Teaching Strategies
Direct Instruction
Students will need to have the literary elements of form, point of view, and tone front-loaded as they usually have limited or incorrect understanding of these terms. Additionally, a handout briefing them on the various subgenre of nonfiction will be helpful as will some statistics as to why they will benefit from gaining familiarity with these text structures. Lastly, students will need some basic understanding about the process of identity formation and how to operate in and maintain a respectful and safe environment.
Lit Circles
Students will form a group of approximately four with other students interested in the same optional piece of literature. Students read independently and prepare to facilitate a conversation based upon homework they prepare. The vocabulary enricher selects a number of unfamiliar or jargon vocabulary to look up to enhance content knowledge or to further the conversation. The discussion director prepares some questions to promote a fruitful dialogue. The literary luminary carefully selects a few passages in the text to read aloud as they are some of the most thought provoking or memorable moments. The real world connector finds allusions and other connections to life experiences to share with the group. Optionally, an illustrator could be tasked with creating a cartoon or flow chart to enhance the depth of understanding of the piece.
SOAPSTone
This acronym (Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Subject and Tone) is intended to help students consider and evaluate an argument through a series of questions. Students will ask themselves, who is the speaker and what personae have they created. Next, the occasion can be understood in terms of time, place, context and background information. Audience necessitates consideration of the intended audience. Purpose is the explicit or implicit intention of the speaker and their worldview and assumptions must be considered. Tone requires students to consider the attitude of the speaker towards the subject, and perhaps even the audience.
SCARF
Brain based strategies will be employed and David Rock’s SCARF strategy about social domains will inform many of the activities in my learning environment. SCARF is an acronym to remind us that status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness are all considerations before your learning environment can be considered emotionally safe and create a sense of connections between my students. Hence, I will strive to avoid unclear lessons which fail to link to learning goals. I will provide clear rubrics of my expectations, but allow for a degree of autonomy and self expression.
GIST
A GIST is a comprehension strategy to get students to identify the main idea of a text. Chunk text into highlighted sections #1-4, students must identify the GIST or “point” of each chunk and then list the evidence used to support the author’s point. This scaffolded approach allows students to build confidence by connecting smaller pieces of a text before approaching the summary. The culmination of the activity is for students to write a summary of only about ten words that identifies the journalistic tenants of a piece: “who”, “what”, “when”, “where”, “why”, and “how”.
Reading Process
I will deliberately teach reading strategies that will gradually release responsibility to the students. Close reading is a skill from which every student can benefit. Initially, I will read aloud to them, then they will take turns reading a segment of the text aloud and eventually they will be skilled enough to read independently. Deliberate instruction in reading strategies include: previewing the text, schema (prior knowledge), visualizing, determining what is important from the information they read, summarizing, analyzing, and reflecting.
Journaling
Daily journaling will de-stigmatize the process of writing, promote a feeling of success, and allow students to explore their thoughts on a variety of questions and topics. Journaling will be a daily activity that will help students think more deeply upon some topics, establish goals, and have an opportunity for self-reflection. Hopefully interesting prompts will make the task less arduous and engage reluctant learners. Some days the prompt will be questions, other days it will be songs that they must reflect upon, and occasionally the task will be to draw something. Some prompts include: Three things I like about myself, describe your bedroom from a dog’s perspective, one moment I’ll never forget, my favorite meal my family makes, describe unconditional love, what five characteristics are most important in a best friend, why topics like sex and profanity are taboo, describe yourself in 10 words, what have you ever learned from a mistake or failure?
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