Teaching Strategies
The following strategies will allow students to more easily access the complex information that we will be tackling.
Independent Reading and Annotation
Prior to the formal start of the unit, students will be required to read two memoirs by activists in the Civil Rights Movement, Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody and The Fight for Freedom by John Reynolds. For homework during the unit, student will be required to read and annotate William Lloyd Garrison’s 1854 speech “No Compromise with the Evil of Slavery” and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
I struggle with how much independent reading to assign. Too often, many of my students—even the brightest and most capable—will not read outside of class. The two major (but certainly not the only) reasons for this are 1) the inaccessibility of the texts I ask them to read and 2) the refusal of some of them to read outside of class. Accessibility is a concern for every teacher at Overfelt when the majority of our students, even those in the advanced classes, read below grade level. The difficulty of accessing information that is dense and complex leads students to give up. The reason they abandon the task is because they have come to rely on the strategy that teachers have used to combat the “I-don’t-read-anything-outside-of-class” mentality: we read the texts in class. The remedy we use has become part of the problem. We teachers need to do better.
By the time I will teach this unit, I do not anticipate that this will be a major hurdle because my students will have had independent reading assignments that require them to come to class having read and annotated the text on their own. This is a critical task that they will need to have completed in order to participate in the next strategy I will use: formal class discussions.
Socratic Seminar and Fishbowl Discussion
One of my favorite strategies to use in my English classes is structured class discussions. The two I use most frequently in my classroom are Socratic seminars and fishbowl discussions. Both of these are excellent tools for teaching students how to express their ideas thoughtfully and to support those ideas with relevant evidence. Students will learn to engage in academic discourse supported by relevant evidence rather than engage in arguments supported solely by feelings and opinions. Earlier in the school year, they will have already been trained and participated numerous times in graded Socratic seminars and fishbowl discussions. They will experience in the language of academic discourse because I will have provided them with a list of phrases to use during discussion that they find awkward in the beginning but come to appreciate as tools to help them frame comments in ways that move discussion forward.
For the Socratic seminar, students will have need to have read and annotated a text (or two), generate at least five questions for discussion, and come to class ready to discuss the topic or issue raised in it. The questions must be open-ended, ones that move discussion forward rather than shut it down. For those students who are more reticent to participate in discussion, having these questions on hand allows them to contribute more readily. Additionally, when discussion wanes (as it inevitably will) and silence becomes uncomfortable, they have questions to fill that void of silence. The journals allow them to ground their comments, questions, and observations in the text. As they gain more experience, the conversation becomes more organic.
Though preparation is the same as for a Socratic seminar, fishbowl discussions take a slightly different format. The discussion begins with a circle of 10 students who bring with them their written questions generated by the reading. However, unlike the seminar where participants are fixed (they are in the circle for the duration of the class period), the circle is fluid in the fishbowl; students may enter and exit the circle following a specific protocol. Students may leave when, and only when, they are “tapped out” by another student not currently in the circle but who wants to enter the discussion. Once in the circle, the student must remain until she is tapped out by another student who takes her place. Students become better listeners because they must be able to join the discussion with as little disruption to the discussion as possible.
Both these methods of discussion teach critical skills. Students learn to engage in sustained discourse using academic language. As their experience with formal discussions grows, they become more nimble, moving from one topic to another more fluidly, the conversations authentic and organic.
Writing Workshop and Peer Editing
When I tell them that revision is an art, my students look at me like am I am crazy. To them, revision is unnecessary torture. They think that essays need only be revised once for the final draft to be publication ready. So when they get to me, and I require at least three drafts prior to the final draft, there is wailing and gnashing of teeth before they grudgingly do what I ask. The multiple-draft writing process will not change. This year, though, I will have them workshop their papers.
They will begin with handwritten prewriting: a brainstorm list, an idea web/cluster, a freewriting, or any other method they use to get themselves started. The only requirement is that they must handwrite it. When they have completed that, they will take their prewriting, meet in their research groups, and review their ideas. They will then decide which ones to conduct further research, then meet again to finalize their topic.
Presentations
We have all seen them (some might even say suffered through them), the PowerPoint that was hastily assembled the night before or even that morning. And we wonder if such presentations are worth the class time devoted to them. The answer to that question is, it depends on the product produced. The goal is for students’ presentations to show they have a good grasp of the subject matter on which they are presenting and to organize and present the information with their audience in mind. This is not an easy skill to master. But it is a critical one.
Students who have good presentation skills will know better how to tailor their information for a particular audience and for a particular purpose. To help them develop this skill set, they will spend several days “workshopping” and critiquing each other before presenting their final product. I believe this will lead to students who are more likely to have speaking, listening, and organizational skills that they can transfer to other situations, both academic and career.
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