Strategies
Garnering Student Interest
In a world suffocating in selfies, many people, especially teens, want to know, “What’s in it for me?” One of the easiest ways to hook students into a lesson is through pre-reading activities, also known as “front loading.” With the pressure of time constraints and looming standards-based testing, teachers may skip over this part of the lesson to jump right into the daily objectives. After completing my fourth year of teaching though, I still have not witnessed any students’ ears perk up when I announce to the class, “Today, you will be able to compare and contrasts the authors’ text structure.” Working with a range of student abilities, I have experienced the importance in providing enough background knowledge and promoting engagement with the text—for example, anticipation guides, “word splats,” and opinion continuums—before students begin a unit study. In Kylene Beers’ book When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do, she explains that by having students make generalizations or connections prior to reading, they then become actively involved in the comprehending the text. The Civil War and history of monuments as a topic alone will only pique a few students’ interests. It will be how a teacher chooses to hook her students into the debate of public art and history that will create a classroom of students eager to discover new understandings through analyzing texts.
Inquiry-based Learning
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “inquiry” is derived from Latin word “quaerere” which means “seek.” Through inquiry-based learning, we are asking students to discover the information—and the questions—themselves. Students may need some guidance about where to begin when conducting inquiry-based learning. Depending on the students familiarity with learning through inquiry, the teacher may wish to model this process through a different analysis of art. This could be done through providing question stems (e.g. “What is the significance of …?”) while students look at an image. Perhaps a teacher may say, “Every piece of art has a story. What questions should we ask to discover the story behind this work?”
Inquiry-based learning is student center. The teacher’s role is to provide the guidance and scaffolding only when needed. According to the National Academy of Sciences, when students learn through inquiry they learn to question; investigate; use evidence to describe, explain, and predict; connect evidence to knowledge; and share their findings. This is exactly what English teachers want from their students as well. Through creating a classroom community and encouraging student-led discussion, students will be able to actively engage in discussion about the role of local art and “by doing so, art becomes a forum for discourse over essential cultural and political activities, their history, and their representation.”63
Close-Reading
As any American teacher reading this unit most likely knows, English curriculums have shifted to include significant more nonfiction texts. For many of my students, reading nonfiction has proved to be a challenge. For this reason, I am always looking for new ways to help students engage with the text they are trying to comprehend. One of the best ways to do this is through annotating. One way my students annotate a text is through color coding and identifying the most important word of each paragraph. A colleague of mine taught me that when color coding, to instruct my students to color all “strong” adjectives or verbs one color. From this, I then ask students to create word groupings based on connotation. From here, students will either write or discuss how the author’s use of diction and details aids in conveying her tone and purpose.
Students may also use SOAPTone graphic organizers to analyze the text. This organizer uses guiding questions to help students analyze a text for speaker, occasion, audience, purpose, and tone. In one educator’s blog, “iTeachiCoachiBlog,,” he writes that on the left margin of the text, he asks students to summarize each chunk of paragraphs and in the right margin, he asks students to dig deeper by using a “power verb” to describe what the author is doing, e.g. “describing,” “illustrating,” “arguing” or “comparing.”
Annotating a text, whether through symbols, emojis, QAR questions, written commentary, or pairing it with a graphic organizer, creates a classroom of thoughtful thinkers and will help students to understand the myriad nuances surrounding a complicated debate over public art.
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