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ELLEN
BERG
Diary #7
The
"Accidental Teacher"
Cooks Up a Rich Learning Soup
I feel a little
like an accidental teacher. I planned a series of lessons to teach questioning
strategies, including asking questions as we read, asking good questions,
and question-answer relationships. However, what started out as lessons
on questioning morphed into a very rich unit that also included finding
and quoting details to support their answers.
I stole my initial lesson from a colleague who swears she stole it from
yet another person. We read "The Jacket" by Gary
Soto which is a true story about a jacket, "the color of day-old guacamole,"
he wore in the fifth and sixth grades. After reading, the students paired
up to write questions for their question chart:
| Question Word |
Question |
Answer |
Proof |
| Who |
|
|
|
| What |
|
|
|
| When |
|
|
|
| Where |
|
|
|
| Why/How |
|
|
|
Once each
pair had their questions, they switched papers with another pair and answered
their questions. Initially I had planned to allow kids to paraphrase the
events of the story that supported their answers. However, after my colleague
told me her kids had a difficult time with the proof column, I decided
to have the kids quote the exact words from the text that supported their
answers along with the page number the quote could be found on.
The first round
went pretty well. The kids were excited about asking "teacher-like" questions,
trading papers, and grading each other's work. As I perused their papers,
though, I noticed that most students were still having a difficult time
with the proof column.
The next day
I passed back papers and asked kids to volunteer some of their questions.
I drew a question chart on the board, wrote down the questions, took answers
from the class, then directed students to locate the exact words in the
book that gave them the answer. I modeled the first question for them, making
sure they put their fingers on the exact spot in the book where the answer
was located. I then wrote the actual words from the text on the board in
the proof column.
"Oh! So you
mean you want us to write the actual words from the story down?"
Okay, I had
said this to them the day before, had repeated it time and again as I circulated
through the room assisting them, but somehow, this time it was different.
They got it. I do not know what is so magical about a chalkboard or an overhead,
but it seems to reach some kids in a way that individual instruction does
not.
Something
a little more difficult
We tried a more
difficult question, one that asked for information not directly in the text:
"Was the boy in the story poor or middle class?" Two groups of students
argued heatedly back and forth, quoting passages and citing page numbers.
It was quite exciting. What I did find out is that my kids do not consider
themselves poor, though 90-95% of them receive free or reduced lunch. It
is clear from the story that the boy does not tell his mother he hates the
jacket because he knows she cannot afford to buy another one, but the details
that lead the reader to that conclusion were things my students experience
daily such as wearing a jacket several years until it wears out. In the
end they finally decided that he was probably somewhere in-between poor
and middle class.
We read another
story, "Eleven"
by Sandra Cisneros, and repeated the question chart activity. This time
the kids whipped through the assignment quickly and with great ease. Something
had clicked.
"Eleven" is
a story about a girl who, while at school on her eleventh birthday, is told
by the teacher that an old red sweater, "that smells like cottage cheese,"
left in the coatroom is hers. It has many similarities to "The Jacket" in
that both characters are the same age, have to deal with clothing issues,
and handle their situations in nearly identical ways. I assigned the kids
the task of creating a Venn diagram to compare the two main characters,
Gary and Rachel. They were required to give the proof from the stories after
each similarity or difference. I fully expected them to do well.
Ha.
It seems that
because they were writing in circles, not the boxes of the question chart,
they thought "proof" was something different than the day before. Brows
furrowed, pencils were slammed down, and several someones tried to resurrect
Mr. I. Can't from his grave. Again, the next day,
I had to go back and explain that what they had written in the tiny little
boxes of the question chart for proof was exactly the same thing I was asking
them to do in the Venn diagram. We did some samples on the board, and again,
"Oh! So you want us to write the actual words from the text!"
Sixth graders.
The real point
I am getting at -- beyond the obvious need to carefully monitor students'
comprehension of concepts -- is that I had not intended to go down this
road. What started out as a series of lessons to practice questioning turned
into a unit as thick as my mother's bean soup two or three days after she
has made it.
The kids not
only learned a lot about what makes a good question (they complained about
each others' questions and commented about good ones), but they also learned
how to justify their answers, explain their thinking, read for and locate
details, and use quotations. All by the happy accident of my colleague telling
me about her students' difficulties and my choice to follow down that path.
I am planning
many more activities around this concept, because it is an extremely important
skill for them to develop. I figure that if I continue to present it to
them in different ways for different purposes, fine-tuning and adding new
elements along the way, they will own the learning permanently.
After all, isn't
that the true goal of education?
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