Strategies
All of the strategies discussed here are part of the core set of strategies I use in my classroom. Most of them are used in our curriculum units and some of them I learned through professional development at our school site. I use these strategies with every unit I teach so that students will become familiar with them. When students are more comfortable with strategies, they begin to internalize them and can explore more complex ideas and texts.
Think-Pair-Share
This strategy is best used to provide students time to digest and share new information. In this unit, students will be faced with a lot of new vocabulary, concepts, and challenging texts. This strategy is designed to give students time to check in with themselves and a partner on their own learning practice. Students are given a short amount of time (1-3 minutes) to think about a question the teacher or another student poses. Usually I ask students to write down some informal notes during the think time. After, students pair up with someone else and share their thoughts. It is best when this strategy is practiced often and clear expectations are set for what it means to get into pairs. Sometimes student desks are already paired up and other times I ask them to pair up with a neighbor, what is most important is that you know what works best for your class. I will often ask for a few students to share out thoughts to the whole class at the end.
See-Think-Wonder
This strategy comes from the Visible Thinking Project at Harvard University. Traditionally, students are given an image and have to respond to three questions 1) what do you see? 2) what do you think about that? And 3) what does it make you wonder? This strategy is designed to support deeper analysis of images and generate greater classroom discussions. I've also used this strategy as a structured method of critiquing student work and with items other than images such as student writing.
Graphic Organizers
I use graphic organizers almost every day in my classroom. Although there are traditional graphic organizers such as the Venn Diagram and T-Chart, anyone can create a new style to fit the needs of a particular group of students or content objectives. Overall, graphic organizers help students arrange ideas in a way that makes sense for them. As a teacher, I find that graphic organizers are an excellent formative assessment tool and help me gauge where my students are in their learning.
Making Connections
Anything learned must be relevant for a student. One way of helping students make learning relevant is by making connections to what they already now. There are several types of connections that can be made including text to text, text to self, and text to world connections. In this unit, students will be asked to make text to text connections between Mumbo Jumbo and TURF dancing, they will make text to self connections when exploring their own resilience, and text to world connections as we expand the metaphor of Jes Grew. These are only a sampling of the ways in which students will make connections in the classroom. In fact, I tend to use this strategy in both formal and informal ways in the classroom every day.
Read Aloud
A read aloud is a short piece of text, often a paragraph to a page, read aloud by the teacher to the class. The purpose of a read aloud is to explore a shorter piece of writing in-depth. Sometimes I will ask students a question to think about and respond to after I read the passage, other times I will ask students to highlight vocabulary, concepts, figurative language, and/or something that stands out to them. I always follow up a read aloud with some kind of discussion or analysis by the class. Sometimes I will conduct a think-pair-share after and other times we may have a whole class discussion.
We will use this strategy as our primary method of reading Mumbo Jumbo because it is a challenging and dense text. This will allow me as the teacher to choose specific passages that relate to Jes Grew and support student comprehension in a more direct way. The regular analysis and discussion by the class will give students the opportunity to constantly monitor their own comprehension before they get frustrated or confused.
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