Strategies
My teaching strategies largely reflect the overall approach of the school. Students and teachers work together in an environment in which we use a combination of learning approaches that aim to support not only our acquisition of knowledge and application through various skill builders and final assessments but also our metacognition: why do we study what we do? How does our new learning inform what we already know, and vice versa? What do we know now that we did not understand before? Students are asked to engage and process fairly substantial academic texts, make comparisons between texts, analyze the biases and perspectives of an author, artist or film director, and connect course content with their lived experience. The strategies that follow are some of my tried and true, and will be essential to meeting the goals I have set forth in this unit.
KWL
KWL (Know-Want to Understand-Learned) is a strategy that I employ in most every unit, whether or not I have my students complete the KWL chart. I plan to begin this unit asking students to share what they already know about both New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. I do want them to record this process in the form of the chart, as it will help them articulate their own knowledge and will give me a simple way to assess what knowledge they have gained through the course of this unit.
Journaling
Oceana freshmen and sophomore humanities students are accustomed to opening class at least twice a week with SSW (Sustained Silent Writing) . The prompts I give them range from relating closely to a particular unit to questions designed to help them open up more to me to free-writes (which inevitably achieve the latter goal, too). I find that journaling in this way allows students time to process not only their thoughts but also their feelings about a given topic. This will be especially important as we navigate the rough waters of Hurricane Katrina and the human disasters that made Katrina so devastating. Students' journal writing will also serve as a springboard for partner and class discussions.
Snowball
This exercise works in tandem with journaling. It is perhaps the favorite sharing activity among my freshmen students. After they've written anonymous responses to a prompt, they crumple up their paper and toss it into the center of the room. Once all student responses are in the center, each student picks up a "snowball" and in turn, reads the response aloud. Students tend to be incredibly honest when they know they will "snowball" their responses; that honesty has provided some of the more insightful sharings in my classroom. Certainly this exercise is advisable only after a class has built up a level of trust and collegiality.
Give One/Get One
After students create a written response to a prompt, they have a limited time to travel the classroom and solicit responses from their peers. There is generally higher motivation if there is some reward for acquiring the most responses. I follow the collection of information with a general share out, so I can also assess the quality of the responses.
Read and Summarize/ Read Aloud
To support students' developing literacy skills, they will do a combination of reading silently on their own and reading aloud in small groups or as a whole class. They will then be responsible for writing brief summaries of various passages based on their own annotations as they read.
Jigsaw
The "jigsaw" reading method has proven a valuable way not only to cover multiple texts in a relatively short period of time but also, and more importantly, to increase students' responsibility in grasping the material. Students work in groups with an assigned text, and either as a group, present out to the rest of their class, or in newly-configured groups, educate their peers as to the core content and themes of their assigned reading. I envision reading Neufeld's A.D.: After the Deluge using the jigsaw. This way, students get to know one character or set of characters more intimately and hopefully will feel more connection with the particular struggles and outcomes that those characters experience.
Big Paper
"Big Paper" offers a unique way for students to have conversations. Taken directly from my introduction of this learning model in my classroom, the point of a Big Paper conversation is to: help take in and process big issues and to give participants a different way to exchange perspectives. The key element that is initially most strange to my students is the fact that a "Big Paper" conversation is a silent conversation. I plan to print out copies of various photographs of New Orleans (possibly before) but certainly during the days that Katrina raged through the city. Students will, again in groups, sit around a table and one photograph and be asked to write down on one butcher paper their responses to questions which prompt them to first observe what they see and then ask questions which they can use to then interpret what is in front of them. This exercise benefits all of my students, but with particular consideration for the visual learners and those who are less likely to speak up in class discussion.
Map Reading
A central component of the NDP is students locating the site of "their disaster" on a map and identifying some geographical factors that influenced that disaster. My hope with this focused study on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is that students will spend more directed time studying multiple maps in order to better understand not only the ecological but also the cultural and social components of the place. While one could argue that in this GPS-dominated world, the skill of map reading is no longer as essential as it once was, I know that map study strengthens not only students' overall literacy but also their understanding of a place. If they can see how the city has grown up around the meandering Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain, they can then better place the "bowl" that is New Orleans and that will be one of the first aspects of the city to which I plan to introduce them.
Fishbowl
The fishbowl is a difficult but ultimately very rewarding learning medium. A small group of students is randomly or purposefully selected by the teacher to hold a directed discussion in a circle, as the rest of the students sit on the outside of the fishbowl and observe the conversation. Usually, I have the students write in response to a prompt before they are asked to talk in a fishbowl. The exercise works most effectively if the observing students have specific tasks beyond simple note-taking: I give each student a slip of paper which details their task which could be anything from noting who speaks and how often, who introduces a new point, who cites the text, who interrupts to who asks questions. Following the fishbowl discussion, the whole class reconvenes and the observers share their findings, which then leads to a conversation about the dynamics at play during the fishbowl.
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