Strategies
The strategies in this unit will be based on the six Common Instructional Strategies of Early Colleges: Classroom Talk, Collaborative Group Work, Literacy Circles, Questioning, Scaffolding, and Writing to Learn. These will buttress the four components of language: listening, reading, speaking, and writing. My responsibility is therefore to incorporate activities for each of the components of language using these stipulated strategies. As the title of my unit suggests, listening activities will be the primary focus, but they will by no means preclude activities to support the other components.
Class Room Talk
Classroom Talk describes the types of interactions that generate speaking, listening, reading aloud; rereading; responding orally to reading; listening to recordings; making recordings; asking/answering questions and providing aural feedback to messages, poems, and so on. This strategy will be an intrinsic part of developing listening and memorization skills in students. They will memorize poems every week and compete for the Bard of the Week prize. They will listen as others talk and they will respond: Listening to poems read aloud and analyzing poetry in the whole group are all parts of classroom talk. In this unit, every selected poem will be read out loud several times so that students will create aural texts through careful listening. They will then share their texts with others and evaluate their responses. Students will also be listening to recordings and making recordings; they will play with different types of recordings, such as solo and choral recordings. They will decide which type of recordings are the most effective. Classroom talk also includes think-aloud by students and teacher, students' spontaneous contributions and suggestions to make the subject more engaging for them.
Collaborative Group Work
Collaborative Group Work is when students work in groups of two or more on a common goal. It helps to generate a friendlier learning environment because students can speak with their peers directly, have opportunities to share and manipulate information, and work with different partners during the course of a semester or even a day. When students answer questions in groups, they do not feel as vulnerable. Collaborative group work also affords students opportunities to exchange ideas, experience new perspectives, realize that people can have different opinions and work together in harmony. Sometimes students will be assigned to dyads or triads to identify sound devices, to scan lines, to write and share response journals. They become more spontaneous and hence participate more. In addition, by focusing on their listening skills, they learn good socialization and leadership skills working in collaborative groups.
In their groups, students will learn to negotiate and to compromise. It is unlikely that all students within a group will have identical interpretations of a poem. They will learn to work together to present a project that everyone has bought into.
Literacy Circles
Literacy Circles stimulate intense aural communication among students and differ from collaborative groups in the assignment of specific roles to each group member. The roles assigned will depend on the discipline and the purpose of the assignment. Examples of roles for a poetry class can be: coordinator, reader, wordsmith, and researcher. Each of these roles should be modeled so that students are very clear about their roles, and can make better choices about the roles they will play. Literacy Circles are much more structured and students should know exactly what they are expected to do. In this format, students usually have major assignments that extend over several weeks and culminate in a project or presentation. This strategy is also useful for helping students to listen to, and to communicate with their peers. Sometimes teachers may use the two strategies simultaneously. For instance, students may belong to a literacy circle for a major assignment, but the teacher can put pairs of students together in collaborative groups to read and memorize a poem.
Literacy circles can be used when students research Langston Hughes' life and relate it to the poem, "Mother to Son." The researcher will do the research. The coordinator will make sure that each member of the group has the resources he/she needs. The coordinator also makes sure that every group member is on task and that every segment of the assignment is submitted in a timely manner. The wordsmith will go over the poem with a fine tooth comb paying attention to diction, identifying the meanings and the etymology of words occurring in the poem being studied. The reader reads aloud any poem and edits the text prepared for presentation,
Questioning
This is a very useful strategy that utilizes listening and speaking to a great extent. By using this strategy, students learn what questions they should ask to get the assistance they need. They learn to use open-ended questions and how to answer them. This strategy also helps the teacher because she has to learn the type of questions she should ask to stimulate critical thinking and performance at the higher levels of Blooms' Taxonomy. Rather than focus on What? When? or Where? I will focus on the How? and Why? I would have to train students how to ask the correct questions. There are actually question grids to facilitate this.
Scaffolding
This involves starting exercises at a comfortable level for students then increasing the rigor once students have mastered a skill. For example, while learning to scan one of Frost's assigned poems, students will first identify the stress in common words: father, mother, angry, hungry, home, come, meanwhile, sometime and so on. This first assignment will be done as a whole class group. Working in pairs, students will scan another list of common words. Once the groups have completed the list, they will share their responses with the whole group and, using the pronunciation guidelines of a dictionary, make the necessary corrections. Students will next scan their complete names deciding if their names are iambic or trochaic. After discussing and sharing what they found out about their names, students will scan the first five lines of "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." The several stages described above, illustrate one way in which scaffolding will be used in the unit.
Writing to Learn
This strategy provides opportunities to do shorter forms of writing to establish clarity, to demonstrate understanding, to write response journals, to gain practice in writing, to write notes, to use writing as a way of thinking, to treat writing as the essential language component it is. Writing to learn is a very useful strategy across the curriculum and may help to dispel students' writing anxiety. The possibilities are limitless: students can write short answers, evaluative journals, letters, short poems, poetic lines, and definitions.
In this unit, students will write responses to poems after listening to them being read, and they will write evaluations of poems they record. After critiquing their recordings, they will record again incorporating the suggested improvements. They will identify different poetic devices, such as alliteration, onomatopoeia, and rhyming couplets; short poems; and altered lines of selected poetry by listening first and writing later.
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