous lesson was that I assumed that my students had a prior knowledge that they did not have. My faulty assumptions led to poor time management--we did not even complete half of the lesson that I had planned. Fortunately, however, my CT is extremely flexible and I was able to complete Wednesday's lesson on Friday.
I decided that I would just have to be content with getting through the autobiography and not worry about not finishing the document analysis. Completion of the entire lesson would have taken close to a week, and I only had half of one class period left.
Now, I knew where their reading skills truly were and how I needed to adapt my lesson. Because they completed reading guides on every chapter, I knew that they would know how to do a reading guide with minimal modeling. Besides, they could not seem to grasp the overall purpose and meaning of the text without it. However, their typical reading guide offers mostly lower-order questions that are straight from the text. While I included many of those same questions, I included a few curveballs that I hoped would challenge them. Fortunately, I was right this time.
This was an assignment that they were much more comfortable with and the majority of them actually completed the assignment, much to my surprise. The majority of the questions that I asked were lower order questions, although the answers were not verbatim from the text. However, the last question that I posed to them was to decide whether or not the President used lies, half-lies, exaggerations, rationalizations, or obfuscations in his autobiography. With some assistance from me, most of the students were able to answer that question--even my students in the back who pride themselves on doing next to nothing.
This lesson taught me that I had been too harsh on the reading guides. Sofia, the student that I have been observing this semester, told me at one point that she got a lot out of the reading guides and the workbook questions. She said that completing them helped her understand the overall purpose of the chapter and prepare her for CT's lecture. Honestly, there is only one, maybe two students, who openly seek to be challenged with more difficult assignments. I do not doubt that many of them would be able to rise to that challenge, but they seem to be content with doing the bare minimum. (I know I was in high school).
I will definitely use reading guides in my lessons, although maybe not as often as my CT does. I think they provide students, like Sofia, with the necessary background knowledge to understand a chapter or unit's objectives. However it is easy to fall back on them constantly and I do not want to do that. I want them to be a scaffold so that students can start to see main points in a passage and grow from answering basic, lower-order questions to more challenging, complex higher-order questions.
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Panama Canal: Part II
In my last post, I introduced a lesson plan that my literacy professor modeled with my class of preservice social studies teachers. Because my high school class was preparing to do a unit on imperialism, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to stun the world with my teaching skills and the Panama Canal lesson plan.
I knew that I needed to do much more modeling than my professor did for us. As a Bell Ringer, I asked the students to hypothesize what lies, half-lies, exaggerations, rationalizations, and obfuscations were and give an example of each. I highly doubted that any of them would know what an obfuscation was, and I was right. Most of them knew what the other words though, and we worked together to come up with some examples for each. So far, so good.
Next, we watched the video on the Panama Canal. Although it was less than three minutes, the class had zoned out. (This quite possibly had something to do with the fact that for technology reasons, we did not get off to a smooth start.) While it was a good idea to build prior knowledge, it proved to be more of a hindrance to overall learning. The downhill spiral begins.
After we talked about the video for a few minutes, I passed out the background information and we previewed it. We talked about important things that they needed to look for in the argument and what made them important. I modeled the first paragraph and told them to do the rest with their partner as I walked around the room.
My trips around the room were almost disastrous. All but maybe three students had underlined and/or circled almost every sentence, every name, every thing. I would try to ask students questions as to why they thought something was important and was met with blank stares. Time was running short, so I decided that we would probably only get through the autobiography, which was very incorrect.
After 15-20 agonizing minutes of trying to explain to pairs of students what I wanted them to do, we came back together as a class to discuss the background passage. Some students were able to point out important people and events. I wrote the names on the board and asked different students why they thought A, B, C was important. I also told them to think of how these facts could be tied to the original inquiry question, and pointed to it on the board.
The next portion was to have them examine the autobiography. I knew that we would need to model this activity too. I pulled the document up on the promethean board and had one of the students read the first argument out loud. I asked the class to point out key adjectives that really stood out and then asked "why do you think the President chose that word?" and "what image was he trying to portray?" They understood that portion, and I was extremely grateful.
Next, I had them consult with their partner for 30 seconds and try to summarize the few sentences that we had just read and was met with a roomful of blank stares. One kid took a shot in the dark and I wrote his answer on the board. I circled the instructions on the Promethean Board and told them to work in pairs and to try to get through the next 3 or 4 arguments.
As I walked around the room, my head began to spin as I realized that the majority of these students had little to no reading comprehension skills. I tried not to get discouraged, so I began to think about what I needed to do to remedy the situation.
First, in hindsight, I realized that I did not model NEARLY enough for my students. I assumed that because they were sophomores that they should be more than capable of reading a fairly simple passage and be able to tell me what they just read. Incorrect. I also realized that they did not have a firm grasp on several things that I had assumed that they knew. For example, they were doing a unit on Imperialism and I was under the impression that CT had very briefly mentioned Teddy Roosevelt and his role in the acquisition of the canal. This was also an incorrect assumption on my part.
Although I considered this lesson a disaster, there were many things that I was able to take away from it. First, I can never assume that any student I teach has a particular skill. Many may have it, but many may not. It is not my job to blame the students or previous teachers; it is my job to teach them, however basic the skill may seem to me.
Secondly, a teacher can never model enough. Scaffolding is extremely important; it does not have to always be me holding their hands through an assignment. Instead, I need to give them the appropriate tools to eventually perform the task themselves. They may not get it on the first or even second try. I need to work with them until they understand.
Finally, I learned that teaching a lesson as a preservice teacher can put one in an unfortunate position. Because I did not work with the students on a daily basis, I did not know that they had never been taught the skills that I was expecting them to use. In my own class in the future, I will start from the beginning of the year by gradually teaching them how to look for key terms in what they read, how to summarize a passage, and how to look for evidence to support their argument. Fortunately, the beautiful thing about teaching is no matter how badly I feel I may screw up a lesson, I can always go back and try again on something else. Which is exactly what I did....
I knew that I needed to do much more modeling than my professor did for us. As a Bell Ringer, I asked the students to hypothesize what lies, half-lies, exaggerations, rationalizations, and obfuscations were and give an example of each. I highly doubted that any of them would know what an obfuscation was, and I was right. Most of them knew what the other words though, and we worked together to come up with some examples for each. So far, so good.
Next, we watched the video on the Panama Canal. Although it was less than three minutes, the class had zoned out. (This quite possibly had something to do with the fact that for technology reasons, we did not get off to a smooth start.) While it was a good idea to build prior knowledge, it proved to be more of a hindrance to overall learning. The downhill spiral begins.
After we talked about the video for a few minutes, I passed out the background information and we previewed it. We talked about important things that they needed to look for in the argument and what made them important. I modeled the first paragraph and told them to do the rest with their partner as I walked around the room.
My trips around the room were almost disastrous. All but maybe three students had underlined and/or circled almost every sentence, every name, every thing. I would try to ask students questions as to why they thought something was important and was met with blank stares. Time was running short, so I decided that we would probably only get through the autobiography, which was very incorrect.
After 15-20 agonizing minutes of trying to explain to pairs of students what I wanted them to do, we came back together as a class to discuss the background passage. Some students were able to point out important people and events. I wrote the names on the board and asked different students why they thought A, B, C was important. I also told them to think of how these facts could be tied to the original inquiry question, and pointed to it on the board.
The next portion was to have them examine the autobiography. I knew that we would need to model this activity too. I pulled the document up on the promethean board and had one of the students read the first argument out loud. I asked the class to point out key adjectives that really stood out and then asked "why do you think the President chose that word?" and "what image was he trying to portray?" They understood that portion, and I was extremely grateful.
Next, I had them consult with their partner for 30 seconds and try to summarize the few sentences that we had just read and was met with a roomful of blank stares. One kid took a shot in the dark and I wrote his answer on the board. I circled the instructions on the Promethean Board and told them to work in pairs and to try to get through the next 3 or 4 arguments.
As I walked around the room, my head began to spin as I realized that the majority of these students had little to no reading comprehension skills. I tried not to get discouraged, so I began to think about what I needed to do to remedy the situation.
First, in hindsight, I realized that I did not model NEARLY enough for my students. I assumed that because they were sophomores that they should be more than capable of reading a fairly simple passage and be able to tell me what they just read. Incorrect. I also realized that they did not have a firm grasp on several things that I had assumed that they knew. For example, they were doing a unit on Imperialism and I was under the impression that CT had very briefly mentioned Teddy Roosevelt and his role in the acquisition of the canal. This was also an incorrect assumption on my part.
Although I considered this lesson a disaster, there were many things that I was able to take away from it. First, I can never assume that any student I teach has a particular skill. Many may have it, but many may not. It is not my job to blame the students or previous teachers; it is my job to teach them, however basic the skill may seem to me.
Secondly, a teacher can never model enough. Scaffolding is extremely important; it does not have to always be me holding their hands through an assignment. Instead, I need to give them the appropriate tools to eventually perform the task themselves. They may not get it on the first or even second try. I need to work with them until they understand.
Finally, I learned that teaching a lesson as a preservice teacher can put one in an unfortunate position. Because I did not work with the students on a daily basis, I did not know that they had never been taught the skills that I was expecting them to use. In my own class in the future, I will start from the beginning of the year by gradually teaching them how to look for key terms in what they read, how to summarize a passage, and how to look for evidence to support their argument. Fortunately, the beautiful thing about teaching is no matter how badly I feel I may screw up a lesson, I can always go back and try again on something else. Which is exactly what I did....
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Panama Canal: Part I
Recently in our literacy class, we were given an intriguing document-based lesson on the Panama Canal. The Inquiry/Essential Question was What is President Roosevelt doing in his
autobiography and what role did the US play in the acquisition of the territory
used to construct the Panama Canal? The rest of the lesson had us, the preservice teachers, played the role of the high school students.
The first thing that we did was view a video on the Panama Canal in order to build prior knowledge because, let's be honest, most Americans know that the Canal exists and that is it. Next, we read a secondary source that outlined some basic information about events that led up to the construction of the canal. We were asked to underline passages that we felt were important, such as names, dates, and other important people. The third step was to read sections of Teddy Roosevelt's autobiography and summarize each portion. Additionally, we had to decide if the president was using lies, half-lies, exaggerations, rationalizations, or obfuscations in his autobiography.
The next portion of our assignment was to look at a collection of documents (letters, memos, political cartoons) and analyze them. Then, we were to share our interpretation of our assigned document with our group and share whether or not we thought it supported or challenged President Roosevelt's autobiography.
This would be a great assignment to do with a high school class. It is interactive, encourages group work, and would be a change from the routine that I see in my class. Students will be able to learn how to examine a variety of sources and their thinking will be stretched and preconceived notions will be challenged.
I would love to use this as a lesson plan for my students in an upcoming unit on imperialism. I think that I would have to provide a little more background knowledge (like definitions of obfuscations, for instance) and model what types of "important" things they should look for in the Background piece.
What could possibly go wrong?
The first thing that we did was view a video on the Panama Canal in order to build prior knowledge because, let's be honest, most Americans know that the Canal exists and that is it. Next, we read a secondary source that outlined some basic information about events that led up to the construction of the canal. We were asked to underline passages that we felt were important, such as names, dates, and other important people. The third step was to read sections of Teddy Roosevelt's autobiography and summarize each portion. Additionally, we had to decide if the president was using lies, half-lies, exaggerations, rationalizations, or obfuscations in his autobiography.
The next portion of our assignment was to look at a collection of documents (letters, memos, political cartoons) and analyze them. Then, we were to share our interpretation of our assigned document with our group and share whether or not we thought it supported or challenged President Roosevelt's autobiography.
This would be a great assignment to do with a high school class. It is interactive, encourages group work, and would be a change from the routine that I see in my class. Students will be able to learn how to examine a variety of sources and their thinking will be stretched and preconceived notions will be challenged.
I would love to use this as a lesson plan for my students in an upcoming unit on imperialism. I think that I would have to provide a little more background knowledge (like definitions of obfuscations, for instance) and model what types of "important" things they should look for in the Background piece.
What could possibly go wrong?
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