Teaching Strategies
The beginning of the unit will focus on shared reading of immigration narratives. Shared reading is when the teacher reads a text aloud while the students read along silently. This process models reading fluency for students. This is a particularly important first step in close reading, because in heterogeneous classrooms, the texts will almost always be above some students’ independent reading levels. Teachers need to ensure that all students are able to access the content.
Then the class will do close readings of some of the immigration narratives in order to infer, make connections, formulate questions around, and draw conclusions about immigration experiences and the history of the Philippines. Close reading is a deep dive into a text, involving at least three readings of the same text. The first reading is for enjoyment and to get the main idea of the text. The second reading is for deeper meaning. In this reading, we pause often to discuss and annotate the text. We look at structure, word choice, and figurative language, and determine how these affect meaning in the text. This involves annotating the text. The third reading is with a specific purpose, usually analysis, comparison, or reflection. This is often done in pairs and with the aid of a graphic organizer to help students focus their thoughts on the specific purpose and record their learnings and realizations.
I will employ different types of discussion models to get students to think more deeply about the information they are gathering from the narratives and other sources. Different types of discussion models used include whole group discussion, turn and talk, and think/write-pair-share. Turn and talk is when a teacher poses an open-ended question for students to discuss with an assigned partner sitting close to them. Think/write-pair-share is when students think or write independently about a question or topic. Then students engage in discussion with a partner about the question or topic. Finally, students can volunteer to share out in a whole class discussion.
I will also use students’ daily journal entries to promote deeper thinking about the ideas that come up in this unit. Students respond to a daily journal prompt during the first ten minutes of class. The prompt is often a question to access prior knowledge about the topic of the upcoming lesson or a question to get students to reflect on the ongoing unit. I often use the journal entry as the thinking of a think-pair-share. I collect, read, and respond to students' journals once a week.
Since there are more narratives to read than time permits, I will have one class period in which students read and analyze the narrative in cooperative learning groups. Cooperative learning is form of scaffolding in which students work in groups on specific tasks. Each member has a responsibility to learn and accomplish, but also the responsibility of group success. Cooperative learning projects can be short or long term. They aid students in practicing communication skills, problem solving, and critical thinking.
After students read and analyze different narratives in cooperative learning groups, students will share their learning with each other using the jigsaw method. The jigsaw technique is a form of cooperative learning. Students are broken up into small groups and each group becomes an expert in a different part of a topic. Then students are configured into different small groups that consist of one member of each of the previous groups. Each member of the new group teaches the other members what they learned during their study in their previous group.
Since I was trained in Socratic seminar last year, and my school is really pushing it, I will use Socratic seminar as a way to have students look at primary and secondary sources about the colonization of the Philippines and grapple with the motives and rational for colonization. Socratic seminar is a formal, highly structured discussion based off the idea that inquiry and discussion is needed for deep critical thinking, which lead to deep understanding and knowledge. Students prepare for the seminar by reading, annotating, and creating questions about one or two texts. During the seminar, a leader poses open-ended questions. Participants respond to the leader’s questions, listen intently, respond to each other’s comments, and pose questions of their own. Often students are expected to write a reflection after the seminar.
To begin the writing portion of the unit, I will use some of the immigrant narratives we read in the beginning as mentor texts. Mentor texts are texts for writing students to reread, study, find inspiration from, and sometimes imitate. They help students take risks to try new techniques and learn how to do something they may not yet be able to do on their own.
At the end of the unit, we will have a celebration of writing for students to show off their final published narratives. The point is for students to feel a sense of accomplishment in a finished piece of writing, to feel that they are writers who just published a piece, not just students who completed an assignment. A quick internet search will produce many different ways teachers conduct their celebration of writings. Since many middle schoolers are shy about reading their work aloud to the entire class, I usually have students share their work in small groups of their choosing. Students fill out compliment cards for each other and I give out small treats. Later, I use a book binding machine to make a book out of the classes’ work. For this unit, students will also publish their writing on the immigrant narrative archive on either Saada.org or madeintoamerica.org.
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