Strategies
Classroom Debates
My students tend to be frightened of events like this where they have to put themselves out there, to be visibly accountable for their knowledge and understanding. On the other hand, afterwards, they ask when we can do it again. Debates force students to re-engage with texts and to parse out the most important information for their purposes, and unlike a test, encourages new or reinforced learning through the end.
With my students, generally less than enthusiastic learners, proper preparation is key to a successful classroom debate. How I arrange these events completely depends on how many students I have in class and how familiar they are with the week’s content. I must assume that no students have been present for all instruction up to that day, so information must be diced into workable pieces and roles must be carefully chosen to set them up for success, not more failure. Often this kind of planning happens the morning of class, as I see who is present. A student who has been absent all week and shows up on debate day still benefits with a role like “argument note-taker.” Given the task of writing down a side’s most convincing arguments, the student still has to critically engage with the content. While some of these decisions are necessarily made last minute in my class, throughout the week we can be organizing information, writing claims and counter claims, drafting strong statements, and learning procedure. The essential questions stated in the Introduction will be fair starting points, and they may get ideas from journal topics they are addressing in the meantime.
Emoji Annotation
Annotation is a skill that benefits all of us as life-long readers. I annotate cookbooks, difficult passages in professional development readings, and the PBS monthly schedule, knowing that when I do, I have internalized the material and engaged with it intellectually and often emotionally. Because my students have usually done no more to a text than highlight it (with no context) in the past, they are daunted by a more complex interaction between themselves, the text, and a pencil. One strategy that works with many of our texts is using underlining and a determined list of emojis: happy, sad, angry, surprised, confused. We create a simple image for each one on the board, and as students annotate the text, anything they underline is accompanied by one of our emojis. By doing so, they must understand the line, word, or passage well enough to designate a symbol to it.
Film Analysis
My students can often feel they are drowning in text, so I try to supplement our materials with image, video, interactive websites. Some are better able to demonstrate their critical thinking in response to a video or image, regardless of the complexity of the material. The organizer I use most is from the National Archives (they also have excellent ones for primary documents, art, and primary sources.) See the bibliography for the one I use. We will use this for The Way of All Flesh.
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